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The Dawn of the Bicameral Clarinetist

An Anthology of American Solo Clarinet Works from 1968-1979

Gary Dranch clarinet

Frank McCarty composer
Elliott Schwartz composer
Shulamit Ran composer
Larry Nelson composer
Paul Martin Zonn composer
Will Gay Bottje composer
James Drew composer
Jacob Druckman composer
Gerald Plain composer

Release Date: December 6, 2024
Catalog #: NV6693
Format: Digital
20th Century
Solo Instrumental
Clarinet
Electronic

Imagine the clarinet like you’ve never heard it before–elevated by cutting-edge technology and taking flight to new, uncharted frontiers. With THE DAWN OF THE BICAMERAL CLARINETIST, clarinet virtuoso Dr. Gary Dranch offers an extraordinary exploration of the pivotal era between 1968 and 1979, when portable synthesizers first made their way onto the concert stage.

This Navona Records release sheds light on the clarinet’s development in a time shaped by the Space Age, when composers, inspired by technological advances, crafted a unique collaboration between electronic devices and live musicians. The album title reflects this groundbreaking synergy, where the clarinetist merges with the digital realm, leading audiences into strange and beautiful new dimensions.

Featuring rare live recordings and a thrilling fusion of jazz, rock, and classical influences, THE DAWN OF THE BICAMERAL CLARINETIST captures the essence of this transformative period with striking clarity and depth. If your interests lie in the intersection of technology and art, this album is sure to make a positive and enduring impression.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Soundpieces from Scratch (for solo clarinet, 12 pre-recorded clarinets, synthesizer) (1975) Frank McCarty Gary Dranch, clarinet; Frank McCarty, pre-recorded clarinet; Gary Mitro, live sound engineer 16:53
02 Extended Clarinet for Bb clarinet and tape, lights, grand piano (1974) Elliott Schwartz Gary Dranch, clarinet 10:38
03 For an Actor-Monologue for Clarinet (in A) (1978) Shulamit Ran Gary Dranch, clarinet 7:21
04 Music II for Clarinet and Tape (1977) Larry Nelson Gary Dranch, clarinet 10:00
05 Stray Puffs for Clarinet Solo (1968) Paul Martin Zonn Gary Dranch, clarinet 6:01
06 Modalities 2 for Clarinet and Tape (1971) Will Gay Bottje Gary Dranch, clarinet 6:56
07 St. Dennis Variations for Bb Clarinet (1979) James Drew Gary Dranch, clarinet 11:55
08 Animus III (1969) (An Explication) for Bb clarinet and tape Jacob Druckman Gary Dranch, clarinet; Gary Mitro, live sound engineer 15:01
09 Showers of Blessings (1972) Gerald Plain Gary Dranch, clarinet; Gary Mitro, live sound engineer 11:24

Special thanks to David Merrill for analog to digital conversion

Track 1
Recorded live June 12, 1980 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Great Hall, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana IL
Recording Session Producer Scott Wyatt
Consulting Audio Engineers Scott Wyatt, Michael Manion
Recording Technician and Concert Coordinator Gary Mitro

Tracks 2, 4-7
Recorded live February 18, 1982 at the New York University Education Building in New York NY
Recording Session Producer & Engineers: Special thanks to the recording engineers at N.Y.U.

Track 3, 8-9
Recorded live May 3, 1980 in the Music Building Auditorium, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana IL
Recording Session Producer Scott Wyatt
Consulting Audio Engineers Scott Wyatt, Michael Manion

Track 8 & 9
Recording Technician and Concert Coordinator Gary Mitro

Mastering Melanie Montgomery

Executive Producer Bob Lord

VP of A&R Brandon MacNeil
A&R Jeff LeRoy

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Kacie Brown
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Gary Dranch

Clarinetist

Clarinetist Gary Dranch, a specialist in new and contemporary music, obtained his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Performance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981. Dranch has devoted his career to promoting new compositions for clarinet and enlarging its repertoire. As a native New Yorker, Dranch returned home to embark on a freelance career, performing and championing new music compositions with NYU’s Contemporary Players, The New Repertory Ensemble of New York, The American New Music Consortium, The Forum For New Music at NYU, and with North/South Consonance, performing at The Loeb Center, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, and LaMama, among other contemporary new music venues.

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Notes

With all the hoopla over the Artificial Intelligence revolution and its explosive impact on all aspects of human life, including the performing arts, it felt like a good time to pay homage to the prescience of a number of American composers from the 1970s who eagerly exploited a technological revolution that had been a long time in the making. Although experimentalism in music had been foreshadowed by the pioneer works of notables such as Edgar Varese and Iannis Xenakis, the 1970s brought to the concert stage for the first time, portable synthesizers. Composers consciously placed tape-recording machines and playback speakers onstage to literally act as adjunct performers astride their human counterparts. Hence the derivation of the title of this album, by which the clarinetist is seemingly catapulted into a bicameral “mindmeld” state of mind. Augmented with “bionic” technologically-enhanced properties, the clarinetist figuratively transcends earthly boundaries and soars into stratospheric other-worldly realms.

This album stands as a retrospective time-capsule, shining a retrospective light on the explosive and overtly self-consciously controversial experimentalism of the solo clarinet music of this period. The selected works here are representative of the “bicameral” clarinetist, forging new demands on the instrumentalist’s extended skills, such as altissimo register, multiphonic and microtonal fingerings, improvisational and theatrical techniques, collaborations with electro-acoustical sound engineers, and multimedia planners, to name but a few.

— Gary Dranch

Frank McCarty’s Soundpieces exploits all dimensions of the performance space by situating the one live clarinetist in the middle of four loudspeakers from which 12 pre-recorded clarinets (performed in this recording by Frank McCarty) emanate using quadraphonic tape. The clarinetist, equipped with a fifth monaural speaker, “beams” in and out of the matrix, changing his direction to “meet” the sounds as they emerge from the speakers. A unique feature of Soundpieces is the collaborative role of the live sound engineer (Gary Mitro), who in real-time must adjust and balance the quadraphonic tracks in relation to the clarinet’s processed sounds. The processed sounds are created by changing the synthesizer patches. In this recording, a Serge Modular Synthesizer was used.

Although McCarty intended Soundpieces to be a concert piece, he allowed for theatrical elements such as lighting and even projections to be used. This live performance included a multimedia presentation of visual slides, and some of these are included on this album in standalone reproductions. The work is structured into two large sections with a Coda restating earlier ideas. The pitch series makes use of a twelve-tone row rich in tri-chordal formations. The first section ends with a five-part serialization of only three pitches (throat-tones). There is even a squeak on one of these, which is meant to be an inside joke, representing clarinet-class students learning to go across the “break” on the clarinet. The second section begins abstractly but ends with a basic F blues mode. The Coda section features clarinet quotes from the standard literature, and the work concludes with a long retrospective set of improvisational jazz riffs with electronic modification.

— Gary Dranch

Elliott Schwartz conceived of Extended Clarinet as an idiomatic clarinet showpiece, representative of works of the genre that focus on theatrical aspects of musical performance as an integral component of the contemporary concert experience. The new demands on the bicameral clarinetist call for extra musical considerations, such as the theatrical, pantomimed piano cadenza, as well as the lighting strategy adopted during the work. The collaboration of a lighting technician is required for the performance of Extended Clarinet. The visual aspect was a primary concern in the mind of the composer, and every effort was made to exploit this dimension in the live performance situation, along with the spatial consideration of speaker placement for the four-track playback system. The grand piano functions as a prop for the clarinetist, who in acting out his conception of the prima donna piano virtuoso, provides an aural extension for the sound dimension capabilities of the clarinetist. The composer created a pre-recorded four-track tape of sounds utilizing an ElectroComp 2500 Synthesizer, featuring filtered and reverberated clarinet sounds. Sonic materials include quotes from one of Schwartz’s earlier works, Dialogue No. 2, with eclectic piano material fragments derived from Fats Waller and Beethoven. The clarinetist’s extended role calls for slow lyric improvisations from Romantic clarinet literature, in this case the third movement of the Saint Saens Clarinet Sonata. In addition to improvisatory plucked grand piano strings, chords and glissandi, the clarinetist also shouts out nonsensical words, sounds, and literally roars. It’s all meant as tongue-in-cheek comedy, literally forcing the performer out of their shell, thereby poking fun, in a good-natured way, at serious classical performance tradition.

— Gary Dranch

Shulamit Ran was inspired to write an unaccompanied clarinet work due “…in large part to the intensely personal ethos with which the clarinet is associated in my mind.” Regarding the title, For an Actor—Monologue for Clarinet, Ran has written, “To me, the instrument in its contemporary usage suggests an incredible gamut of gestures, dynamics, emotions. Accordingly, in Monologue, the player assumes the role of a virtuoso actor who, by purely musical means, goes through a kind of wordless ‘monodrama’.” The form of Monologue is analogous to the Sonata form with a double-exposition, a development section with cadenza (where multiphonics are used), and a coda, echoing the opening materials. The cadenza merges into a section Ran defines as development-disintegration. Speaking of this, she writes: “I have thought of this section in an explicitly dramatic sense as the section where our ‘actor’ breaks loose, literally conveying an image of working himself into a great frenzy (of course he needs to be perfectly in control in order for the sense of being out of control to really work).” The composer has supplied various acting prompts in the score such as, “Sneaking,” “Stubborn,” “Scream,” and “Drawback for ‘last encounter.’” The bicameral clarinetist’s new demands include compiling a list of theatrical gestures for Monologue, including spatial clarinet bell and other pantomimed gestures, that transcend a purely traditional approach to interpreting and rendering a contemporary score.

— Gary Dranch

Larry Nelson wrote Music II during his tenure at West Chester State College where he was the director of the experimental music studio. He studied with Will Jay Bottje at Southern Illinois University (featured on track six of this anthology). The clarinet and tape are like two equal partners, each with their own cadenza-soliloquy sections. When clarinet and tape sound together, the clarinetist must blend and harmonize with the tape sound medium. As a result of conforming, the clarinet sound loses its individuality, sounding less like a conventional instrument and more like a live extension of the electronic tape and natural “concrete” sounds. The extensive use of multiphonic leitmotifs help create an ‘other-worldly’ quality to the clarinet sounds. In the middle section of the work there is a canon where the rhythmic challenge for the player is to uncover the “uhr” — the macro-pulse that lends solidity and precision to the clarinet entrances. The key to successful performer-composer collaborations is trusting in the composer’s intentionality. The task consists in searching for the set of tones, such that the end product is what the composer intended. As the clarinet sounds the work’s melodic motif a cappella, Music II concludes on the clarinet’s lowest note in a sigh of resignation.

— Gary Dranch

Stray Puffs (1968), the earliest work in this anthology, was composed by the performer’s thesis advisor and musical mentor, the composer, conductor, and clarinetist Paul Martin Zonn. This unaccompanied work for clarinet was composed during the composer’s tenure at Grinnell College, Iowa. Zonn was highly regarded as an authority in the performance of contemporary clarinet music. I am personally indebted to him for inspiring me to become a new music clarinet specialist. Under his tutelage, I acquired the skills required to perform these works. Zonn wrote with regards to his compositions: “I try to bind together the many languages of today’s music with a common syntax. Oftentimes my jazz background will influence the rhythmic details of a 12-tone passage or the melodic portioning of the Set. And it seems quite natural to me to contrast serially controlled material with an improvised or at least partially free section. I am not as concerned with formulations and formulas as I am with the interactions of line and density, and shape and expansion of my chosen material.” This jazz-inspired composition is replete with rhythmic complexity: additive rhythms, half-note triplets in 4/4 time, and disjunct 12-tone melodic lines. There are ample extended techniques: altissimo b-natural4, double-stops, flutter-tongue, and wide dynamic-range notes juxtaposed one-against-another. The bicameral clarinetist must reach for a subtle jazz-inflected style such that the work takes on an improvisatory style where one is less concerned about the mechanics of it all, but more immersed into its substance.

— Gary Dranch

Will Jay Bottje composed Modalities 2 in 1971 during his tenure at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale IL. He had recently founded the university’s first electronic music studio there in 1965. He studied composition with Vittorio Giannini at Juilliard, and also established himself as a flutist. He went on to receive a Fulbright scholarship and studied with Henk Badings at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He received the first Doctoral of Musical Studies degree to be awarded in the United States, and the first from the Eastman School of Music in 1965. He studied composition with Bernard Rodgers and Howard Hanson. Bottje wrote prolifically in the electronic music medium, and his compositions are characteristically dissonantly explosive and experimentally avant-garde in nature. Modalities 2 begins with a tonal-sounding romantic song, marked “easy going style” in the score. The electronic tape accompaniment provides what may be interpreted as sporadic commentary, but it seems disconnected and apart from the clarinet line. The two voices begin to interact, but then they seem to pull apart, as if there is some entropy at work. The clarinet voice, in an attempt at coexistence, tries again to recapture the original mood of insouciance at the work’s departure, but is seemingly thrown off balance by the raucous accompaniment. In a sudden state of acceptance, the clarinet intones a new march-like theme, with strong rhythmic support from the electronic tape. Spurred on by the accompaniment, the clarinetist attempts to show-off and outdo his partner by spinning out faster and more elaborate variations based on the march-like theme. Each time the accompaniment doubles up the tempo and spurs the clarinet solo to even more frenzied and competitively outlandish flourishes. It is as if the clarinetist is in the throes of a “deadly embrace,” and much like Vicky in “The Red Shoes” is doomed to self-destruction. For the final improvised section of the work, Bottje instructs the bicameral clarinetist: “Some sort of reaction with the tape would be excellent but should not be considered essential. Perhaps something close to wild “jazz” licks or the style that might be called ‘a la Coltrane’ would be in order.” In the final analysis, as we have seen time-and-time again, in a contest between man and machine, it is the human who must humbly bow down before technological supremacy.

— Gary Dranch

St. Dennis Variations by James Mulcro Drew is the most recently composed work in this anthology set. Drew attended the New York School of Music and studied with Riegger and Varese. He obtained a Master of Arts degree from Tulane University in 1964. He has held composition teaching positions at Northwestern, Yale, among others, and held several music director positions with theater groups and ensembles. St. Dennis Variations, a solo unaccompanied work for clarinet, is written in the Neo-Medieval style, and as such, is grounded in tradition. It draws its inspiration from the early polyphonic music of the 12th–13th Century Notre-Dame School in Paris, France. It pays homage to St. Denis (Dennis in the anglicized spelling) who was Bishop of Paris, a martyr, and Patron Saint of France. The florid musical lines in the St. Dennis Variations evoke the polyphonic organum of Léonin and the Magnus Liber, as well as that of his successor Pérotin. Notable in those composers’ work are the clausulae — the melismatic portions of the Gregorian Chant. The St. Dennis Variations contrast melismatic musical embellished passages in the style of the Alleluia with the major prolations of the cantus firmus. The bicameral clarinetist’s challenge is to strategically conceptualize the structure of the entire work in terms of its large sections (variations), as if strung together like a through-composed mosaic. Each large section consists of alternating fast melismatic passages (intoned wordless organum) that contrast with Gregorian Chant cantus tones that trail away. The performance challenge is to maximize the effect of the micro and macro phrasing throughout the work, striving for an agile, restrained meditative inner quality, combined with the athleticism and endurance of a long-distance marathon.

— Gary Dranch

Animus III was composed September 1969 in New York and Paris and is the third in a series of Animus compositions Jacob Druckman composed for live instrumentalist and electronic tape. Subtitled “An Explication for Bb clarinet and tape,” the work is conceived as a theatrical work which focuses on musicians and their virtuosity. The theme of Animus III is an exploration between man and machine and the inevitable competition-clash resulting from this association. The bicameral clarinetist’s role in Animus III is to assume the role of a stereo-typical prima donna virtuoso who believes in his glib virtuosity as the source of his strength. During the course of the work, the clarinetist is required to deliver a “Ted TALK” on the esoteric subject of crossing “the break” on the clarinet. But soon, when pitted against the relentless insensitivity of the electronically-generated sounds, the clarinetist experiences a gradual progression toward cynicism, devolving into mindlessness and a full-blown onstage nervous breakdown. Druckman views the electronic equipment as an essential part of the theater he is creating. He prescribes that “All of this machinery should be on stage, in no way disguised. The ambiance should be that of a workshop rather than a concert. Wires and machines exposed in their disorder will help.” The clarinets sounds are modified through the use of a microphone connected to a reverberation unit (echo patch), which in this recording was a tape machine operated by live sound engineer Gary Mitro. These sounds enable the clarinetist to move in and out of the electronic sphere. Druckman states, “In this way the tape and the live player can approach each other, even crossing to opposite sides of the real/electronic gamut.” During a long tape “solo” section, the bicameral clarinetist will work out a list of theatrical elements and pantomimed reactions to the electronic sounds. These include “geese-hunting” (aiming the clarinet like a musket pointed into the air and pulling the “trigger” in reaction to some explosive sounds on the tape), and putting the clarinet barrel into one ear and the rest of the clarinet in the other ear, while listening to the reverberated sounds through the tubes. By the end of the work, the madness is complete, and the clarinetist hurls his angry low “f-epithets” at the speaker, quickly leaving the stage with a slam of the door.

— Gary Dranch

Showers of Blessings was composed by Gerald Plain in Lubbock TX in January 1972. The electronic tape part was realized in the electronic music studio of the University of Michigan and in the composer’s independent studio. Showers of Blessings requires that the bicameral clarinetist collaborate with a live sound engineer, who controls the sound-level relationship of the three-way speaker mixture (live-processed clarinet plus tape-playback with parallel speaker-coupling). The live sound engineer also changes the patches on the [Putney VCS-3] Synthesizer for the clarinet’s reverberation and ring-modulation. In this recording, the live sound engineer role was fulfilled by Gary Mitro. Showers of Blessings is an ecclesiastical musical composition, presenting in almost stream-of-consciousness style, many diverse musical forms. When taken as a whole, they form a kind of American “pastiche.” The title of this work is the name of a 19th-century American Protestant hymnal, whose evocative strains (heard by Plain as a young child) are contrasted with elements of Jazz, Rock-n-Roll, concrete environmental sounds (eg. childrens’ voices, motors, sirens), as well as electronically-generated material. Showers of Blessings makes extensive technical demands on the clarinetist, requiring a virtuosic command of extended contemporary clarinet techniques. These include: half-tone slides, multiple sonorities, long glissandi, and playing-while-humming. The novel if not brutal clarinet sounds have been carefully chosen by Plain to complement the mechanical and electronic sounds utilized in this composition. This serves to preserve a timbral sense of unity and equilibrium. Showers of Blessings is an exemplary work pointing to a prophetic new style of composition involving clarinet and electronic tape.

— Gary Dranch