Basset horn & live electronics: Electroclarinet 3

During my guest talk on Music & digital art, I premièred Electroclarinet 3, a new composition for basset horn & live sound processing.

The piece is an homage to Carl Maria von Weber, who composed lots of great music for clarinet. The theme, which manuscript you can see above, was inspired by the theme from Weber's Opus 33 (7 variations for clarinet & piano).
At a larger scale, the form draws on Weber's composition as well:

• Theme
• Four parts corresponding to the Variation III (Adagio) of the Opus 33
• Coda referencing the Opus 33's final seven measures

I couldn't resist including a "WEBER" series of notes:

• W  Mi / E
• E   Mi bémol / Eb
• B   Si bémol / Bb
• E   Mi bémol / Eb
• R   Ré / D

In the coda, these notes are transposed for the basset-horn:

Spectral music in Boston

Yesterday, the Boston Musical Intelligencer published an interview of Joshua Fineberg by composer David Dominique.

I was lucky to work with Joshua Fineberg during my time at the Harvard Music Department. He was a great tutor when I was writing the article A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing Using Max/MSP and Jitter. But don't get fooled by the spectral word: I was not really talking about spectral music.

To know more about spectral music, make sure you read the interview, and—even better—attend the concert on Saturday, March 26, 8p.m. at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts Concert Hall. You'll hear ensemble Sound Icon perform Fineberg's Recueil de Pierre et de Sable and Gérard Grisey's Partiels.

Joshua Fineberg's 2006 book: Classical Music, Why Bother?

Labanotation in Perpetuum mobile

Last week, I promised I would tell you more about my recent meeting with Jacqueline Challet-Haas: I wanted to check the dance notation of my Perpetuum mobile, a composition for dancing clarinetist. (Perpetuum mobile starts at around 2:27 in the video PPP for dancing clarinetist.)

An excerpt from my dissertation.

I have been interested in dance notation for years, and especially since the composition of Wu jú sè, a quartet for clarinet, double bass, five Chinese opera gongs, and dancer—incidentally, the first piece I composed in my Arc-en-ciel cycle. I chose then to use Labanotation (kinetography Laban), rather than other movement notation systems.

I have been lucky to work several times with Jacqueline Challet Haas, the leading specialist of Laban notation in France.

In August 2007 with Jacqueline Challet-Haas

Jacqueline Challet-Haas will be a guest at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg during their event Rudolf Laban, le danseur de cristal, June 17-19, 2011. I think I'll be there!

Ballet books

Last Monday, I was in Paris to meet with Jacqueline Challet-Haas, the French specialist of dance notation, and more precisely of kinetography Laban (Labanotation).

We talked about numerous topics, including labanotation (I'll let you know more about that next week) and my interest in classic ballet. I didn't know she had written a reference on the subject (in French): Manuel pratique de danse classique. Jacqueline is such an expert in movement analysis that I'm looking forward to reading her manual: I thank her very much for offering me a copy.

The table of contents reads like this:

1. Éléments de base (page 15)
2. La barre (page 105)
3. Le milieu, les pas (page 155)
4. Fourth part (page 231) including table of common defaults and list of steps notated in kinetography Laban

There are several editions of the book. The latest, from 2009, is there: Manuel Pratique de Danse Classique and at the publisher's site: Ressouvenances.

Ballet books in English

I started reading about ballet in English. Here are four ballet books I really like (with links to amazon):

• A classic: The Classic Ballet: Basic Technique and Terminology, by Lincoln Kirstein & Muriel Stuart - with beautiful illustrations, nice typography, originally published in 1952.
• A modern reference: Gretchen Ward Warren's Classical Ballet Technique - with countless great sequences of photographs

• Let's not forget that health is the most important: The Healthy Dancer - American Ballet Theater Guidelines for Dancer Health
• Finally, the enjoyable The Art of Teaching Ballet: Ten Twentieth-Century Masters, also by Gretchen Ward Warren.

Of course, I could add Jennifer Homans' Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet, but I'm just at chapter 2.