⟨ʀ⟩emote in Chicago
I am delighted to be able to declare that Thomas Giles gave the World Premiere of my soprano saxophone solo ⟨ʀ⟩emote in the Frequency Series at the Constellations venue in Chicago on 5 November. The livestream of the concert is already online: you can hear it here. ⟨ʀ⟩emote is directly after the intermission and starts at 54:15. The piece proper is about 12 minutes. I recommend watching the whole gig, though –Thomas is a supremely talented player and it is simply a joy to observe him in action. I went to buy a ticket for the livestream, but that no longer seems to be an option.
One of the downsides of writing music for other musicians to play is that there is inevitably a delay between completing the work and actually hearing it. Soon after Thomas asked me to write for him I was told that I would need imminent cancer surgery, so I rather hurriedly got stuck into writing, and finished the piece a few days before going under the knife. So Thomas’ learning the piece was effectively coextant with my recuperation, and he played the piece a little over a month after getting it, which is both a testimony to his astonishing capacity to absorb music, and a real treat for me to get such near-immediate gratification.
If there is a single element of Thomas’ performance that I would particularly highlight, it is his ability to project the meaning embedded in the piece. Often premieres are renderings of the surface of the music, and the deeper message emerges after a few outings. Here, I feel that Thomas gets to the heart of it from the first notes. Enjoy his performance!
It struck me soon after completing ⟨ʀ⟩emote that it made an interesting pair with my fairly recent bass clarinet piece that I wrote for Drew Gilchrist, the effort to return to the cities of the sane, (tetrocos for short). The pieces have at least two shared gestural features: they involve a very rapid churn of expressivity, and are both highly rigorous. The intent in tetrocos is to effect a sense of barely-controlled precipitousness, where the player is taken on an unpredictable wild ride that is quite intentionally discursive for the audience – Drew remarked that “a few people … couldn’t grasp the overarching form” – with a wilful refusal to conform to narrative logic. ⟨ʀ⟩emote, by contrast, while mercurial, is never digressive; its trajectory is (at least, intendedly) clear and intelligible.