Output details

Darkness visible

Composition for bass clarinet and piano

This is an example of a work specifically composed for a commercial CD (Timeless Shades) and the première live performance took place several months after the recording sessions. This piece has been short-listed for a British Composer Award (Instrumental Solo or Duo), 2013. Its origins lie in the extensive and ground breaking research carried out by Sarah Watts (Watts 2013, Keele University) into the production of multiphonic sounds on the bass clarinet. The existing collections of fingerings compiled and published by Bok, Spaarnay and Rehfeldt are often unreliable and unpredictable in effect, and it is the ultimate aim of her research to produce a definitive lexicon of fingerings for practical use by players and composers. George Nicholson's Darkness Visible is one of the earliest examples of a piece of new music to draw on this work. In it he exploits the darkest sonorities of both the bass clarinet and the piano in relation to brighter sounds that come to the fore in the course of the piece through the appearance of multiphonics and harmonics. These brighter sonorities are, then, directly related to the opening sounds and are literally rooted in them. The harmonic language of the piece is to a large extent determined by the exact and precise nature of the bass clarinet multiphonics used. Following the completion of Darkness Visible George Nicholson went on to write a series of eight bass clarinet studies for Sarah Watts (Soundings) lasting nineteen minutes in all, in which he further develops and exploits the use of multiphonics.