Hayes Biggs

Clarinet, Violin, and Piano

Composer's Note:

The “recovery” here is from nothing dire, not illness nor computer-related disaster. It’s more like reclaiming, repurposing, recycling, and reusing. This recovery of is that of old melodies and other thematic material of mine that languished for years in search of a piece or pieces in which they could find a proper home.

In 1987 I composed a short lullaby in celebration of the birth of a family member’s new baby. That tune actually did find its way into a piece for instrumental septet, When you are reminded by the instruments (1997), but I decided to recycle it yet again in this work. In the new piece, that tune, played in artificial harmonics by the violin, doubled at times in the right hand of the piano, begins the proceedings, and recurs in a few later passages. Soon after, the clarinet enters with a fragment I came up with some years ago, thinking I would use it in an unaccompanied solo for that instrument.

It starts with a d minor triad, has a bit of a Bachian vibe (a small nod to the subject of The Art of the Fugue), and it returns in various guises and textures throughout the work. The clarinet eventually has its own short solo to end the first section, and this leads into the next recovered melody, one that I wrote sometime around 1975, when I would have been a Freshman at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). This one also is in the clarinet, accompanied by the piano, and is of a decidedly lyrical and Romantic cast, in the clarinet-friendly key of B-flat major; it will be heard again near the end of the piece, with violin counterpoint added.

The tune is followed immediately by extremely contrasting material, initially marked ruvido (rough or coarse), violento, alternating with lighter, more dance-like music, featuring another thematic retrieval: a short, fast, arpeggiated ostinato pattern that constantly changes meter (7/16, 6/16, 9/16, etc.), also composed sometime in my late teens, I think perhaps between my senior year in high school and my first year as an undergraduate, though I’m not sure of the exact date. (I can’t seem to put my hands on the original versions of any of these musical ideas, so I am recovering them entirely from my memory.) The fast music yields to a varied return of some of the introductory music to lead back to the B-flat tune, followed by a short duet for clarinet and violin (eventually returning to the initial artificial harmonics) based on the lullaby tune that began the piece.

In Recovery Mode is in many ways an homage to my first teacher, Don Freund, whose extraordinary, truly staggering Triomusic (1980) — a much larger scale work for the same combination of instruments — is one that I continually return to both as a teacher and as a listener. I remember studying with him while he was writing it, and I continue to learn from it, particularly from its bold stylistic juxtapositions, as I do with so many of his compositions. My piece even has a few very, very tiny “stealth quotes” from Don’s piece.