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Three Meditations for Clarinet and Piano (2007)
B-flat clarinet and Piano
Approximately 11 minutes
This piece was written for Richard Stoltzman, who will record it for MMC Recordings in August of 2007.

1. All you grasp will be thrown away...
MP3 (Excerpt 1)

2. ...and here I sit unmoved.
MP3 (Excerpt 2)

3. I'm the clumsy one, out of place.
MP3 (Excerpt 3)

Excerpts from a live recording of the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble’s premiere performance of Three Meditations in May of 2007. Performed by Katherine Szadziewicz, clarinet and Jakob Scholbach, piano.

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This piece was strongly influenced by the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, specifically her 1998 "rendition" (she doesn’t use the word translation) of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. I have set Le Guin’s texts before, and each time I use them I find a resource full of interesting language and layered meaning that is a goldmine for me as a composer. This case was different in the sense that I was not setting her texts, but instead using her interpretation of the Tao Te Ching to guide each movement’s overall intent. In essence, it is a rendition of a rendition. All three titles are taken from her book.

Three Meditations was written for Richard Stoltzman. We spoke about the piece before I started writing, and something he said about playing with the same emotional context as a human voice stuck with me. He talked of music that spoke in a way "that words are superfluous." It was an engaging thought. Throughout the piece I had a mental image of the clarinet as a human voice clearly in my mind, though a voice unencumbered by issues of phonetics and language, and certainly with a wider range.

The first movement, All you grasp will be thrown away..., pits the clarinet squarely on the other side of a disagreement with the piano. This idea of conflicting voices has been appearing more frequently in my recent work. In this case the piano is doggedly refusing to allow the clarinet to influence the piano’s course, as indicated by the ever-present rising whole tone scale, spanning from the very bottom of the piano’s range to the very top. However, the piano certainly does react to the clarinet’s ever-more-desperate attempts to be heard. The clarinet, eventually, gives up in an irritated quarter-tone, and has departed the scene before the piano, miraculously, changes scale at the very last measure.

The second and third movements’ titles are taken from the same LeGuin/Lao Tzu text. They are different approaches to similar themes. The second movement’s title comes in the following context:

       "Everybody’s cheerful,
       cheerful as if at a party,
       or climbing a tower in springtime.
       And here I sit unmoved…"

And the third:

       "Everybody has something to do.
       I’m the clumsy one, out of place.
       I’m the different one…"

For me, being a composer in a city like Los Angeles is a deeply conflictive state. On the one hand, there is so much happening here and I am constantly surrounded by activity and too many exciting things to ever be able to experience them all. On the other, my work actually involves me being home alone most of the day, working privately and quietly. Sometimes the shock of going from a day of working hard on a piece to being surrounded by people at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, only 10 minutes away from my home, can be quite overwhelming. In these two final movements, I try to capture some part of that conflict, where I am surrounded by all this activity, and yet somehow I don’t feel like I fit in. But, the beauty of Los Angeles is that nobody asks you to.

Richard Stoltzman will record Three Meditations for MMC Recordings later this year.

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