13. April 2020

New Music Monday #4

The next New Music Monday release that we would like to share with you is Clarinet and String Quartet by Morton Feldman, recorded in concert by Carl Rosman and the string players of Ensemble Musikfabrik. Carl shares on our blog his reasons for choosing the piece for his Monday Concert in February 2016, and talks about one of his most important inspirations as a clarinettist.

This was quite the concert.

I needed a framework to premiere Evan Johnson’s new piece for historical basset clarinet, ‘indolentiae ars’, a medium to be kept – an Ensemble Musikfabrik commission, and already something of an epic in itself at twenty-plus minutes. It seemed a pity not to take the chance to play the Mozart clarinet quintet as well, which I had literally never previously performed – I played that on ‘modern’ basset clarinet, though, partly because the historical basset clarinet isn’t exactly my comfort zone, partly because it wouldn’t have been a happy mix with the modern string instruments of my colleagues (even if I asked them to tune down a quarter-tone, which seemed a bit of an ask in itself). But even though the programme was already reasonably long with just those two pieces, it wasn’t really balanced: it needed another piece of new (or newish) music, preferably for quintet.

There were a few options but Feldman’s Clarinet and string quartet stood out for a variety of reasons. Even though it’s hardly short, purely from the rehearsal point of view it’s not too difficult to prepare (stamina is another question, of course). It’s also the kind of music that plays games with the perception of duration, which makes it a nice thing to have on a programme with over 100 minutes of music. There’s a biographical connection between Feldman and Evan Johnson: besides Feldman’s status as an inspirational figure, he taught at Buffalo University, where Johnson would later study. And there’s another important connection for me, to do with the clarinettist Alan Hacker. For me he is by far the most inspirational clarinettist on record, not only in new music but in older repertoire as a pioneer in the use of historical instruments. He was one of the first players to perform the Mozart concerto and quintet on basset clarinet (the instrument with extended lower range for which the pieces were originally conceived); he also premiered the Feldman quintet, which is dedicated to him, and was the clarinettist of choice for many other composers, most productively Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle. He had an immensely wide tonal range, not just wider than any other single clarinettist but pretty much as wide as all the rest of us combined, and not just classical players. And he did everything from a wheelchair, having suffered a spinal thrombosis near the beginning of his career. If you don’t know his recorded work, do investigate: I can’t imagine what my own playing would be like without his example.