chiara percivati

Bubbling bell

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During a working session with Luca Valli on his piece, Totem, for bass clarinet and tin foil preparation, we decided to prepare the bass clarinet’s bell with water. I had seen many brass players doing this, storing water into the bell or immersing their instruments into buckets of water and then blowing them, but had never tried it on the clarinet because of its wooden body. In this case, since the bass’ bell is made of metal, there is no danger for the instrument.

We first sealed the vent hole with patafix, wrapped up the low C pad (the one on the lower part of the bell that you can see in the picture) with cellophane, to isolate it from water (they are waterproof, but it’s safer anyway), closed the low C key (otherwise, water would run out of it) and finally poured approximately a glass of water into the bell.

The result was an interesting blend of low and bubbling sounds, with a strong and yet unpredictable percussive element, caused by the ‘boiling’ water. Just imagine blowing into a one meter straw! When I tried to play louder, harmonics emerged from this low magma.

This preparation was the starting point for further preparations (after all, isn’t it the same with complex acoustic sounds, that are often the result of an overlapping of techniques?).

These are the sounds we experimented with:

00:00, water only; harmonics emerge as dynamic raises.

00:16, boomwhacker (tuned percussion tube) into the bass’ bell; harmonics emerge.
We first added a boomwhacker pipe into the prepared bell, to get a lower and less defined sound, and obtained similar results but with a deeper and darker fundamental (I personally like this sound a lot, though it needs lots of air).


00:48, aluminium foil; harmonics; pp aluminium solo-buzz.
Again without the boomwhacker, we covered the watery bell with aluminium foil. The new preparation adds a rattle, delicate or intense, depending on the airflow’s energy, to the bubbling and the harmonics. As you can hear in the audio recording, more sounds are possible with the combination of these preparations: breathing in and out, sipping sounds, extremely delicate buzz of the aluminium foil.

01:25, didjeridoo embouchure.
Finally, we removed the mouthpiece and tried to use this last preparation (water and aluminium foil) with a didjeridoo embouchure. The result is pretty fun, quite far from the sounds we started from. Hilarious and expressive at the same time.

Sounding lower

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I met Murat Çolak in Graz, during the Impuls Festival 2014, and I was right away impressed by the personal sound imagery that emerges from his music. After some preliminary work via Skype, we met in Madeira at the Estalagem da Ponta do Sol Residency for Contemporary Music and Electronics, and started working there on a piece for prepared bass clarinet and electronics.

Preparation was for Murat the possibility to defamiliarize the instrumental sound, working with a known instrument but with unknown sounds. As we were working together, I remember his concern that the chosen sound would have some kind of “unheard-of” quality, refusing those that would lead the listener to a well-known sound domain.

His first goal was finding a lower and less defined sound to work with. For this preparation we chose:

  • a plastic cylinder-shaped tube (we used a boomwhacker musical tube)
  • Patafix (Blu-Tack, reusable putty-like pressure-sensitive adhesive)

Inserting the boomwhacker pipe into the bass clarinet’s bell and sealing the vent hole and the interstices with patafix, the lowest note of the instrument, the written C (usually sounding Bb), is lowered to sounding pitch Ab. The sound of this low note resembles that of a contrabass clarinet, but less concrete because of the material heterogeneity (probably the sound quality could change a bit using different materials to lenghten the bore). The preparation affects the lowest note only, so leaving all the other notes “unprepared”.

Apart from these ‘prepared’ low tones, Murat chose other sound materials that, despite being produced with the ‘ordinary’ instrument, question the well known sonic image we have of bass clarinet: among the others sounds, teeth on reed, quasi-sine-tones from the altissimo register, air sounds of different range. The performer is asked to play extremely short and clearly characterized samples, that are recorded by a microphone and instantly processed by two pedals, an infinite reverb and a tremolo. The processed sound is then controlled by the performer, through the manipulation of the pedals’ setting, resulting in a music made of drones that slowly and constantly evolves, on the edge between collapsing and exploding.

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