MUSIC
I've been playing my clarinet since I was 8, with particular enthusiasm for these Bach solo Sonatas, Partitas and Suites (originally for violin or cello). They are glorious, intricate, soothing, inspirational and classic. Until recently, I'd never recorded my performances, but the urge to express and share has finally brought these pieces in a new form to this playlist. My interest in music and sound has also evolved into expertise in sonic storytelling as a film sound designer . Combining these aptitudes, I've begun a creative challenge for myself to record and engineer these Sonnenschein-Bach Variations, with the restriction that I never repeat the stylistic approach of any rendition. So I play around with my performance style (fast, slow, strict rhythm, jazzy interpretation, etc.), multi-track, filters (pitch, speed, delay, reverb, chorus, etc.) and additional sounds (percussion, tonal instruments, sound effects, etc.). It's a very personal exploration of music I've known almost my whole life, and now producing for an as yet unknown public to discover. Let's see where it takes us...
Inspired by J.S. Bach Partita I Corrente, clarinet performed live in the woods of Cortes and Vancouver Islands, British Columbia, Canada. More on Red Dress Day https://globalnews.ca/news/7838341/re...
A celestial gallop of triplets racing across the glorious Colorado sky.
Composed 200 years after Bach, this study for clarinet by Alfred Uhl resonates with that same lyrical beauty of the master, so it's included in this playlist. There is a particular symmetry to Bach's Cello Suite V Sarabande, which I've also recorded and will be posting.
I recorded a single performance of this piece, then copied that track into two additional tracks and explored pitch shifting into various harmonic structures that are beyond the original underlying chordal progression. It has a kind of organ-like quality to my ears. Curiouser and curiouser...
I love kelzmer music and the often heard rapturous flight of the clarinet, which has influenced in this Bach rendition, letting go of perfect intonation, rhythm and even the notes on the page. Adding delay, reverb and chorus at a few points, makes this one of my favorites.
There exists such emotion within the exquisitely calculated melody and harmonic structure of this piece. I augmented the ecstatic rise and fall of two layered performances, multi-tracking and offsetting to create specific delay intervals, plus a lower octave, and an expansive reverb at select moments.
I love the mathematical regularity of Bach, but also am extremely fond of finding the juicy phrases and dwelling upon the beauty of the hilly melodic landscape. So this rendition breaks the predictable rhythm and then adds a good dose of reverb at certain expansive moments.
V.2 is based on the same Bach piece as V.1, with a different approach and a later section. One of the intriguing aspects of Bach is the mathematical structure which can evolve into many beautiful musical relationships. For this version, the recorded section was doubled in speed and layered under the original; and then this was re-doubled to 4x speed and also layered under the two previous speeds. They all catch up with each other and come beautifully together at the end.