Geplaatst op 06 jan. 2025
This artistic research project explores saxophone without mouthpiece (SWMP), an innovative approach to saxophone playing that challenges traditional performance practices. In SWMP playing, the instrument’s mouthpiece – an essential component for producing its conventional sound – is removed. Instead, the player performs directly on the neckpiece of the saxophone. This absence of the mouthpiece creates new sonic possibilities, giving rise to a range of relatively new techniques such as air pitch, tongue ram, trumpet sounds, and saxo-flute hybridity.
These techniques, which have yet to be fully explored in both performance and academic spheres, prompted my early interest through initial encounters with composers incorporating them into their works. From this curiosity emerged an artistic research project aimed at understanding and refining my own skills with these techniques, contextualizing their origins and aesthetic position within music history, exploring their role in the broader saxophone repertoire, and investigating their potential in such a way that other performers as well as composers could benefit from it.
This research project has taken place in and through my own musical practice. Therefore, it is complemented with personal audio and video performances of various SWMP works. The performances of these works are a crucial element in the possibility of having done (and having been able to do) this research in the first place. The true outcome of this artistic research project lies in successful performances, recordings, and commissions of SWMP works. Additionally, a detailed pitch manual, featuring audio examples of each possible pitch for each respective technique, is included.
Today's artistic presentation will feature works that prominently employ these techniques. All three pieces were commissioned by me and are based on the artistic research I conducted.
Go Within (2020)
Go Within draws inspiration directly from Rainer Maria Rilke’s first letter to a young poet in which the author offers advice to a young and aspiring poet. In this first letter, Rilke discourages the reader from looking outward for answers to their desires, wishes, and dreams. Instead, he urges the young artist to “go within” and seek the answers within themselves through intimate and deep selfdiscover and self-reflection. The musical work is written for live tenor saxophone without mouthpiece and pre-recorded tenor saxophone played from a speaker embedded inside the instrument. Quite literally, the sound of the prerecorded saxophonist comes from within them. Ralli intricately weaves contemporary techniques together - not so much as a glossary of what is possible on the saxophone, but as functional musical elements whose sum is much greater than the individual parts. Taking advantage of Don-Paul Kahl’s previous training as a singer, Ralli uses speech, sprechstimme, and vocal elements in her work - taken directly from Rilke’s letter. The work is at once demanding and virtuosic for both sides of the saxophonist, with and without mouthpiece; however, there is a certain simple elegance to her work which comes across as both quaint and blossomed - much like the content from which she took inspiration.
Zeruan (2020)
Zeruan (Basque for “In heaven”) was completed in 2020 and is dedicated to the saxophone quartet Ensemble du Bout du Monde (EBM). Here, María Eugenia Luc explores the sonic potential of the saxophone with the aim of giving shape to an initial conceptual idea: the image of the sky as infinite, an unfathomable space of unlimited possibilities. The piece begins with a single pattern made up of three types of sounds with contrasting timbral characteristics: a low and short attack (tongue ram) on the lower instruments of the quartet, a high-pitched sustained note on the soprano saxophone that gradually begins to fade into a bisbigliando, followed by a concrete sound on the baritone saxophone. This pattern is repeated in various forms during the first part of the piece, though its three elements will eventually become independent later through percussive sounds, multiphonics, and air sounds. Zeruan thus evolves through deconstruction, breaking down the timbral characteristics of the original pattern in order to make each component independent and give them a life of their own. After a brief but forceful cadenza from the baritone saxophone, an improvised creation of Don-Paul Kahl (saxophonist of the EBM quartet) drawn from a pattern proposed by the composer, the score concludes with an extensive coda in which noise objects take center stage once again.
For Felipe M. (2021)
For Felipe M. is a love song to ephemeral things. It is composed of material that engages the margins of auditory perception: islands of fragile sound between pockets of silence, quasi-subliminal signals that disappear in the distance, streams of seemingly interminable melodies, and static sounds of delicate polarities. These four sound types are arranged in an idiomatic “Lieder Ohne Worte” form composed of seven epigrammatic Verses and two extended Stanzas. If there is one common thread that permeates the nature of this material, it is the predilection for minuscule gradations, particularly evident in the nano-microtonal melodies and delicate nuances of breath tones, both of which the result of painstaking collaboration between composer Stratis Minakakis and saxophonist Don-Paul Kahl. By drawing attention to such esoteric nuances, the work aims to create an intimate space between performer and
listener, inviting the latter to an inward journey of what the poet C.P. Cavafy calls “indistinct sensations.”