Like sweet bells jangled (2009)
Instrumentation: clarinet (or violin) and crotales
Electronics: Yes
Duration: 11'
Commissioned by the Moving Theatre Dance Company and the American Music Center, based on a short work written for Duo Breekbaar (David Schotzko and Joshua Rubin).
PURCHASE
SCORE SAMPLE
Music should be accessible. If cost is an obstacle, please fill out the form below:
NOTES: Like sweet bells jangled is concerned with space and distance: distances between notes, sounds, ideas, and physical distances between performers, audience, walls, speakers, and so on. Using one of the earliest techniques in electronic music, a ring modulator creates a second phantom duo, dependent on real-time input from the clarinet and crotales, that plays the sum and difference of any sounds made together by the live performers. Familiar timbres are literally inverted, their overtone structures turned on their heads. Together the live duos and the ring modulator processing form chords that deconstruct what begins as a simple, strophic melody. The audience and performers form another codependent pair, with the audience providing the means of amplification and spatialization for the processing thru speakers in their phones - but the signal reaches the phones having first travelled along thousands of miles of wires and then beamed from cell towers. The piece takes its title from Ophelia's description of Hamlet's loss of sanity: "Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh; That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth blasted with ecstasy".
GALLERY
