• Commissioned by Gaudeamus Interpreters Award winner Helen Bledsoe for 1996 Gaudeamus New Music Week, Amsterdam.
Solo flute (some extended techniques)
12’
Premiere: 3 September 1996
Publisher: Composer
Edited with fingerings by Helen Bledsoe
notes:
Three movements, as titled. Extended Technique piece for solo flute. American flutist Helen Bledsoe and I met at Banff Artist Colony, 1992, where she played “Flames encircle Sides” by Robert Dick. An exquisite performer. Invocation-Meditation-Allegro marks an approach to ‘extended techniques’ used not for the purpose of writing so-called ‘avant-garde’ music, but rather to naturally extend my own musical language through writing nuances and timbres I usually hesitate to using western instruments: spectral harmonic effects, tuning variations, glissandos, and special timbres that complement the still-intact harmonic and melodic core of this music. Falling off from notes. Harmony on a monophonic instrument, circular breathing and singing while playing. The kernel of the work is the quasi-ney solo in middle of second movement, whose meditation spans the world, not just the east. Release into the void. This second movement, Meditation, marks the first time in my music where the Turkish element, hidden under the surface of works from Henry V onwards, is ‘acknowledged’ openly. This is incidentally still one year before I made the first of many journeys to Anatolia. But I had already performed two years in th MSG (Makam Study Group) from Tufts University, including singing the vocal parts of the Mevlevi Ayins in a ritual setting in Brattleboro, Vermont with whirling dervishes, and the ney, as well as makam itself, seemed to be becoming an integral part of a deeper aural conciousness.
Michael Ellison 