12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 249
Date: 09/06/2013
Instrument: Soprano saxophone
Location: A road pullout South of Cannon Beach, Oregon
Notes:
This weekend my wife and I decided to go camping in Oregon, and tonight found ourselves on the coast near Cannon Beach. This is a very popular tourist destination for entering the seemingly unending twists and turns of Highway 101 South. Even though the terrain surrounding the coast is rugged and forested, the shear beauty of it has led to widespread development. In the area we found to camp it was difficult to find even a pullout that didn’t have a house at the end of it. I stumbled on a small dirt road that lead into what will eventually be a large housing development on a steep hillside overlooking the water. It’s raining steadily today, and what was a thick forest has now been removed, leaving a long and barren scar of sopping mud with fire hydrants and future driveways carved out.
In today’s improvisation I used the faster walking trill against the Fork F key, creating an aggressive, pliable sound area that allowed me to bend notes up and down a wide range. This improvisation is much looser in execution, and I wanted to explore wider pitch bends and large dynamic shifts. The first half of the piece explores this spectral concept, but the later half is performed at a very low dynamic level, again using the same fingered technique. The fingering used was as follows:
(Left Hand) B-A keys, Low Bb // (Right Hand) Walking trill on the Fork F key (using the index and middle finger). The octave key and low Bb were also occasionally lifted or depressed during this improvisation.
-Neil
The image “Untitled from untitled” accompanying today’s post by Gert Tobias (2008).