12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 171

Date: 06/20/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: Practice Room B at South Whidbey High School. Langley, WA (Whidbey Island)

Notes:

I spent about an this afternoon working on a specific set of sounds I had been exploring earlier this morning. I captured a solid take of an improvisation using the end result, but there was something indescribably off about the finished product. Despite doing a transcription of what I played and a written description of my process, I walked away from the piece feeling very hollow. Towards the end of my teaching day I had an unanticipated bit of time, and went back into the practice space to try a very different kind of piece. The end result is the improvisation captured here, which was a multifaceted response to my mood, the horn, and the room–this piece represented a holistic cycle.

This improvisation centers around an Ab drone. The fingering that created this pitch held a special resonance in the room, filling it without a real need for volume. Fluctuations in air flow brought out a fullness that seemed to encompass my entire body. During this piece I began to focus heavily on when to take my next breath. The breath created a momentary lapse in the flow of air, and began an anticipated cycle of sound–breath–sound–breath, etc. After some time I began “flicking” the low D, breathing before doing so. This took the focus away from the natural breath cycle and created a very new kind of cycle in the piece. I introduced the gentle multiphonics to become part of this new secondary cycle near the end of the improvisation.

The fingering used to create the Ab was as follows:

(Left Hand) B-A-G keys, Low Bb // (Right Hand) F-E keys, Side Bb, Low C. The small sound punctuations were created by “flicking” the D key momentarily in the right hand. The multiphonic was created by an adjustment in embouchure pressure with the above Ab fingering.

-Neil

The image “Untitled” accompanying today’s post by Leni Riefenstahl (1936)