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Composers: Georges
Aperghis • Franco
Donatoni • Pascal
Dusapin • Lori Freedman • Michel Galante • Monique Jean • Giacinto Scelsi
Performer: Lori Freedman
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Among many things the function of a bridge is to connect otherwise separate
parts, creating a larger, more inclusive whole. The form of a bridge, its structure
and design, is beautifully essential. This Bridge is no
exception: whether the music is written or improvised what is important to consider
is the renaissance of the musician who, as in the past, is both an interpretive and
a creative artist, a performer who makes music by way of integrating, “bridging”
both worlds to form a larger more unified one. Here Freedman makes the necessary connection between the composer and the
listener by her delivery as interpreter, improvisor and as composer herself.
Why Bridge?
One: I love this music.
Two: To document a moment in my career when my playing music is equally about
composition, interpretation and the spontaneous combination of the two, in
improvisation. For my own artistic health each practise is exactly necessary for
the others. Thus Bridge: the connecting structure, the
all-inclusive form.
Three: To draw focus to the triangular relationship that exists between the
composer, the performer/improviser, and the audience — all roles with which I am
very familiar. I am describing there in here: there, the composer; in, inside me
as the performer/improviser; here, now in your ears.
Four: A public offering of an exceptional and extraordinary programme of solo
clarinet music. The most recent composition, my début performance and the only
track with two players, is Michel Galante’s Flicker, a duo for clarinet in perpetual motion and a minimal though
reassuring bell-tolling piano. Flicker’s mechanical flurry
is pure texture: a piece concerning the tangible surface. The most sharply
contrasting piece is coincidently the oldest, Giacinto
Scelsi’s Maknongan. This otherworldliness addresses sensations below the
surface by undulating waves of slow-motion Morse code. Apart from the gorgeous
redrich sound of the contrabass clarinet this score demands creative attention
towards what is not written. Turning upwards in tessitura, speed and volume is
the second oldest piece on the programme, Franco
Donatoni’s Clair. This “jazzy halleluiah” contrasts
the inquisitive, more introspective nature of the other scores: in the style of
an epic military tattoo, Clair is a pure exclamation of
joy. Monique Jean has given me music as a passageway: a
tunnel, a covered bridge. The only electroacoustic composition here low memory #3 is by nature multiphonic, aurally multi-dimensional and
psychically multi-temporal: filling the ear with the weight of a vivid but
distant past, powerfully propelling into the present, and groping into inevitable
light. The two French works are again contrasting, both to the other compositions
and to each other. Whereas the two Italians provide extremes in musical feel,
Pascal Dusapin’s Itou and
Georges Aperghis’ Simulacre IV
differ radically from each other by the treatment of their materials. Where
Itou uses a vast vocabulary to depict a singular
character, Simulacre contains relatively few motifs that,
re-iterated with nuance, produce a multitude of meanings. If Itou is an angular portrait of a “wyrd” being, peculiar and
unpredictable enough to eliminate any programmatic inference, Simulacre is a simple homonymic song, neither rambling nor stumbling
in discourse, but rife with specific babblings. My own composition, Brief Candles, stands alone on this album as the only score that
includes both written and improvised sections. It requires the performer to be
both virtuous and disobedient, always straddling a balance between knowing and
discovering, this dichotomy rampantly abused by obscuring the sense of beginning,
middle and end.
Five: Bridge One: Firth of Forth, Bridge Two: de Normandie and Bridge Three: 59th
Street were entirely improvised moments during the studio sessions, music
that was certainly influenced by the written works swarming at the tip of my
breath. As with my practise during live performances, I wanted to record that
which would surface spontaneously while under the influence of such an exigent
programme, relating entities and organizing sounds in time. The result is there,
here for you, in my Bridge.
— Lori Freedman
| 1 |
Bridge One: Firth of Forth (Freedman) (2009) 
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2m12s |
| 2 |
Flicker (Galante) (2007)
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2m57s |
| 3 |
Itou (Dusapin) (1985)
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7m33s |
| 4 |
Brief Candles (Freedman) (2006) 
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11m01s |
| 5 |
Maknongan (Scelsi) (1976)
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4m24s |
| 6 |
Bridge Two: de Normandie (Freedman) (2009)
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5m20s |
| 7 |
Clair (Donatoni) (1980) 
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5m08s |
| 8 |
Simulacre (Aperghis) (1995)
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8m11s |
| 9 |
Bridge Three: 59th Street (Freedman) (2009)
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6m00s |
| 10 |
low memory #3 (Jean) (2005) 
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11m46s |
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Total duration
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64m32s |
UCC 771028370924
actuellecd.com Lori
Freedman: Bridge (CD): description
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