Hmm... how about bassoon, accordion, and harpsichord?

I've been corresponding with my friend Mike Lawton, from IWU, who is now working on his master's in clarinet at the University of Kentucky. He asked if I might be interested in writing a piece for him, which of course I am, but the question that immediately sprung to mind was that of instrumentation. Recently I've gotten into the bad habit of judging pieces immediately based on their instrumentation before I've even heard them. Style is endlessly slippery, but instrumentation is immediate. In today's hyper-varied musical atmosphere, we often don't have enough frame of reference to perceive abstract musical traits when hearing a piece for the first time: it takes all of our attention and effort just to get a basic grasp on what this music is trying to do and where it's coming from. It's the big gestures we seize onto, the obvious surface, not the intricate details. Of course, these details are still there, and are still important. But it's foolish to think that a piece for four mandolins, just on the basis of the same notational system and the same set of twelve pitches, could have the same superficial musical effect as a woodwind quintet. I think of Feldman's famous suggestion--later disavowed, I know, but it contains a significant idea--that orchestration defines the piece. How could it not? I tried to take this into account when I was writing my recent saxophone quartet, St. Marks Lighthouse; I could make all the interesting harmonic, rhythmic, and formal choices in the world, but still the first thing the listener is going to notice is the fact that there are four saxophones up there on stage. My first obligation, then, to both the listener and the players, is an acknowledgment of this sound and this social arrangement. (To be fair, I'm not sure if these insights played much concrete role in the music, or at least not one more nuanced than just including big chords and trills, but eh. There's always the next piece.)

To take some stylistically thorny examples, these thoughts explain why I'm interested in Babbitt's Composition for Guitar or Boulez' Sur Incises (three pianos, three harps, and three percussion) while many of these composers' works in traditional instrumentations leave me decidedly apathetic. And, to return to Mike's piece, this is why I immediately asked if he'd be interested in some sort of unconventional trio instrumentation. There's a lot of good music still to be written in C Major, and there are certainly some badass solo clarinet and clarinet-piano pieces out there in the ether waiting to crystallize as well. But I won't be the one to write them, at least not right now, because I know how I feel when I sit down in a concert hall and see a new clarinet-piano piece on the program, versus how I feel when I see a piece for four scordatura cellos. Traditional instrumentations still carry, if not stylistic baggage, then at least a set of expectations that it's difficult to subvert. It would be difficult for me to sit down and write a clarinet-piano piece without thinking of the standard, vanilla "recital piece." Clarinet and two marimbas, on the other hand--this offers a different feel, and some more promising opportunities.

Incidentally, looseness of format and instrumentation is also what made (and makes) SEMC such an exciting project. Check out their repertoire page and look at those instrumentations.