12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 10

Date: 01/10/2013
Instrument: Tenor saxophone
Location: South Whidbey High School. Langley, WA (Whidbey Island)

Notes:

Each Thursday for the past 6 years I’ve worked with students at South Whidbey High School. Our practice space is located next to a long, narrow hallway with high ceilings and hard laminate floors. During my break each week I practice in this space, and I’m always excited about the resonate qualities of this hallway.

For my piece today I worked with the open, ringing quality of this room by playing a piece with a simple sound concept. Through this improvisation I use a single fingering, with my right hand trilling as fast as possible and my left hand trilling at a medium tempo. I stagger the opening and closing of keys in each hand to create continuous loops of sound. In this improvisation I aimed to work on balancing a high pitch with a low blanket of sound pulses. I attempted at times to crossfade these sounds, so that as the higher pitch becomes quieter the lower “blanket” pitches become louder. Much like a pianist is required to play contrasting parts in each hand, I began using this technique several years ago as an exercise to see what sounds I could cull out of my horn. Essentially my hands perform a similar action but move at different speeds.