Stutter - SOLO Eb CL

Stutter

for solo Eb clarinet

by Amelia S. Kaplan

Written for Elizabeth Crawford and supported by a Ball State University CREATE Grant.

app. 4.5 minutes

from the composer:

Stutter, for E-flat clarinet, was written for Elizabeth Crawford, who has been collecting pieces for this underappreciated member of the clarinet family.
The work is based on two contrasting ideas: an irregular repeated pitch, resembling morse code, or a stutter, and a motive with a regular rhythm that jumps around in large irregular leaps. Most of my work explores timbre as much as any other musical parameter, but I chose to explore these pitch and rhythm-based ideas, in part, because fewer timbral variations are possible on the E-flat clarinet than on its larger cousins. As the piece develops, it reaches an extremely long and challenging passage of jumps using most of the range of the instrument, after which the irregular jumps and irregular rhythms merge in a symbiotic flourish to the end.