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Air: Air, Canary, New Ground

from ORDO by Philip Blackburn

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about

Air. Air; Canary; New Ground
“Air can e’er renew ground,” the poet might have said. The fact is, none ever did. It was just a misread list of titles of harpsichord pieces by Henry Purcell that caught my attention when I was starting to write this work for an Oxford Soundpool concert. I had seen Peter Greenaway’s film, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), with music by Michael Nyman. He had taken several Purcell ground bass patterns, and slyly arranged them in Minimalist fashion as metacommentary on the plot. I decided to take a similar repeating ground bass – a simple descending tetrachord – but wrestle as much counterpoint out of it as I possibly could. The attentive listener may count up to 87 canons embedded in the solo clarinet line alone, stretched and displaced. The piano pedal is held down to resonate in sympathy with the clarinet. The solo piano second movement reworks the same material but using the range of notes the clarinet didn’t. Finally the instruments find common ground together. The halting musical gestures somehow relate to my typical speech patterns as well as the fact that, during the composition process, I had to rotate my body very slowly (as the clarinetist needs to do, surrounded by music stands) in front of the fireplace to keep warm in my mother’s chilly house that winter. One wag at the premiere heard plenty of new ground but not many canaries. That is fair enough.

credits

from ORDO, released October 21, 2023
Gunnar Owen Hirthe, clarinet
Nicholas Underhill, piano

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Philip Blackburn Saint Paul, Minnesota

Philip Blackburn was born in Cambridge, England, and studied music there and at the University of Iowa with Kenneth Gaburo. He is a public artist specializing in sound — a composer/environmental sound-artist. Blackburn’s works have been heard in ships’ harbors, state fairs, forests, and coming out of storm sewers, as well as in galleries, parking lots, and on concert stages.

philipblackburn.com ... more

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