Extended techniques for clarinet

The Portuguese language version of this book chapter has just been published, edited by Ângelo Martigo and Ana Telles, Musica Instrumentalis: Experimentação e téchnicas não convencionais nos séculos XX e XXI, Edições Húmus, 2019.

This is a very slightly amended version of the book chapter for this website.

The British oboist Christopher Redgate, discussing his newly designed oboe (made by Howarth of London in 2011), writes the following about new sounds and extended techniques, ‘the technical demands can be extreme, sometimes approaching the unplayable and the resulting works have influenced performance practice, expanding the potential of the instrument, and redefining and developing new technical realms’ (Clarke and Doffman, 2017, pp.142-143). Redgate talks about players ‘finding solutions’ (ibid., p. 143) and when he calls something ‘unplayable’ he is referring to traditionally notated music, the music of the so-called ‘new complexity’ school of composers: for example the solo works for flute, bass clarinet and piano by Brian Ferneyhough all written during the 1970s. Finding solutions is something players have been doing for quite a long time, at least since the eighteenth century. Louis Spohr’s (1784-1859) clarinet concertos required his favourite player Simon Hermstedt (1778-1846) to add keys to his instrument to execute certain otherwise unplayable passages. Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) might be the first major composer to use multiphonics at the end of the cadenza in his Concertino Op. 45 (1806, rev. 1815) for French horn: this is two-part writing, playing and singing, rather than multiphonics as such, but a third harmonic often results. Composer and bassoonist Franz Anton Pfeiffer (1752-87), writing for the bassoon, was noted for a kind of three-part harmony, a similar effect using the voice.

I first wrote about extended techniques for clarinet over twenty-five years ago (Heaton, 1995) stating then that none of this was new and that in the intervening years nothing had changed in music performance; similarly since then up to today, apart from digital technology. What has changed thouigh is that players have developed technically across all musical styles but particularly in the areas of period instrument performance and contemporary art music. By way of example in the clarinet repertory Maxwell Davies’ Hymnos, written in 1967, was considered at the edge of possibility, with its high E flat at the end that is, in theory, off the range of the instrument, but this piece is now performed by quite a few players including postgraduate conservatoire students. More recently Magnus Lindberg’s Clarinet Concerto (2002) is highly virtuosic, using some ‘new’ techniques whilst being in an accessibly lyrical yet contemporary style, and is popular among many younger players. Other examples of ‘impossibility’ are a number of pieces by Vinko Globokar from the 1970s for clarinet, bass and contrabass clarinets as well as trombone pieces for himself to play. These are unplayable only in the sense that he asks for the performer to do a number of things simultaneously. Voix Instrumentalisée (1973) for bass clarinet without the mouthpiece requires vocalising together with pitched notes and lip glissandi (using a trombone embouchure), percussive effects with fingers on the keys, playing on the in-breath, circular breathing and so on, a combination of which, unlike Ferneyhough’s music, are sometimes physically impossible to produce. It is the tension and drama in the performer’s act of trying that is as much part of the musical intention as any kind of accuracy.

The idea of the unplayable and the unpredictable is also largely the problem concerned with microtonal writing, particularly for instruments that are not designed to play them, hence Redgate’s recent re-invention of the microtonal oboe. But this is also not new: the first quarter-tone clarinet, for example, appeared in 1900 but was hardly used, and yet there is a large and growing repertory of works for the traditional clarinet and bass clarinet using microtones. The point here is that all of the experimentation across all instruments that resulted in music using ‘extended techniques’ comes from the period after the Second War during the three decades up to the mid 1980s. The resulting music is (almost) entirely in the modernist, atonal style which began with the last movement of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet of 1908. Instrumental experimentation is embedded in modernism and its language of free atonality. The life of these new sounds depends on the modernist tradition of post-serialist composers associated, at its beginnings, with the Darmstadt summer courses (Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ligeti and others) and the influence of electronic music beginning in radio studios in Germany and some American university music departments, reaching its stylistic peak, one might say, in the work of Ferneyhough and Elliott Carter in the 1980s.

This is not to say that there were not earlier experiments: Satie and particularly Henry Cowell were exploring the inside of the piano from 1913 onwards and growling and singing down saxophones and trombones could be heard in the Duke Ellington bands of the 1920s and 30s. The first important piece for solo clarinet that uses techniques that are ‘new’ is Alban Berg’s Vier Stücke Op. 5 with piano, written in 1913 after a period of formal composition lessons that Berg had with Schoenberg. The pieces were not performed until 1919, the year Stravinsky composed the Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet which are still the most played and well-known solo pieces in the clarinet repertoire. Berg’s Op. 5 uses extremes of dynamic, particularly the effective use of echoton and flatterzunge. These are also used in ensemble and orchestral works of the period, for example Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire of 1912.

But the catalyst for ‘extended technique’ for woodwind instruments comes later after the war with Luciano Berio’s Sequenza I for flute written for Severino Gazzeloni in 1958, which contains a single multiphonic in the central section of the piece. Whilst rehearsing and collaborating with Luigi Nono in Rome in the early 1960s towards a performance of A Floresta é jovem e cheja de vide (completed 1965-6, a large-scale work for four voices, tape and solo clarinet) the great American classical and jazz clarinettist William O. Smith was exploring multiphonics, influenced by the Sequenza. One of Smith’s early compositions from this time was Variants (1963, published by Universal Edition), a piece for solo clarinet in six short movements which contains a wide range of new techniques and remains one of the best and most useful introductions to extended techniques despite its age. Italy seems to have been an important centre for exploratory work at this time: the composer Bruno Bartolozzi’s pioneering treatise New Sounds for Woodwind (which appeared first in English in 1967) was an early attempt to systematise and notate multiphonics, microtones and colour trills (different fingerings for the same pitch, a kind of bisbigliando) which Bartolozzi had worked on with orchestral players in Milan and Florence (he worked with clarinettist Detalmo Corneti, principal of the Maggio Musicale Orchestra) in the early 1960s. This research was continued by clarinettist Giuseppe Garborino whose own excellent treatise appeared in 1978.

After the Second War there are a number of significant differences and changes to the composer/performer relationship in the twentieth century. What might be seen as new are composers writing for particular players and specialist ensembles with talents in technical and sonic experimentation, musicians excited by the possibilities of their instruments beyond accepted idiomatic writing. These are players whose technical 'toolbox’, or ‘box of tricks’ as Ferneyhough has called it (Boros and Toop, 1998, p.370), goes beyond the all-pervading eighteenth and nineteenth century music (with some Prokofiev, Bartók or Shostakovich and other earlier twentieth century classics) which still seem to dominate concert programmes even today (see Heaton 2012 for a fuller discussion).

This new relationship with technique, players and composers, composers and players, allows for works to be created that exist in a dimension apart from the concerns of traditional sound production and idiomatic writing. Here the phenomenon of the specialist has developed further, not far removed from the Romantic nineteenth century composer/performer travelling showman, certainly with the technique to cope with the new demands but also a musical personality where the music is often crafted to the strengths and the mannerisms of that performer: players and singers such as Cathy Berberian, Jane Manning, Harry Sparnaay, Irvine Arditti, Pierre Yves Artaud, Heinz Holliger and Vinko Globokar are instantly recognisable as are pianist/composers such as Frederic Rzewski. Certain players have a curiously powerful and individual way of delivering material which almost appropriates the music for their own purpose, they create themselves in the music, project a style of approach which can develop into something more tangible as composers write in ways which assume their performance styles thereby creating a performance practice, a tradition.

One such powerful musical personality was the British clarinettist Alan Hacker (1938-2012). Hacker’s energy, imagination and extraordinarily individual technique resulted in many commissions and a handful of these remain among the best solo works in the repertory: Hymnos mentioned above, Harrison Birtwistle’s Linoi (1969), the concerto Melencolia I (1976), the Clarinet Quintet (1980) and Nenia on the Death of Orpheus (1970) with soprano, two other clarinets and percussion which has a powerful solo at its climax. Bruno Bartolozzi’s Collage (1973) for solo clarinet was dedicated to Hacker. During the same period other solo players were commissioning and playing new work: the Germans Hans Deinzer (b.1934) and Eduard Brunner (1939-2017), Swiss player Hans Rudolf Stalder (1930-2017) and British clarinettist Antony Pay (b.1945). What is interesting is that all of them (apart from Brunner, I think) were involved with the period instrument movement playing boxwood instruments including playing and recording the Mozart Concerto on specially made basset clarinets, both modern and boxwood, before these started to be commercially made by the major companies.

Deinzer gave the first performance of one of the most important works for clarinet of the twentieth century: Pierre Boulez’s Domaines (1961-2). Domaines (Areas/Domaines) was originally written as a work for solo clarinet but later, whilst retaining the solo part exactly, six small instrumental ensembles were added to each of the soloist’s six cahiers or pages. The work was started during 1960 and completed in 1968, though some ideas were sketched earlier. The piece, as is typical with Boulez, had a long period of composition. The first ideas were in 1959 when it had the provisional title Concert or Labyrinthe and the idea of ‘six-ness’ and spatial distribution of players was there from the start. The Sacher Stiftung in Basel has in its archive a single sheet of hotel note paper dated 9 April 1959 with notes written on the back. The page lists ensembles of instruments, many of which will appear in the ensemble version of Domaines, and a star drawing with five ensembles at the five star points with the conductor and audience in the centre. It seems that an ensemble piece was conceived from the start rather than a solo. During the early 1960s Boulez was working on a theatre piece, a kind of opera provisionally entitled Marges (margin, marginalia) which he never completed, and a short Cantata for baritone and small instrumental group. The cantata was to be premiered in the concert series in Ulm, Germany, in September 1968 but Domaines was substituted at the last minute played by Deinzer. The sketches show that much of the Domaines material relates to the Cantata and Marges with some of the solo clarinet lines in sketch form having text by e e cummings underlayed. Deinzer, in conversation, told me that he received pages of score every few days before the first performance, all un-transposed, and this was the score he played from. Domaines in both solo version and the one with six instrumental groups Boulez has always considered unfinished or in the process of revision. The first performance of the ensemble version took place in Brussels in 1968 played by Walter Boeykens and members of the Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of the composer. After Deinzer first performed the solo version in Ulm Boulez requested that he did not play it again until revisions were complete, which never happened. A kind of ‘revision’ is the piece for clarinet and electronics Dialogue de l’ombre double (1982-85), written for Alain Damiens (b.1950) the clarinettist of Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain, which takes material from the ensemble music of Domaines but not from the solo part. Universal Edition published the solo part in 1970.

Domaines is all about the number six: six cahiers original, six miroir (almost the exact retrograde of the material) and six fragments of material on each page. The piece is serial in that rather opaque Boulezian way, but based on six pitches. The sketches, however show integral serialist techniques: 12x12 matrices for rhythm and dynamics and a hierarchical structuring of material often using three different colours. The sketches and first drafts clearly show that the pitch, rhythm and even articulation are present in early versions, dynamics appear later and all the ‘extended techniques’ only appear in the final drafts. Domaines is also all about colour and about the clarinet - there is no question that this is a clarinet piece. The notation demands a different and careful approach from the player where, rather than simply being concerned with the mechanics of notes and rhythms, there is an immediate concern with colour - the player explores each fragment and carefully places it in space judging continuity and pauses between fragments and, in the solo version, pages. In my clarinet lessons on the piece with Deinzer at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1980 he talked about the ‘phrasing’ and the way in which the musical materials of the fragments determined the pauses or lack of pauses between them. Domaines may be fragmentary music but it is not pointilliste in that there is always a sense of the larger structure, the way in which the player travels from material to material and from page to page giving a sense of expressive and coherent continuity. The notation begins to look like the music sounds in the groupings and the placing/spacing on the page but more significantly requires the player to 'interpret' in the relative freedom of expressive timing and placing. It is the radical nature of this notation in Boulez (and other composers in the complex modernist tradition, as well as others using different non-traditional symbols) which militates against the lazy employment of tradition or ingrained ‘musicality’ and by its very nature asks of performers an interpretation without preconceptions, without history or tradition but simply in response to the text.

I have spent some time here describing Domaines because it represents for me one of the pinnacles of twentieth century composition for the clarinet by a major composer. What is important is that the extended techniques are fully integrated into the music, they are the music, and necessary for the work’s expression and style rather than some virtuoso gimmicks appended in a cadenza-like section. Of the techniques most commonly used, extreme register, extreme dynamics, fluttertongue, vocalisation, air sounds, glissandi, pitch bends, variable vibrato and key clicks are all now considered part of the clarinettist’s basic technical requirements. The two areas still considered slightly outside of traditional technique are multiphonics and microtones.

Microtones have an honourable history: Wyschnegradsky, Alois Hába, Ives and others together with, in the early days, the invention and modification of instruments to perform this music. These instruments (apart from Redgate’s oboe) are now in the museum and all microtonal music is written for standard orchestral instruments without modifications. There are a number of compositional approaches that result in these microtones being perceived in different ways. When played at great speed they are almost impossible to hear, when played slower they often, particularly in string playing, sound like poor intonation and are more successful in the woodwind with specific fingerings for quite accurate tuning. When played slowly they can be clearly heard as either inflections or bends (in much Japanese new music, in shakuhachi influenced flute music, or in Xenakis), or as specifically tuned pitches. In post-serial music of the complex school the intention is a natural and further saturation of the chromatic scale, where the notes between the semitones are heard as new pitches within, for example, a twenty-four note scale. The problems occur when pitches do not move stepwise facilitating a linear, contrapuntal style where microtones add to the expansion and expressiveness of the melodic line (and thereby allowing for perceptual 'goodness' because one can hear them against the stable pitches). If the music jumps in larger intervals, fourths or greater, the effect is of poor tuning.

Some composers devise new modes/scales using microtones which arise naturally out of the material (much more successful from the player's point of view) and what often results here is a music which is unafraid to mix dissonance (verging on noise) and consonance where the use of a consonant sonority, because of its context and how the music arrives at it, functions as just another sound or perhaps a resolution of more complex colours onto a primary one - what does not happen is the listener's sharp intake of breath on hearing a major triad, a reminiscence of tonality, out of context.

Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988) was doing this in the 1960s. After being a recluse for much of his life he seemed to be rediscovered in Darmstadt during his last decade, and his pieces hovering microtonally around a single pitch are now quite well known. Of the clarinet works the two that are most impressive are the simple, short Ixor (1956) a lyrical, gentle piece in an improvisatory style with a number of quarter-tones, and the concerto Kya (1959) in three movements, orientally inspired with a finale that displays a rustic folk-like quality.

Apart from the ‘complex’ school the most successful use of microtones is in the work of the predominantly French ‘spectral’ composers, a term originating from Hughes Dufourt and centred mostly on Paris, which emerged in the early 1970s led by Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey. Its approach and aesthetic was markedly different from the then prevailing styles and while influenced by electronic music it strove rather to explore a different world of texture and sound exploration using traditional instruments and sometimes live electronic treatments. This music is organic in the truest sense, based on the analysis and reproduction of natural sounds, the harmonic spectrum, as well as notes themselves (like Scelsi or later Radulescu), getting inside the notes, dealing with sound's density and grittiness. Instruments have particular characteristics in different registers. The clarinet's low notes are rich in upper partials which can be highlighted by 'splitting' the note with the embouchure to reveal and simultaneously play some of the partials of the fundamental (a rough type of multiphonic). The higher the pitch the fewer the partials resulting in increased thinness of tone. There are a considerable number of new compositional techniques here, but most seem to involve the reproduction of timbres analysed spectrographically: Grisey's Partiels (1975) takes as its starting point the sonogram analysis of a trombone's low pedal E.

Despite the differences between them, these composers' fundamental interest is in the manipulation of sound for sound's sake, influenced by acoustics and psychoacoustics: frequency as given in Hertz rather than pitch resulting from the division of the tempered scale into microtonal steps. Taking the range of composed music the lowest note might be A0 (27.5Hz), the highest A7 (3520Hz) or the C above that 4186Hz. What is more difficult is to map these precise frequencies onto instruments designed for equal-temperament. What results is an approximation using quarter, eighth and sixteenth tone notation, incorporating a certain amount of effort on the player's part to reproduce these with any accuracy. But the sounds, and their inherent natural expressiveness are often very beautiful. Horatiu Radulescu (1942-2008), however has stated on many occasions that he was the originator of spectral composition in 1969, though he does give a nod to Stockhausen’s Stimmung of the year before. Before defecting to the West, to Paris, in 1969 he had already had the idea and was planning a piece called Credo op. 10 for nine cellos which he claimed was the first spectral composition – the piece is made entirely from the upper partials of a low C fundamental going up to the 45th harmonic. He uses particular instrumental techniques for strings to animate the music, for example very fast flautando either sul tasto or ponticello. These kinds of techniques, the way in which he can access the high partials of the spectrum, he transfers to other instruments and are part of the clarinet piece The Inner Time as well as many ensemble works.

The Inner Time (1983) is, perhaps, the most successful and certainly the most radical and extreme of microtonal and multiphonic works for clarinet. The piece lasts twenty-eight minutes using only multiphonics, harmonics and what Radulescu calls 'yellow tremoli' - following exact rhythmic patterns (pulsing, trills on one note, colour trills). Multiphonics in this piece are where notes are split apart and the harmonics explored individually then built and layered on top of each other. The material is a selection of partials of a low G fundamental: partials 6,7,8,9,10,11 then every odd partial up to the 83rd. The piece hovers mainly in the upper partials and the higher one plays on the clarinet the more exact the player can be in tuning the microtones.

Multiphonics for woodwind instruments have been explored in some detail over the years and there are now many good and useful treatises. Rehfeldt’s book of 1976 (rev. 1994) is still a reliable guide. More recent practical resources for fingerings and technical help come from the British players Heather Roche (website resource) and specifically for bass clarinet Sarah Watt’s book (2015) based on her doctoral research. There are two types: those produced by splitting a fundamental or a lower harmonic by altering the embouchure (this is the main technique used throughout Radulescu’s piece discussed above) and those with specific fingerings documented in detail in the various treatises. Technically the issue here is one of breath control: the balancing of the multiple tones, particularly lowest and highest, so all voices are balanced equally where possible.

For performers experimentation is over and the instruments have not changed because of it. The great melting pot of style and exploration that was the twentieth century has given us, and continues to reveal, a wealth of work that is rewarding and sometimes frustrating. In the current period of stylistic pluralism and flux, with a current emphasis on tonality and lyricism, trends and fashions will come and go but committed players will always be busy exploring the recent past and looking to the future.

References

Bartolozzi, B. (1982). New Sounds for Woodwind. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boros, J., Toop, R. (eds). (1998). Brian Ferneyhough Collected Writings. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Clarke, E. F., Doffman, M. (2017). Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garborino, G. (1978). Metodo per Clarinetto. Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni.

Heather Roche clarinettist (2020). Available at: <https://heatherroche.net> Accessed 30 March 2020.

Heaton. R. (1995). ‘The Contemporary Clarinet’. In: Lawson, C., ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 163-183.

Heaton, R. (2012). ‘Performance in the Twentieth Century’. in Lawson, C. and Stowell, R. The Cambridge History of Musical Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 778-797.

Rehfeldt, P. (1976 rev. 1994). New Directions for Clarinet. Scarecrow: Metuchen, New Jersey.

Watts, S. (2015) Spectral Immersions: A Comprehensive Guide to the Theory and Practice of Bass Clarinet Multiphonics. Metropolis Music Publishers: Ruisbroek, Belguim.