‘Sonorous Body’, a composition that is brought to life by the wild adventures of the solo clarinet. Physiology meets soul and tone meets color as the piece ends in consummate splendor. Raul D’Gama Rose, All About Jazz
‘Wild adventures of the solo clarinet’ – I like to think of instruments as personages in some way – characters with an inner life that cannot be completely tamed by either composer or performer. Try as we might, sometimes that wildness just comes through in an uncontrolled squawk in concert or in an inexplicable silence that just appears in the score as one is writing.
Sonorous Body, my work from 2008 for solo clarinet has been released by Hat Hut Records on a compilation disc. This is the second disc of mine with both Hat Hut and the Ensemble für neue musik Zürich who released a portrait disc The Heart’s Ear [Hat(now) Art 148] in 2002. Sonorous Body was written as part of the installation work TON and also refers to some aspects of my opera The Navigator. The piece might be described as an experience of shifting perspectives between a far horizon and an intimate nearness.
The title comes from part of Patricia Sykes’ libretto for The Navigator: ‘Horizon and water/could never be lovers/ horizon adores only distance / sonorous water/ searching for its sonorous body.’ The clarinettist Manfred Spitaler gives a wonderfully textured and nuanced account.
Women Composers I, Hat(now) Art 164. works by Katharina Rosenberger, Ada Gentile, Carmen Maria Cârneci, Liza Lim and Noriko Hisada. Ensemble für neue musik Zürich.
Liza Lim 