Output details

Penumbra for bass-clarinet and live electronics

Duration: 9:00.

First performance: Keele University, UK, 22/10/2008, Sarah Watts (bass clarinet). Subsequent Performances: The Space, Docklands, London, 10/5/09, Sarah Watts. Skopje Summer Festival, Macedonia, 15/7/09, Sarah Watts (bass clarinet). Keele University, UK, 18/2/11., Sarah Watts (bass clarinet). DatFest, Hanley Museum, Stoke-on-Trent, UK, 25/2/11, Sarah Watts (bass clarinet). State University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil, 13/11/12, Sarah Watts (bass clarinet). UNIRIO - Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 16/11/12, Sarah Watts (bass clarinet). Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil, 19/11/12, Sarah Watts (bass clarinet).

This work addresses the issue of organising musical form according to a poetic idea (rather than relying on process or 'given' formal archetypes) and with respect to the materials generated by the instrument and its live electronic transformations. The title of the work alludes to the timbre of the bass-clarinet’s lines as well, as the contrasting weights and shades of harmony and sound from the real-time processing. Apart from this poetic idea of shadows, the overarching musical concept, the form, is a projection, as well as elaboration, of the opening gesture: a sustained long-note crescendo-decrescendo, interrupted by a single attack. The work's shape grows from this opening idea and then shrinks, dissolving into the combined melodic texture of the bass clarinet and its live transformation of delays and comb-filtered resonances at the end of the work. ‘Points’ (short-note groupings) become activity and rhythm which then ease back and stretch out into ‘lines’ (sustained pitches/multiphonics/textures). This model shapes the gestures in the live electronics as well as detail in the bass clarinet's musical material: for example, the swells in the electronic transformation over the bass clarinet's rapid 1/16th-note figuration at rehearsal numbers F1 - F11.

In Penumbra two forms of the same musical landscape move in relation to each other. At times their relative motions mask or shadow each other whilst at others, they combine to create shifting, evolving patterns and shapes; the bass-clarinet’s predominantly decorative and melismatic materials – moving between singing, melodic and dance-like rhythmic characters – is enveloped and set against the spectral resonances of the computer’s transformations.