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Reuben Derrick  

Castle Hill April Fool

Duration: 05' 56" Year: 2012
a field recording featuring exploratory performance at Kura Tawhiti, Canterbury.

  • Instrumentation
    solo clarinet
  • Programme Note

    Kura Tawhiti, also named Castle Hill by early European travellers, is a conservation area located between the Torlesse and Craigeburn mountain ranges in the South Island. Its most distinctive geological feature is rampart-like limestone rock formations, making it a popular site for climbers. Because of its exposed alpine location weather conditions can be extreme.

    Kura Tawhiti, meaning ‘the treasure from a distant land’, has great historical significance for Ngāi Tahu, who are actively involved with the management of its conservation. Knowledge of trails, shelters, rock drawings and historical food cultivation sites is an intrinsic part of past and present tribal identity.

    Towards the northern end is an area facing several escarpments, the most distant is about 200m away from the recording location. In still weather these can generate multiple echoes of varying length, direction and timbre. Typical soundscape components are pulsating insects, transient birds, gusts of wind against grass and rocks and distant traffic on state highway 73.

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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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Alex Taylor  

deepwalker

Duration: 09' 30" Year: 2011
work for vocalising clarinetist

  • Instrumentation
    solo clarinet
  • Programme Note

    In many ways this is a companion piece to an earlier work, Vivid for solo trumpet, which also sets a powerful, sexually charged poem by Will Christie. But where Vivid is very often overtly violent and forceful in its gestures, deepwalker is mostly much subtler, almost passive-aggressive in outlook. The opening lines of the poem – “the day is a drum that connects these vocal loops with grey traffic circles bridge after bridge” – are mirrored in the cyclical, sometimes elliptical form of the work, loops and circles that play between registers of the clarinet. Sexual tension and aggression bubble away in the background, periodically rupturing the musical surface with piercing, angular outbursts, sometimes in parallel with the rather tender, fluid lines of the low register, and with the spoken text itself. This violent interplay creates a kind of disordered internal conversation, a bizarre hermetic character opening and shutting her windows; a clarinet of many voices.

    Warning: contains coarse language

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Chris Cree Brown  

Inner Bellow

 Year: 2010
for clarinet and tape