Extreme Clarinet

SKU: HL.14019122

ISBN 9781844492886. 8.25x11.75x0.23 inches.

By the age of forty, Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg was one of the busiest concert composers in the world. His music avails itself of all manner of modern innovations, but there is a Neo-Classical orientation in his harmonies and formal design that makes his works appealing to a wide audience. The Quintet for Clarinet and Strings was comissioned by Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival and first performed in this festival in Finland in 1992. In the composer's own words: 'Despite its rather extended duration (almost 20 minutes) the work is in one continuous movement. Sections are based on either a static material composed of different scales giving the music an 'insect like' appereance, or on directional processes forcing the music to gradually change character or even physically pushing the music to extreme registers or speed.' This edition contains all the Parts.

SKU: PR.14440602S

UPC: 680160622023. 11 x 14 inches.

Times Like These was commissioned and premiered by clarinetist Jean Kopperud and pianist Stephen Gosling, who also included the work on their Albany Records CD Extreme Measures. The work was also adopted by clarinetist Lisa Oberlander, who performed it at the 2014 ClarinetFest of the International Clarinet Association and recorded it on her debut album, Times Like These. A YouTube video performance by Oberlander is available, with pianist Yien Wang. For advanced performers.

SKU: HL.49045231

ISBN 9790001178402. UPC: 841886017313. 9.0x12.0x0.077 inches.

The pianist and composer Alexander Rosenblatt (*1956) from Moscow loves to cross frontiers, trying to overcome in his piano and chamber music works the rigid barriers between classical and jazz music. It was precisely in this spirit that he wrote his Tango for clarinet and piano. It is a virtuoso, exciting and quite effective piecewhich deliberately puts the possibilities of performance and sound to the extreme. Both players and listeners are going to enjoy themselves.

SKU: HL.14008425

ISBN 9780711933545.

Davies's feeling for the potency and bravura of the clarinet goes back to works of the 1960s; his concerto for the instrument is predictably a big, ranging piece, in two linked movements. The first, fast with a brief slow introduction, has the soloist in propulsive melodic flights slipping over into florid runs, but it is a virtuoso piece for the orchestra, especially for the marimba and pair of horns. The Adagio that follows is in the spare, cold, birdcall-riven style of other recent Davies slow movements, exploiting first the clarinet's low register and then, at its climax, the instrument's high extremes. A cadenza leads to the coda, where Davies introduces a Scots tune, previously hinted at, with which he brings the work to an end in F sharp major. Clarinet part with piano reduction of the orchestral score.

SKU: PR.16500092L

UPC: 680160039531. 11 x 17 inches.

Zion is the third and final installment of a series of works for Wind Ensemble inspired by national parks in the western United States, collectively called Three Places in the West. As in the other two works (The Yellowstone Fires and Arches), it is my intention to convey more an impression of the feelings I've had in Zion National Park in Utah than an attempt at pictorial description. Zion is a place with unrivalled natural grandeur, being a sort of huge box canyon in which the traveler is constantly overwhelmed by towering rock walls on every side of him -- but it is also a place with a human history, having been inhabited by several tribes of native Americans before the arrival of the Mormon settlers in the mid-19th century. By the time the Mormons reached Utah, they had been driven all the way from New York State through Ohio and, with tragic losses, through Missouri. They saw Utah in general as a place nobody wanted, but they were nonetheless determined to keep it to themselves. Although Zion Canyon was never a Mormon Stronghold, the people who reached it and claimed it (and gave it its present name) had been through extreme trials. It is the religious fervor of these persecuted people that I was able to draw upon in creating Zion as a piece of music. There are two quoted hymns in the work: Zion's Walls (which Aaron Copland adapted to his own purposes in both is Old American Songs and the opera The Tender Land) and Zion's Security, which I found in the same volume in which Copland found Zion's Walls -- that inexhaustible storehouse of 19th-century hymnody called The Sacred Harp. My work opens with a three-verse setting of Zion's Security, a stern tune in F-sharp minor which is full of resolve. (The words of this hymn are resolute and strong, rallying the faithful to be firm, and describing the city of our God they hope to establish). This melody alternates with a fanfare tune, whose origins will be revealed in later music, until the second half of the piece begins: a driving rhythmic ostinato based on a 3/4-4/4 alternating meter scheme. This pauses at its height to restate Zion's Security one more time, in a rather obscure setting surrounded by freely shifting patterns in the flutes, clarinets, and percussion -- until the sun warms the ground sufficiently for the second hymn to appear. Zion's Walls is set in 7/8, unlike Copland's 9/8-6/8 meters (the original is quite strange, and doesn't really fit any constant meter), and is introduced by a warm horn solo. The two hymns vie for attention from here to the end of the piece, with the glowingly optimistic Zion's Walls finally achieving prominence. The work ends with a sense of triumph and unbreakable spirit. Zion was commissioned in 1994 by the wind ensembles of the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Oklahoma. It is dedicated to the memory of Aaron Copland.