Morton Subotnick, "Passages of the Beast"
Notes from Owl Recordings OWL-30:
mp3
PASSAGES OF THE BEAST (1978) 19:36 (Theodore Presser, ASCAP)
1. Before Dawn; Awakening
2. Night Song; Dance of Emergence
The composer supervised and mixed this premiere recording. The work, for clarinet and an electronic ghost score, was commissioned by the International Clarinet Society. Ramon Kireilis premiered the work at the 1978 International Clarinet Clinic held at the University of Toronto, Canada.
MORTON SUBOTNICK (b. 1933) has been acknowledged for over fifteen years as a pioneer in composing with electronics, beginning with several purely electronic works created expressly for the record medium. The first of these was Silver Apples of the Moon (1967); others include The Wild Bull (1968), Sidewinder (1971), 4 Butterflies (1973), and Until Spring (1975). Subotnick then began to explore the relationship between performers and technology in a series of "ghost" pieces for instruments and interactive electronics. In these compositions, the ghost score is a silent digital program which activates electronic modules to modify the instrumental sounds with regard to pitch, timbre, volume, and location of the sounds. Each work has its own digital program which controls a standardized ghost box. The ghost electronics were designed by Donald Buchla and built by John Payne according to the composer's specifications; funding was provided by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. There are fourteen ghost works (composed between 1977 and 1983), and, at present, Subotnick feels he has finished this series. While the ghost pieces have used electronics to modify instrumental sounds, it appears Subotnick's next compositional period will involve having instruments control computer generated sounds. Ascent into Air (1981) is the first work drawing on this new approach.
Subotnick attended the University of Denver and Mills College, studying under Leon Kirchner and Darius Milhaud. Currently on the faculty of The California Institute of the Arts, he has also been a visiting professor in composition at the University of Maryland, University of Pittsburgh, and Yale University. Among Subotnick's numerous grants and awards are three from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Composer Award. Nearly all of his major works involving electronics have been recorded, mainly with Nonesuch and Columbia. Subotnick states:
"The title Passages of the Beast refers to the rites of passage, of beastness to humanness, the passion of the beast and human awareness joined. The clarinet is treated as both a very old instrument (through a series of invented fingerings to get some of the non-diatonic qualities back into the technique) and a modern instrument, paralleling, more or less, the transition or passages from beast to human. The almost programmatic quality of the work is in keeping with the mainstream of my work for more than a decade. Passages, in particular, deals metaphorically with the evolution of the human spirit, and was one of a group of works which led up to the final (as of this writing) piece in the series, The Double Life of Amphibians, ' a ninety minute staged tone poem which received its world premiere at the 1984 Olympics Arts Festival in Los Angeles."
Ramon Kireilis has been extensively involved with new music for clarinet for many years. He has premiered several works, some of which have been written for him; these composers include Morton Subotnick, Milos Stedron, Normand Lockwood, and Marvin Feinsmith. Since 1973, Kireilis has been a principal guiding force in the International Clarinet Society, a group that not only holds an annual composition contest, but also commissions new works. Subotnick's Passages of the Beast, premiered by Kireilis, resulted from one of these commissions. Kireilis received his bachelor's and master's degrees from North Texas State University, and his doctorate from the University of Michigan. He has taught at the University of Denver since 1967. Performing regularly as a soloist throughout Colorado as well as making numerous European appearances, Ramon Kireilis has also recorded clarinet quintets by Arthur Bliss and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor on Spectrum.
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