“…the audience can expect radical solo works for bass clarinet and electronics — Jason Alder’s A’d Amssong that draws from Detroit’s legendary underground electronic dance music scene and Robert Ratcliffe’s Wake Up Call – a dialogue between jazz improvisation and contemporary electronic music.”
I Play in Leeds on Thursday in one of Gabriel Prokofiev’s NonClassical nights, as part of the International Festival for Innovation in Music Production and Composition iFIMPaC. Performing Robert Ratcliffe’s “Wake Up Call” that I programmed the electronics for, and a piece of mine I recorded 12 years ago but have never performed live yet, “A’d Amssong”.
The program notes for the pieces:
“A’d Amssong” is a two-fold improvisation. The first was the
electronic accompaniment, played and manipulated live by me
in real time, improvising with various synthesizers, samplers,
and midi triggers. The recording of this live performance was
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piece developed after a period of being deeply immersed in
the Detroit electronic dance music scene, and prior to my life in
the Netherlands. What I didn’t realize when I recorded the bass
clarinet solo at the time was how influenced it was from the
musical scene of Amsterdam, where I would end up a couple
years later.
Wake up Call looks at strategies for ‘recoding’ existing music to produce original material. This is explored through modes of both composition and improvisation, highlighting the similarities and connections between procedures of transformation in various musical practices.
Based on ‘recoded’ transformations of material sourced from Willy Burkhard’s Sonate für Klavier, op.66, the bass clarinet writing of Wake up Call simulates jazz improvisation through characteristic phrase construction, gestural archetypes, melodic contour and the use of a governing unison theme (a ‘self-borrowing’ from an earlier composition for bass clarinet). Whilst the ‘theme’ of Wake up Call remains compulsory – ‘fixed’ in both notation and the ‘double-tracked’ unison of the electronic part – the performer may ‘deactivate’ other notated passages, which remain optional, choosing to replace them with improvised material. In this way, the outline structure of Wake up Call emulates traditional jazz arrangements alternating a theme with improvisational passages or secondary material.
The fixed medium component initially functions as an electronic accompaniment to the bass clarinet, with an increasing dialogue between the two parts unfolding over the course of the work. Featuring a ‘post-digital’1 approach to sound design incorporating noise-based artifacts, synthetic elements (EMS ‘Synthi A’,2 electronic percussion samples), and deconstructed fragments of bass clarinet, materials are equally derived from experimental electronic music and forms of EDM, such as glitch hop.3 The result is a new form of hybrid musical discourse that amalgamates contemporary electronic music with aspects of jazz composition and improvisation.