At the Alliance Française, Canberra
From the programme notes:
Starling is a new quartet for clarinets (first performance at the Adelaide Fringe in March this year) Don't pay too much attention to the title: originally the music was to have been based on the idea of the movement of a huge flock of pre-roosting birds over St Peter's Square: a refreshing and life-affirming experience after a day's tour of the Vatican. But Starling remained as a working title as the piece took on its own personality and changed into something quite different: overlapping drones supporting a fluid, improvisatory exploration of the main themes, leading to dance-like sections (with footstomping obbligato) and quieter interludes, concluding - inconclusively - with a trancey dronal ending.
You'll hear a scale with a sharp fourth and a flat seventh that pops up around the world: Tatra Mountain fiddlers, Hindustani musicians, and film composers writing music (usually involving lots of fench horns) for those wide ocean and deep space scenes are all fond of this mode . The English folk song 'Lucy Wan', quoted briefly, has a similar flavour.
The piece is basically in a slow 3/2 rhythm, which lends itself to interesting subdivisions, becoming quite jig-like at times and subverted by the occasional hiccup in 11/8 when it helped the flow, or I couldn't make it stick to the rules...
Clarity will be featuring Starling on their next CD, to be recorded early in 2007. And I'm now contemplating a piece closer to the original idea behind Starling: a swarm intelligence, 'multiplex of wing and eye' type thingy, which will possibly end up being called Pipistrelle if it doesn't get away like the last one did.
back to top