{"id":8545,"date":"2020-04-13T13:35:35","date_gmt":"2020-04-13T11:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/blog\/new-music-monday-4\/"},"modified":"2022-03-29T13:44:12","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T11:44:12","slug":"new-music-monday-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/blog\/new-music-monday-4\/","title":{"rendered":"New Music Monday #4"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/em><\/p>\n

This was quite the concert.<\/p>\n

I needed a framework to premiere Evan Johnson\u2019s new piece for historical basset clarinet, \u2018indolentiae ars\u2019, a medium to be kept \u2013 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 \u2013 I played that on \u2018modern\u2019 basset clarinet, though, partly because the historical basset clarinet isn\u2019t exactly my comfort zone, partly because it wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t really balanced: it needed another piece of new (or newish) music, preferably for quintet.<\/p>\n

There were a few options but Feldman\u2019s Clarinet and string quartet stood out for a variety of reasons. Even though it\u2019s hardly short, purely from the rehearsal point of view it\u2019s not too difficult to prepare (stamina is another question, of course). It\u2019s 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\u2019s a biographical connection between Feldman and Evan Johnson: besides Feldman\u2019s status as an inspirational figure, he taught at Buffalo University, where Johnson would later study. And there\u2019s 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\u2019t know his recorded work, do investigate: I can\u2019t imagine what my own playing would be like without his example.<\/p>\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Morton Feldman’s “Clarinet and String Quartet”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1097,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-programmnote"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8545"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8547,"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8545\/revisions\/8547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musikfabrik.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}