Largo calligrafico / “patientiam” [2012]

for baritone saxophone

duration :: 8’

Written for Ryan Muncy

First performance :: Ryan Muncy — University of Huddersfield (UK), 11 March 2013

Recording :: Ryan Muncy :: Tundra tun003 [ label | amazon | spotify ]

[ Ryan Muncy :: St. Paul’s Hall, University of Huddersfield (UK), 11 March 2013 ]

Largo calligrafico / “patientiam” is a perforated gloss of an absent center. Ludwig Senfl’s haunting sixteenth-century tenorlied “Patientiam muss ich han” contributes background pitch structures, proportional matrices, formal guidelines, and large-scale gestural shapes, but the fluttering, intermittent, unstably more or less repetitive ornamental marginalia, forced through an instrument not given to fluttering, form a drifting supplement to all of that.  It is not terribly clear, and it is an open question whether it would remind us of the song if it were there.