SKU: ST.Y214

ISBN 9790220221293.

1st perf: Douglas Mitchell, Clare Hall, Cambridge, 26 October 2002

Morgan Hayes's Totem, for B flat clarinet, is a short, single melodic line that in its brief duration challenges players of Grades 7 or 8 standard or above to encompass widely contrasted dramatic and lyrical moods within the primitive vision of its title. The composer had no specific ethnological source in mind when composing this piece. Rather, his aim was to suggest the complex rhythms and rituals of tribal life, remote in time from the sophistications of the modern world, but in spirit closer perhaps to our own than we might care to imagine.

SKU: HL.50600566

8.25x11.75x0.07 inches.

The Finnish composer Osmo Tapio Räihälä reports that he experienced a phase whilst working on his Horn Concerto in 2011 during which he had the feeling of “having landed in a deadend”. To find a remedy, he decided to develop a kind of “finger exercise” for composers, comparable to the “warming-up process of an instrumental soloist before performing”. Räihälä remembers furthermore: “Instead of writing for orchestra, I started a short solo piece for clarinet. Little did I know that I had opened a Pandora's box! I wrote 'Soliloque 1: Étoffé' in two days. Perhaps this frenzy caused the music to become restless, with quick turns – in short, a rather virtuosic etude. The clarinet seeks paths, at first without success, but obviously finding one in the end. And what about the Pandora's Box? I had given the title the number one, and during the next two years I wrote five more Soliloques, solos of six to seven minutes, for various instruments, as well as one for soprano a cappella. The title Étoffé means 'rich', or 'well rounded', but also 'fabric' or even a 'patch' - and I felt that I had patched something in my work that was broken; indeed, working on the concerto now gave me a fresh start.”.