chiara percivati

Reduction as a means of expansion 2 – Treccozzi’s Ayre

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Ayre

Maria Teresa Treccozzi composed Ayre for the Impuls Festival 2015, where I had the chance to work first with her and to premiere the piece.  

Like in Vinko Globokar’s Voix instrumentalisée, Treccozzi decided to remove the clarinet primary sound source, the reed-mouthpiece combination (but working with a clarinet, instead of a bass clarinet). Despite this shared starting point, the two works develop in distinct directions, Globokar’s being built on the intimate, grotesque power of human voice, Treccozzi’s transforming the clarinet into an hybrid air machine/percussive tool.

The blowing action is the only common technique this piece shares with traditional clarinet playing.  All open holes are considered for blowing into the instrument, like in a sort of a pan flute. Different kinds of air sounds, Shakuhachi playing, trumpet embouchure and the use of a whistle (appendix and substitute for the clarinet) serve as a core connection to the traditional “wind instrument” technique. At the same time, these techniques are combined with percussive ones: tongue rams, key clicks and palm strokes on the barrel.

Maria Teresa Treccozzi – Ayre (2015)
for solo clarinet without mouthpiece


The blowing point into the instrument changes rapidly and constantly, far from its ordinary position, the loss of a fix contact with the instrument demanding for a new kind of spatial awareness (an inaccurate fast movement could severely harm the performer’s embouchure…).

Again in this piece, the subtraction of a part of the instrument’s body, rather than being an auditory deprivation, opens up to the exploration of so far hidden potentials. Let’s just think that most of the used techniques couldn’t be possible with a complete clarinet (Shakuhachi playing, trumpet embouchure, tongue rams and palm strokes on the barrel).

Here is an useful video by clarinetist Sean Osborn, teaching how to play Shakuhachi technique on clarinet.

Reduction as a means of expansion 1 – Globokar’s Voix Instrumentalisée

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The first “prepared” work that I approached was Vinko Globokar’s Voix instrumentalisée, for a bass clarinet player. The subtitle here is truer than ever, since the instrumentalist is asked to remove the mouthpiece from the bass clarinet and play the instrument without it. That is, without its primary sound source, the reed-mouthpiece combination. While in ordinary playing is the reed basic sound to be instrumentalized (filtered by the instrument body to its final sonic features), in this work Globokar uses the voice to replace it, and the instrument for its resonance and filtering.

A new set of sound techniques are then introduced: singing, speaking and blowing into the bass clarinet’s neck, using pure consonantal sounds, making the lips vibrate in the embouchure as a trombone player would and using the keys to modulate all this produced sound.

Although the words can never be clearly understood, the spoken and sung material is based on the sentence “L’art et la science ne peuvent exister sans la possibilité d’exprimer des idées paradoxales.” (Art and science cannot exist without the possibility of expressing paradoxical ideas). The mentioned paradox is immediately evident to the listener, that following the performance moves from dramatic to grotesque episodes, immersed in a heterogeneous and iridescent sonic world.

Globokar’s approach is clearly provocative and at the same time extremely powerful. This new, apparently “deprived” instrument, produces autonomous sounds, filters and modulates the voice, amplifies the percussive-articulation sounds. The ordinary position of mouthpiece and reed would have been a huge obstacle to the desired centrality of voice and articulation (let’s just think of the stable embouchure needed in traditional playing), with the full range of articulatory movements (of mouth/tongue/teeth) constrained by the same physical presence of the mouthpiece into the performer’s mouth. Temporarily freed of it, we gain the “space” (physical and aesthetic) for the voice to become a powerful sound source.

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