Apostrophe 1 (All communication is a form of complaint) [2008]

for two bass clarinets

duration :: 20’

First performance :: ELISION — University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia), 7 August 2008

Recording :: ELISION :: Kairos 0015069KAI [ label | amazon | spotify ]

Apostrophein – to turn aside, to address another space, to create an exception to the parameters of discourse, to draw in something that was outside.

This piece emerged as an aside—an apostrophe—to a larger, hypothetical work-in-progress, a concerto for bass/contrabass clarinet and ensemble. It pinches off a small amount of material (defined not only as pitches and rhythms but also physicality, affect, range of motion, conception of the instrument) and then trips over it, tentatively embraces it, and twists it until it exhausts itself.

There is simultaneously too little and too much to work with: too little, probably, to sustain large-scale musical discourse as traditionally experienced; too much, though, for the instruments to handle comfortably, with intercrossing and superimposed lines redefining areas of impenetrable obstacles with unworkable solutions as musical material. Too little and too much, also, for the notational practices that are called into service: “complex” rhythms (tuplets, tuplets within tuplets, …) are stressed until they overlap, stretch, and fracture, uncoupling themselves from any coherent rhythmic context and becoming affective markers as much as metrical devices.

After the assaultive and intrusive form has had its way, what remains is only a reflection of a reflection and the second movement’s fitful and incomplete attempt at a reprise. Because of this aggressive structure, everything that is heard is approximately heard again; what began as fundamentally canonic evolved into a chaotic, bent, mutilated, often frenzied, multidimensional hall of mirrors that exists on the edge of audibility, “pressed tightly,” as the score indicates, “between two panes of glass.”