Join us 4 October for a concert with discussion and Q&A, all about the Contrabass Clarinet!
The first Istanbul Woodwind Festival was held this year 2016 from 29 June – 3 July, and Shadanga Duo had the pleasure of performing.
The International Clarinet Association’s annual ClarinetFest was 22-26 July 2015, this time in Madrid. My first year attending was 2013 in Assisi, where I came as a spectator, but ended up performing with the European Clarinet Association ensemble. Last year was in Baton Rouge, where I performed Stockhausen’s Solo fur Melodieinstrument und Rückkopplung.
This year I performed with my new ensemble, Shadanga Duo. We played part of our program from our concert in Århus last December, which consisted of the Elliott Carter Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux, and two of our new commissions, Louis Aguirre’s Yalodde Yeyé Kari and Hannes Kerschbaumer’s gryet.debris. Even though we had performed it before, with four times more pieces as well, it was still quite a challenging program.
I’ve just gotten done playing a couple dates in Amsterdam and Antwerp with the multiple-award-winning actress and singer Idina Menzel on her World Tour.
From 11-13 December 2014 the 4th European Clarinet Congress was held in Katowice, Poland. While I’ve been involved with the past International clarinet festivals, this was my first European. I was invited to perform a solo concert, where I premiered a solo clarinet piece Fáessa by Thanos Chrysakis, and also played a couple of my bass clarinet favorites, Monólogo Fantástico by Francisco Castillo Trigueros and Wake Up Call by Robert Ratcliffe.
In 2012, flutist Katalin Szanyi and I were brought together to perform the duo Oshun Olodí by Louis Aguirre, a Cuban composer living in Denmark.
megalodon/na is a project that’s been developing over the past year with Austrian vocal artist Magdalena Hahnkamper (Pfefferminz Anymalia). It’s hard to classify exactly, but it’s an avant-garde combination of elements of jazz, Viennese lieder, free improvisation, spoken-word, poetry, German cabaret, theater, performance art, and multimedia. In February we won the Lyrik Live audience competition from the Austrian Ö1 radio with our piece, a video called “friedrich/das erdrückende”.
Six months after 20 musicians/composers/sound artists met in Nida, Lithuania for the New Music Incubator, we reconvened in Oslo for the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival, which was also hosting the Nordic Music Days.
The International Clarinet Association’s annual ClarinetFest was held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana this year, and I was invited to perform Stockhausen’s “Solo für melodieinstrument und Rückkopplung”. The piece was written in 1966 for any melody instrument and delayed feedback. To perform it then required the assistance of at least four people to operate the different elements of the delay system, which include the recording, the playback, and the speakers. Using the software Max/MSP with my laptop, I’ve developed a patch so it can now be performed with a computer doing all these tasks. Harry Sparnaay, the pioneer of the modern bass clarinet, has even mentioned my performance in his book.
Who knew? Things are actually happening in Detroit. It’s been 8 years since I left and moved to Europe, and in that time the city has seen its share of disaster.
Here’s the shows I’ll be playing this summer while I’m in America, in Detroit, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Chicago!
“…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.”