Ground [2010]

for contrabass clarinet

duration :: 11’

Commissioned by the by the City of Witten for the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik 2010

First performance :: Gareth Davis — Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (Germany), 25 April 2010

Ground is a tracing of the 1933 Harold Arlen/Ted Koehler standard “Stormy Weather,” a meditation on the physical act of singing its melody, in the form of a single, awkward instrument’s attempt to capture the remarkable divagations of that melody, with the contrabass clarinet skimming fitfully over the surface as the tune proliferates into an overlapping, folded, canonic space that serves as a slippery ground. 

This is an admittedly idiosyncratic approach to the request from Gareth Davis to write a work based on a tune from the Great American Songbook, insofar as it involves virtually no audible snippets of the melody in question.  The most direct trace is in the form of the piece, its large-scale looping repetitions, which faithfully retraces the sectional pattern of the original.  Otherwise, Ground operates in indirect homage to what is most interesting to me about the song: its pressure on the breath and on the lowest register, its repetitions, its aimless chromatic wanderings followed by plunging descents.  It is an incredibly demanding melody, physically speaking, in a way that the suavity of a standard performance can barely contain.  Ground is a record of what lies beneath.