The third multiphonic in the randomly selected list is the first I’m to document that is not an artifact of Jeffrey Ryan’s Arbutus.
Happily, this multiphonic is quick to respond and powerful making it a real rip-snorter when played with gusto. Yet it can also be played quite softly if you have a fluency for that sort of thing.
Make note that without the low B key depressed, this merely plays a handsomely in-tune Eb over the break (that’s a post for another time). The combination of the open left hand first finger and the low B key are the active ingredients in making this baby work.
I also mucked about with lowering the first finger left hand to — among other things — sound the low Eb, but also to find all sorts of delightful little micro-multiphonics (you heard it here first) that reside in the twilight world of sounds between everyday notes.
The recording I made is just the straight up in-your-face multiphonic, but I may get around to documenting some of the other nifty sounds possible (if I can figure out how to notate them). Enjoy.
Continuing from my previous post in the long-awaited documentation of tárogató multiphonics, I’m starting with the two multiphonics employed in Jeffrey Ryan’s Arbutus for tárogató and piano (who incidentally I just discovered was nominated for a Western Canadian Music Award nomination, Classical Composer of the Year 2021).
The second multiphonic is considerably easier to sound (i.e., it’s more stable than its predecessor) even though it is fingered quite closely to the other. The upper note is not a true F sharp but is in fact an F quarter sharp (a flat sharp, as it were). Notation-wise, it’s a sharp that makes you think perhaps your printer has dropped a cog or some crawling insect has met its end on your manuscript.
Once again, the fingering system is the German one although it could work on the French system, I just haven’t tested it. In any case, tárogatós are hardly systematized so it may not matter at all. For all I know I could be the only benefactor of this documentation. Having worked these past twenty years as a technical writer, it wouldn’t be first time writing documentation for an audience of one — or none.
Below is what the multiphonic sounds like, and I’ve also included a link to the recording of Arbutus for tárogató and piano allowing you also to listen to this multiphonic in context with the composition: Listen to Arbutus on YouTube (I’ve cued it up to where the multiphonic is played).
In 2016 when I commissioned composer Jeffrey Ryan to write a contemporary work for tárogató and piano, I discovered the rich world of multiphonics for the tárogató, none of which to my knowledge have ever been documented. This is numero uno in a series of posts to document what I have learned about extended techniques for this instrument.
Below, I have recorded the first multiphonic, one built on the low D# (1) and which coaxes an F# in the second octave (2).
I’ve notated it as follows:
This isn’t a particularly easy multiphonic to start with. It wants to just give a bland-grey nothing sound, so you need to ensure you play with a slack jaw and focus on the low D sharp. Fortunately, Jeffrey scored his Arbutuswith the instructions “allow lower note of multiphonic to emerge first” (although I may have had a hand in those instructions).
About the fingering chart: I play a tárogató that uses a German (Albert) fingering system, so if you’re playing on a French (Boehm) system, Dieu vous aide.
Here’s a short recording of what this multiphonic is meant to sound like:
My brother and I were never truly opposites. I was no Apollo to his Dionysius. Even so, it was my own Apollonian voice I would hear saying — as he climbed to the top of the chimney or peered into the apple crate full of fireworks he’d just lit — “Chris, no.”
When Christopher was 14 and I was 8, he learned to jump into the swimming pool from the second-story window of our house. It was no direct, vertical descent mind you. To reach the safety of the pool, he had first to clear several feet of roof overhang and then successfully sail over a flagstone patio. Yet, as he tumbled out into space and then a few breathless moments later entered the water with a huge splash, I remember how his eyes sparkled with exuberance and adrenaline. Once I tried jumping, but my descent was exuberance-free. Eyes clenched tight, I just wished it over. Naturally, I entirely missed the point, but of course I didn’t realise that at the time. For Chris, jumping gave him a few moments of bliss; he was in his own element shooting through outer space like a meteorite — exuberantly burning up.
Of course we all said that he’d burn out early – his thirst for adventure would one day be his downfall. That thirst would later morph into a thirst for sugar (something he never lost even after every tooth rotted out of his silly head), then a thirst for drugs (the scourge of my late childhood when his drug induced rampages terrorized the family). So, not only did my formative years convince me that my role was to beware of danger, it somehow became embedded in me that risk was a thing to be avoided. After all, I was the thoughtful one, the careful one, the “good boy”.
And so we became different in every way possible. Even our musical tastes diverged. While he followed Janis Joplin, I committed myself to Mozart and set out be a classical musician. Classical music may seem to fit the staid and safe narrative of this story, but I do distinctly remember the night the orchestra played Tchaikovsky’s Francesca Da Rimini Overture with such fury that something in me snapped. I let go of trying to play and just let go into being the music. For a few spectacular moments I became suspended high above the frantic orchestra gazing down at my own frenzied fingers doing what they’d trained themselves to do. In the wild rush of the music all around me, I became invincible and, like my thrill-seeking brother, I suddenly found myself playing purely for the thrill of the ride; riding that same adrenaline rush he so craved.
As Christopher aged, he did eventually quiet down, and he didn’t die young as was predicted, and not in some thrilling explosive demise as was also conjectured. He passed away quietly at the hospice he’d checked into. To wait for his turn. On that last, sunny autumn afternoon at the hospice — his last day still tethered to planet Earth — I wonder if he hoped that death, when it came, would maybe present itself like one of those adrenaline rushes he once craved. I hope so.
When my time comes, God help me if all I can think of is how to stay safe, how to lessen the impact, how to manage everything. If that happens, I’ll for sure have missed the point. Maybe it’s time I seize onto the feeling of what it’s like to be that alive. Like I’m free-falling in space many miles above a distant blue swimming pool. Imagine if all I can think is, “Man, what a rush this is!”
A non-jumping day, my brother repairing the patio (1980s)
Once written, a symphony sounds forever. Like a cathedral, which even after its stones are tumbled down, remembers all those who traversed its threshold with a wish for eternity. Open a score to a symphony laying there all silent on its many staves, you’ll hear it suddenly leap to life as if it had been sounding all along.
I’m not gifted with perfect pitch, but occasionally I’m arrested when the sounding of an E-flat chord catches my attention. I’m not sure why exactly, but I believe it is because E-flat major is a heroic key. It’s a portal into eternity — that is why it is heroic. E-flat major startles us when it appears all of a sudden in its shining armour — those three knightly flats, a holy trinity, standing guard permitting only the most heroic to enter.
One night I met Napoleon. I, a time traveller, knew what was to come and could share certain discrete information with him concerning his future. I decided to start with Waterloo — the defeat that is — but I sweetened the news by explaining that, despite his defeat, he would be remembered as a hero. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, as I conversed with the Empereur, those opening E-flat chords from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony boomed in my head.
When I returned, I determined I should gather all things E-flat close to me.
