Ancient Devices (1999/2003)
for clarinet with Max/MSP
commissioned by Double Dialogue

duration: 11 minutes
download score (as pdf - x KB)
performance materials are available on request

also needed:
computer with stereo audio interface
stereo playback system

Full recording:

Ancient Devices — John Bruce Yeh, clarinet; Howard Sandroff, electronics

Program Notes
The title Ancient Devices is a double allusion, both descriptive and ironic.  The piece invokes one of the earliest descriptions of rhetorical speech as its formal model.  Corax of Syracuse, the founder of the “art” of rhetoric, divided organized discourse — here the sections of the composition — into five parts: proem, narrative, arguments, subsidiary remarks and peroration. The Proem (or preliminary comments) presents the themes, amplified through two canons, and introduces the extension of the clarinet with electronics.  The Narrative rhapsodically develops the opening assertions.  More tightly structured, the Arguments section uses the computer to provide the clarinetist with an asymmetric ostinato against which the clarinet material is phased.  The computer takes over the floor for further expansion in the Subsidiary Remarks.  Finally, the clarinetist has a last word in summary in the Perorations.

Ironically, these “ancient devices” are realized here using a not-so-ancient device to accompany the clarinet.  The digital signal processing computer software for this piece was written in Max/MSP and runs on a Macintosh computer. The sounds produced by the computer are live manipulations of the performed clarinet. The computer modifies and supplements the clarinet to provide a musical foil which amplifies, grounds, and broadens the acoustic instrument.

Ancient Devices was commissioned and premiered by Howard Sandroff and John Bruce Yeh of Double Dialogue.

Performance History
2001 NYU (Esther Lamneck, clarinet)
1999 Ultima Festival (Oslo, Norway)
1997 Oberlin College, Conservatory of Music
1997 22nd Annual Clarinet Symposium (University of Oklahoma)