Happy Friday Music! The main video this week is something way beyond my concept of what the bassoon can play. Anna Meredith (1978 - ) is an exciting Scottish composer, who like many composers across the centuries, has accepted what is good about previous compositions, but has tried to further define what is musically possible and tasteful. “Axeman” was written for bassoon and electronics with the intention being ‘to make the bassoon sound as much like a 1980s guitar-god as possible.’ The techniques the performer uses here show a great deal of skill and dedication. Much of Anna’s output makes the listener reconsider their own ideas about what music is. “Hands Free” was performed at the 2012 Proms. It consists of over 10 minutes of clapping and clicking, with choreographed hand, arm and torso movements with sounds. It’s a cross between a Mexican Wave, tribal dancing, what I might do in a lesson with 7 year olds and Stomp. With the National Youth Orchestra performing it, it is mesmerising though. She has also written a concerto for beatboxer and orchestra. She has become a little more prominent amongst the general public recently as she has written one of the “Ten Pieces” that the BBC is promoting at the moment. https://youtube/watch?v=UKLLINdl4N0 Vincent Persichetti (1915-1987) wrote a lot of music for piano, orchestra and wind instruments. It is his 25 Parables, mostly for unaccompanied wind instruments, that I find really interesting. The Bassoon Parable, one of his earliest ones being written in 1969, has complex rhythms and difficult pitches to control. Dong Yun Kwon Shankle, originally from South Korea, has played in many parts of the world as both an orchestral player and a soloist. https://youtube/watch?v=de1mwOaW8Dc This is part of a series of fourteen Sequenze by Luciano Berio (1925-2003), an Italian composer. The work was written for, and dedicated to, the French bassoonist Pascal Gallois, who gave the world première on 15 June 1995. Sequenza XII reflects Berio’s fascination with virtuosity, ‘understood not merely as technical dexterity, but as a manifestation of an agile musical intelligence that relishes the challenge of complexity.’ In Sequenza XII Berio explores the physical limits of performance through extended techniques, such as through different uses of the tongue to modify airflow, by writing notes and phrases that are so long they require the performer to use circular breathing, the use of glissando, and multiple sounds produced by singing through the instrument while playing. The physical stamina needed to play this is amazing. It would be interesting to see the notation that is spread over those eight music stands. Sequenza XII is the longest of all the Sequenze https://youtube/watch?v=8u4wVKgXJ1Y Pascal Gallois began his studies in 1978 at a Conservatoire in Paris, where he taught himself from 1994 until 2000. He has been a member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain since 1981. Gallois specialises in music after 1945, having given world premieres or French first performances of numerous pivotal contemporary bassoon works, among them Karlheinz Stockhausen’s In Freundschaft (1984) and Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XII (1995), which was of course dedicated to him. He is seen as a big contributor to the development of the modern bassoon repertoire. Johanes Boris Borowski is a German composer born in 1979. His Bassoon Concerto for bassoon and ensemble was written in 2012/13. At the moment he doesn’t have a listing in Grove music online!
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 06:15:00 +0000
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