silence (2024) for tenor saxophone

Staying with saxophones, last February the saxophonist Daniel Sclafani gave a second performance of the piece I wrote for him, silence, and the video of that outing is now on the webpage for the piece. Silence embraces the self-contradictoriness of a piece for the boisterous tenor sax that concerns itself with silence-adjacence… The title and impulse behind the work comes from the homonymous, and rewardingly complex collection of short stories by Rodney Hall.

After the aggression of burns (1989) for alto, and suavity of {r}emote (2023) for soprano, I was keen to treat the tenor sax as a quite different ‘flavour’: darker and more mellow, melancholy and – despite the name – sweetly baritone-voiced. As I explain on the dedicated webpage, silence was written against the prevailing manner of tenor sax playing: rampaging and hyperbolic. The resulting work is – to my ears at least – mysteriously paradoxical, with a character that is both meandering and focused, busy and still, while still retaining at least a little of the ‘dirtiness’ of paradigmatic tenor sax music: qualities that Daniel reveals effectively in his performances.