A Project-Based Life

Here in Los Angeles, we've just passed the 3-month mark for the Covid-19 lockdown. The weekend of June 13 was marked by the County's movement to Stage 2. With the re-opening of beaches, the airport, and various businesses, the noise level in Venice has roared back. Unfortunately, the uptick in noise has coincided with the first week of the actual recording phase of my solo clarinet piece project.  The result is a lot of time wasted, waiting for the jet to fly over or the ambulance to pass out of my soundspace so we won't hear it on the performance track. Our wonderful Coles 4083 ribbon microphones hear everything.   Yesterday morning, there was a half hour when there were four simultaneous noise sources to dodge: a private plane, the street sweeper, a distant siren, and a leaf blower down the block. (And the mockingbird, but as I said before, his presence doesn't bother me.) After a morning of this, cleaning the kitchen seems almost a treat.

Despite all that, I am now getting some successful takes for more than half of the six pieces in my project, which is a satisfying feeling.  John Mayer's Raga Music for solo clarinet is something I first performed as an undergraduate around 1972, when I was studying with Rosario Mazzeo. Written in 1957, it was still considered to be a new piece! The Stravinsky Three Pieces is a very old friend, which I learned for the first time as a clueless 13-year old for a regional band directors' Solo and Ensemble Festival. (In those days, I was emulating Kell's notoriously inaccurate performance from his Decca LP - the first  record I ever bought myself as a teenager.) Along with the Debussy Rhapsodie, it was what I played for my very first lesson with Mazzeo, when I was a 17 year old freshman, and the eye-opening coaching he gave me on both pieces is something I will never forget. Miklos Rosza's two movement Sonatina is a work I have come to love while coaching professional-level students on it, and it has been a joy to actually bring it to performance standard myself. The list continues with two other pieces I also did not perform before but learned about from coaching a gifted student: Bright Sheng's A Song from Childhood, which is nearly ready, and Katja Saariaho's Duft, as yet not fully mastered by me. 

The final two pieces for this "album" are still being decided, but will likely include Gordon Crosse's A Year and a Day,  a beautiful but inscrutable set of variations that I have been toying with since buying a copy when living in England in the early 90s.  I've had a recent breakthrough with its idiosyncratic altissimo passages, experimenting with alternative fingerings (such as used on bass clarinet ) which potentially make the second variation playable at the given marking. The wildcard still on the list is the Soliloquy by Swiss composer and theorist Ernst Levy. I learned this for my 1982 solo recital in New York's Merkin Hall, where it was billed as the premiere (it was in fact the second performance, as I later found out, the first having been given by its dedicatee, a faculty member at Brooklyn College). It remains to be seen whether I still love the work enough to learn it again, or simply decide to use my archival performance instead in this slot; stay tuned.