Rhapsody in Blues
John de Clef Piñeiro
About this work:
A "rhapsody" as a concept in music evokes an effusiveness that carries one along the trajectory of another’s emotional flow. Indeed, we can point to various examples that make the case. But this idea of "what a rhapsody is" is more a contemporary, or even fanciful, notion than one based on etymology. Having its origins in ancient Greece, the "rhapsody," as an expressive form, found its earliest incarnation in the recitation of a potpourri of excerpts or episodes from the epic and lyric poetry of those times.
Today, a musical rhapsody represents a rather free-form, but not necessarily free-from-form, single-movement composition that, in its seemingly idiosyncratic expressions and gestures, can evoke the sense of a spontaneous improvisatory impulse as its source.
Both episodic in its structure and mercurial in its moods, Rhapsody in Blues provides a jazz-imbued vernacular offering of the form for clarinet and piano duo. Actually, in surveying the catalogue of compositions for this instrumental combination, one can reasonably conclude that this is really an atypical pairing of instruments for this musical genre – the sonata and collections of pieces being the most common forms represented in the literature.
As a kind of implicit homage to George Gershwin’s perhaps most popular instrumental concert work, Rhapsody in Blues takes as its initial inspiration the distinctive clarinet solo opening of that great American classic. From there, the rhapsodic flow of the work courses through contrasting terrains, pitching variously upward, downward and sideways – in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the oral rhapsodists of ancient Greece – before reaching its climactic destination.
This work is dedicated to Professor Esther Lamneck, whose artistry was itself the inspiration for this modest contribution to the clarinet repertoire.
(World premiere, May 31, 2005, in New York City; European premiere, November 23, 2007, in Perugia, Italy, as part of the Music Without Frontiers Festival.)
Version: 2005 Revised Version
Year composed: 2004
Duration: 00:05:20
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Unknown
Instrumentation: 1 Clarinet, 1 Piano
Instrumentation notes: clarinet and piano duo