Contemporary Classics January 30, 2018 Contemporary Clarinet and Oboe

Henry Cowell Three Ostinati with Chorales: Written in 1937 and premiered by Robert McBride and Gregory Tucker at Bennington College, in Bennington VT on 18 May 1937,  The score was copyrighted 1946, Music Press (later Presser Music) as Three Ostinati with Chorales for Clarinet and Piano or Oboe and Piano.  But in correspondence between Henry Cowell and Robert McBride, Cowell insisted that these pieces were written with the oboe in mind. The solo part does not utilize the clarinet's greater range, especially its low Register and the 3rd movement (Chorale 2) has imitation bagpipe skirls that are effective on oboe but not on the limpid clarinet.

Michael Daugherty   Brooklyn Bridge (2005) for Solo Clarinet and Symphony Band was commissioned by the International Clarinet Association.  The world premiere was given by the University of Michigan Symphony Band under the direction of Michael Haithcock, with Michael Wayne, solo clarinet, at Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, Michigan on February 11, 2005. 

Michael Daugherty wrote “Like the four cables of webs of wire and steel that hold the Brooklyn Bridge together, my ode to this cultural icon is divided into four movements.  Each movement of the clarinet concerto is a musical view from the Brooklyn Bridge: I. East (Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights); II. South (Statue of Liberty); III. West (Wall Street and the lower Manhattan skyline which was once dominated by the World Trade Towers); IV. North (Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center).  In the final movement of the concerto, I also imagine Artie Shaw, the great jazz swing clarinetist of the 1940s, performing with his orchestra in the once glorious Rainbow Room on the sixty-fifth floor of the Rockefeller Center.”

 Evan Ziporyn "Four Impersonations" completed in 2000 consists of four movements, all based closely on careful transcriptions of melodies from other cultures.  Each requires a few particular extended techniques, all explained in the preparatory notes to each movement.  As described by Evan Ziporyn “In Balinese trance, as in many similar traditions throughout the world, subjects are inhabited by specific people or entities who speak through them. Their voice remains their own, but the words they speak are foreign to them, often in ancient or foreign languages they themselves do not understand. In these pieces the voices of three different cultures - Japanese shakuhachi ("Honshirabe"), Balinese gamelan ("Pengrangrang Gde" and “Bindu Semara”), and East African nyatiti ("Thum Nyatiti") - speak through the clarinet. As a rational westerner, I've transcribed and translated, found ways to play them, but as a trance subject-wannabe I leave the interpretation to others.”

Press release was dedicated to and premiered on bass clarinet on 16 March 1992 by Evan Ziporyn in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Versions have also been written for bassoon and baritone saxophone as well.  David Lang has written:

Gunther Schuller  Duo Sonata:  Duo Sonata  for Clarinet, Bass Clarinet (1949) adopts an early twentieth-century atonal approach in its first two movements. Schuller sets up intervallic gaps and fills them in chromatically in the first movement, which is fugal and contrapuntal in design, and triadically in the second, which alludes to a Classical homophonic texture. The last movement strongly suggests a unifying key area with playful arpeggios outlining triads related by semitonal voice-leading. In this recording, the B flat bass clarinet substitutes for the A bass clarinet with a transposed part, thus retaining the proper pitch relationships between movements.

Luciano Berio  Sequenza IXa for Clarinet      

The piece begins rather hesitantly, as if the music were preparing again and again to play a melody, only to remain stuck on a single pitch, held for 10, then 8, then 6 seconds. But the music does slowly gain momentum, the sustained pitches dispelled until they reoccur at the end.

Berio says that Sequenza IX for clarinet is a long melody which, “like almost every melody, includes redundancy, symmetries, transformations and recurrence.”