“We have some music of this type, then, meanwhile, there is something else going on here. Meanwhile, over there there is something else entirely.”
This is how Stephen Hartke describes the origin of his new piece Meanwhile, a set of six character-pieces that 8bb premiered several weeks ago at University of Richmond, as part of an all-Hartke extravaganza. You can hear him talk about the genesis of the piece, and the experience of working with eighth blackbird, in the second of 8bb’s Composer Chit-chat podcasts, below.
Hartke wanted to turn 8bb into an imaginary “court orchestra” from a non-existant non-Western culture, of which the composer himself is master. So the work deploys a bucket-load of odd-sounding percussion instruments, lots of unusual musical gestures and an endlessly creative instrumental combinations.
Hartke was inspired by a number of interesting sources to create his often truly madcap music. The wildly disjunct melodic contours and extended techniques of the hysterically dramatic bass clarinet solo in Meanwhile’s third movement, Narration, is inspired by the unique sound of Japanese bunraku narrator. Check out some fascinating video clips of Bunraku performances here. Hartke wants the shrill, thrilling C-major end to the work, in which two antiphonally placed flexatones, a prepared piano, cymbals and gongs throw clangerous sounds at one another, to sound like “a Chinese wedding celebration.” The Spike-fiddling movement turns the viola into an instrument like the Kamancheh, a thin, nasal-sounding 4-stringed Persian instrument that has melodies played both above and below a constant drone.
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