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Michael Norris  

De corporis fabrica

 Year: 2012
for amplified solo clarinet and video

• Programme Note

  De humani corporis fabrica, a 16th-century anatomy textbook by Andreas Vesalius, was an important step in the Renaissance advancement of medical and anatomical knowledge. Divided into seven chapters, the book groups the myriad elements of the body into seven broad categories. This work for solo clarinet, divided into seven movements, responds to these categories through gestures, energy profiles and structural processes that take their cue from Vesalius’s taxonomy:

  Book I: The bones and the ligaments that interconnect them
  Book II: The ligaments and muscles, instruments of voluntary and deliberate motion
  Book III: The series of veins and arteries throughout the body
  Book IV: The nerves
  Book V: The organs of nutrition and generation
  Book VI: The heart and organs serving the heart
  Book VII: The brain and organs of sense

  Quite apart from the intertextual references, however, the extreme demands of the music heighten the role of the performer’s own body as a site for the literal embodiment of the physiological processes described in the text.

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  • Norris: De corporis fabrica; computer set 

    Full score | Hardcopy - computer set
    
    $22.00
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  • Norris: De corporis fabrica; computer set 

    Full score | Pdf - computer set
    
    $18.50
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