Duration: 6'
Dedication: Tristram Williams, Ben Marks, and Daryl Buckley (ELISION)

Recording

            Huddersfield Contemporary Records HCR 03 (Tristram Williams and Benjamin Marks), released 11/23/10

Performance History

7/26/09 - ELISION - Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne, Australia (broadcast 10/17/09 and 1/23/10 on ABC Classic FM)

[A thought-provoking response to this performance by Robert Dahm can be read here]

2/8/10 - ELISION - Kings Place, London, UK

"Evan Johnson takes such latent fragility to greater extremes. Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my sternum), for flugelhorn and alto trombone, goes beyond the boundaries of the possible into the realm of the deliberately impossible and self-defeating. It is related to the bass clarinet duo Apostrophe 1 (all communication is a form of complaint) like household dust is related to the home. Tiny motes of music drift in and out of the light, each hinting at the remnants of something long gone, gently articulating currents of air, the passage of bodies, the dimensions of a room." -- Tim Rutherford-Johnson, Musical Pointers

"...it was with great delight that I witnessed the extraordinary alchemy of Tristram Williams and Benjamin Marks, in the idiosyncratic acoustic of King’s Place, reveal this work as a masterpiece. ... The listening experience of Apostrophe 2 this time was one in which the islands of barely audible, barely stable sonorities violating the peripheries of perception was maintained, but with an endlessly fascinating, multifaceted sonic outcome. It’s a shame that the physical demands of such a work mean that it will never be more than niche repertoire, as this is music-making of the first order." -- Robert Dahm, Sound is Grammar

7/28/10 - Paul Hübner (flg), Stephen Menotti (tbn) - Darmstadt Summer Courses, Darmstadt, Germany

12/1/11 - Paul Hübner (flg), Stephen Menotti (tbn) - University of Huddersfield, UK

Program Note

This is an abbreviated, stunted, stifled, altogether more effortful sequel to the sixteen-minute Apostrophe 1 (All communication is a form of complaint) for two bass clarinets (2008).  Apostrophe 2 scavenges most of its pitch, durational, and structural material from its predecessor, but the three smoothly connected sections of Apostrophe 1 are recast as floating islands of forced-out ornament, its prevailing air of lyricism and gentleness replaced by feebleness and strain.  This is an athletic piece, a physical piece, whose discomfort and urgency are evoked by the subtitle; but there is still a kernel of lyricism, of a recognizable relation between ornament and melody, and of a welter of hinted-at canons, near-canons,  and repetitions that attempts to manage the unmanageable whole.

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