for tenor saxophone (2024)

for Daniel Sclafani

Rodney Hall’s 2011 short story collection Silence, has a covert premise: as the author says in an afterword, “a contributing factor to the silences being explored is that most of these pieces engage with a ‘silent’ partner, being written as if by others”. The list of Hall’s ‘others’ ranges from Henry Green to Herman Broch, Malcolm Lowry to Gertrude Stein, and includes many of my own favourite writers.

By invoking Hall’s collection, I have ‘bought-in’ to that notion of the new work channeling some pre-existing writing, being superimposed on some palimpsest-like ghost text. Unlike Hall, my relationship with the history of my artform is somewhat fraught. I regard a lot of musical mutation over time as devolution, a loss of articulacy; Dunstaple’s taming of the late 14th century avantgarde, Sigismondo d’India’s extraction of bald declamatory single lines from the residue of the ars perfecta, the gradual abandonment of the subtlety of counterpoint and harmony that led to the Classical Style, Minimalism’s rejection of ...well, almost everything that I consider to constitute musical intelligence. I simplify, of course, but as a result I am hardly going to attempt any such stylistic emulation in my own piece. (Many of Michael Finnissy’s more recent works have very successfully taken this approach; his relationship with history is clearly more robust than mine).

Instead I have adopted Hall’s cellular, stylistically-segregated structure. Each single short arch in my work is a self-contained utterance that engages autonomously with silence. Silence, or at least quietness, is not an attribute one immediately associates with the tenor saxophone. Back in my youth, the tenor was the sax that (as I saw it) the big players adopted: Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, John Gilmore, Clifford Jordan, Dave Liebman, Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Wayne Shorter, Alan Skidmore, John Tchicai, Barbara Thompson, Stanley Turrentine, and so on. My preference was always for the Free Jazz players, and the wild hedonistic frenzies that they instigated, like Coltrane’s Om or Ayler’s Truth is Marching In or Shepp’s Magic of Ju-ju or Sun Ra’s Space is the Place. Those sounds have been in my ears ever since, particularly while writing such pieces as énoncé, or my Third Symphony: Afterimages, let alone burns. Many of these players turned to soprano saxophone for their more intimate work, and I’ve addressed that idiom in my 〈ʀ〉emote.

But now, confronted with the prospect of writing a piece for tenor sax as requested by Daniel Sclafani, I found that I didn’t want to write a barnstorming, ear-splitting, John Gilmore-y Howl of a piece. What I chose was to try and return a timbral liminality to the instrument, to reposition it far from all that hectic blowing. Not that the big, percussive, tenor sax can ever be truly quiet; its mechanics offer a sonic substrate to the blown sounds, and that composite homophony is really what this piece is about. So I structured the work fairly abstractly, allowing the sonic coloration to emerge from architectural juxtapositions, without any more subjective associations, as if it were itself the chassis of some higher, more elaborate, architecture. In a way this still derives from Rodney Hall’s notion; however, my piece is itself the palimpsest upon which the unspecified other works are overlaid …or, to view it from another angle, the sonic residue that might remain after a typical tenor saxophone rant is almost erased, pushed over the aural horizon.

Silence is, while ostensibly simple, a fairly elusive work. It is intended, as the title suggests, to be predominantly quiet but subtly colourful, with occasional bursts of rhetoric, and sufficiently extended to provide a sense of sustained, moody, anticipation. Of what, is never revealed.

Daniel Sclafani has exclusivity on this work for two years from 28 March 2025.