Breaths (Six Pieces for Amplified Flute and Piano)
John de Clef Piñeiro
About this work:
In writing this work for flute, I sought to celebrate civilization’s primeval fascination with the pitched breathiness of, perhaps, the most universally found wind instrument (in one form or another), besides the human voice. That long-standing fascination also encompasses the realm of pitched percussion, and so, the piano, in an analogous but more refined sense than the drum, quite naturally plays the part of elemental partner with the flute in this work.
Suppleness of gesture and expression is certainly one well-known characteristic of the flute, as it is of the piano. As complementary voices, then, these instruments can easily provide a satisfying breadth of color and intensity. This is why Breaths, essentially a cycle of six miniature duos, explores through dialogue and interplay the flexibility of each instrument and the capability of each to mimic and parody the other in contrasting pitch ranges. Although idiomatically contemporary and abstract, the work is intended to be comprehensible to a diverse public audience.
For those who wonder about the title and the rationale for amplification, perhaps some explanation is in order. Anyone familiar with the chamber music experience already knows the living, breathing excitement of live performance in intimate surroundings. And in that context, the breathy cues that the musicians seem to have worked out beforehand in rehearsal often suggest clues to the structure of the work. That was the thought behind the title.
Those quintessentially natural sounds during a performance impart a dynamic vitality to the otherwise static portrait of a work in print. Of course, the same can also be said of the contrast between the art of theatrical performance and the written word as a symbolic artifact. Extending that comparison further, we can readily acknowledge that a phenomenon common to both the theater and the music hall is that the immediacy and power of a performance can become attenuated through separation – namely, the distance between performer and listener – so that the audience’s connection with what is taking place on stage is experienced differently, merely depending on where one sits.
In conceiving the sound that I wanted the listener to hear, I felt that the mediation of performance presence through space was one acoustic compromise that should be neutralized (or at least minimized), in this instance, to preserve the breathy vitality of the playing. To capture and communicate that breathy energy in a moderately-sized performance space, I thought it necessary to amplify both the flute and the piano and, in that way, permit the audience to more closely experience what the performers are hearing at close range -- breaths and all.
(World premiere, May 29, 2003, New York City, presented by the New York Composer's Circle; subsequent premier performances at colleges in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; and a subsequent New York City reprise on 2/14/09 at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre.)
Version: Original
Year composed: 2003
Duration: 00:07:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Keyboard plus One Instrument
Instrumentation: 1 Flute, 1 Piano
Instrumentation notes: Amplified flute and amplified piano