6n Hours
6n Hours arose from a collaboration between the music and dance programs at Tufts University in spring 2005. The musicians were asked to provide music for a choreographers concert, featuring pieces choreographed and performed by dance students. The dances were created independently from the music, much like some of the collaborations between Merce Cunningham and John Cage. We musicians were informed of the duration and general content of the various pieces, and given free rein to fill those durations however we saw fit.
One of the dances pieces on the concert was "Death Solos", an arrangement of several individual reconstructions of Yvonne Rainer's "Death Solo" from 1963, lasting about nine minutes. This was roughly the same length as my clarinet solo Six Hours in the Isolation Booth, written in October of 2004, so I decided to recast Six Hours as a duet. I had already composed two "remixes" of Six Hours, Interruption and Dual Confinement, which both added new material to that was not present in the original, but this time, my idea was much simpler: have two or more clarinets playing Six Hours simultaneously. The score to Six Hours contains many notes of indeterminate length, so two clarinettists playing the same score -- or one live clarinettist and one prerecorded clarinet -- need not stay together. Furthermore, the overlapping of multiple realizations of the same score seemed to nicely echo the overlapping of different interepretations of the same solo in the choreography. Lastly, I cannot understate the appeal of being able to create a "new" piece of music without having to expend any substantive effort on my own part.
Actually, it required more effort than I expected, but not a lot more. I already had a recording of Six Hours in the Isolation Booth, so I burned a copy and brought it to the dress rehearsal, along with my clarinet. The combination seemed to work well musically, but I found that the dance lasted a bit longer than I had anticipated. Even though the last note of Six Hours can be arbitrarily long, and I indeed held it as long as my lungs allowed, the dancers continued to move for another 30 seconds or so after I stopped. This was not necessarily a problem -- the dancers did not need music to coordinate their actions -- but I was somewhat dissatisfied. So I decided to doctor the recording somewhat. Many of the rests in Six Hours are also of indeterminate length, and I went over the whole recording, and inserted an extra one to five seconds of silence in those intervals. All told, I was able to extend the length of the recording by 30 or 40 seconds, and, using the recording as a guide for the progress of my live performance, I could hopefully cover all of the dancers' movements. The following night, the choreographers concert was presented twice, at 5 and 7 PM. In the first performance, I tried to time my playing to end the same amount of time after the recording as I had the night before, only to find that the dancers had slowed down somewhat. I held the last note as long as I could, and the dancers were still moving for another 15 seconds after I had ended. Since I couldn't make any further edits to the recording, I just kept in mind that I'd have to give myself more time after the recording was over in the second performance. So I stalled, and stretched things out, and yet again, the dancers continued long after I had ended. Every time I tried to slow my performance down, they got even slower. Maybe they were listening to my performance after all.
If you wish to get some of your friends and/or music playback devices together to perform 6n Hours, I have a few suggestions. First, note that 6n Hours is just the generic title for a multiple-clarinet interpretation of Six Hours in the Isolation Booth, and specific performanced should be given a title appropriate to the value of n. Thus, a performance by two live clarinettists would be entitled Twelve Hours, while a performance by four live clarinettists and one prerecorded clarinet would be 30 Hours. Also, keep in mind that the more clarinets you have playing simultaneously, the more time the individual clarinets need to spend between notes. While 6n Hours does not take place in an isolation booth, it should still have a lot of space. In fact, if more than three or four clarinets (live or recorded) are involved, I would suggest that only one of them play the entire score as written. The other players should omit some of the phrases, to keep the performance from getting too cluttered. With large numbers of clarinets, it may also be useful to spread out the performers spatially. Since synchronization is only an optional issue, it would not be unfeasible to have performers scattered throughout the hall. Of course, in any performance of 6n Hours, the live performers should be listening around themselves at all times, though they get to individually decide whether to react to what they hear, and how.
