Commande de l'Ensemble Vortex avec le soutien de la fondation suisse pour la culture Pro Helvetia.

Rada Hadjikostova, violon
Benoît Morrel, alto
Aurélien Ferrette, violoncelle
Noëlle Reymond, contrebasse
Maximilien Dazas, percussion
Anne Gillot, clarinette basse
Mauricio Carrasco, guitare électrique 

Caméra et enregistrement son, Arturo Corrales & Daniel Zea
Mixage et montage, Paul Clift

'Tombeau de Clément Ader' (2021) for chamber ensemble & electronics

qui, dove mezzo son...
for flute solo + 8 performers [fl. sax. tbn. acc. pno. 2perc. elec.gtr.]

PREMIERE: 6 June, 2014 at Musik-Akademie Basel by Ensemble Zone Experimental, Anja Brezavšček, flute, Mike Svoboda, conductor
SCORE: www.babelscores.com

'qui, dove mezzo son...' for flute solo & chamber ensemble (2014)

1950-C
for solo guitar with scordatura

Composed 2010 -- Performed by Kobe van Cauwenberghe

PREMIERE: 25 March, 2011 at Exapno, Brooklyn by Kobe Van Cauwenberghe
SCORE: www.babelscores.com

'1950-C' for solo guitar (2011)

EXCERPT of 'Objets à réaction poétique' for large chamber ensemble (19 musicians) with quotations of music by Maurice Ravel and texts by Rainer Maria Rilke.

composed 2015
premiered by Ensemble Zone Experimental, Jürg Henneberger conducting

Excerpt from 'Objets à réaction poétique' for 19 musicians (2015)

Feuille volante (2012) for solo alto flute

Recorded live at Villa Sträuli, Winterthur, 11 October 2016.
Anja Clift, alto flute

PREMIERE: 3 May, 2012 at The Italian Academy, New York by Jill Sokol
SCORE: www.babelscores.com
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feuille volante - a loose leaf of paper, detached from the volume which originally contained it. This work is a moment's mediation upon the memories of conversations with Tristan in Paris & New York, and the influence his work had on me long before I ever met him. Many thanks to Anja for her invaluable aid in composing this work.

'Feuille volante -- hommage à Tristan Murail' for solo alto flute (2012)

presence absence, degree (2015) for accordion & electronics

Living-room-studio version -- performed by Olivia Steimel
NB. Soundcloud added a few clicks to this track somewhere along the way -- you can download a 256kbps MP3 from here which should sound much better.

PREMIERE: 22 January, 2016 at Hochshule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar by Olivia Steimel
SCORE: www.babelscores.com
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Presence, Absence, Degree -- after Francis Bacon: the essence of a thing may be arrived at through reductive reasoning – this work, conceived in Ljubljana, composed (for the most part) in Basel, and ultimately completed in New York. I have always observed that travel alters my perception of music, never more so than with works-in-progress, for which the relationship between one moment/figure/gesture/phrase and another is often highly abstract. In Switzerland, for example, I anticipate the development of materials and foresee their (subjectively) logical conclusion; in New York I am suddenly unable or unwanting to continue in this way, because, with a change in latitude the sunlight also changes, doors creak in new ways, voices that were close become 8-bit/11,025Hz (and vice-versa), etc. etc. and the abstract relationships between musical moments/figures/etc. assemble themselves according to an entirely different logic.

With many thanks to Olivia Steimel for her invaluable help in the composition of this piece.

'presence, absence, degree' (2015) for accordion & electronics

Soprano: Svea Schildknecht
Conductor: Cecilia Castagneto
neuverBand Ensemble für neue Musik
Live recording of the Swiss premiere at Gare du Nord, Basel on 6 February, 2017
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Preludio a Colón [‘Prelude to Christopher Columbus’] is Mexican composer Julian Carrillo’s  earliest extant work to employ the principles of the Thirteenth Sound, a system of microtonality which divides the octave into 24, 36, or as many as 96 intervals (as opposed to the traditional division of 12). It is among the earliest known works for ensemble by any composer to employ such a technique. Carrillo, who had not left his native Mexico at the time of the work’s composition, would almost certainly have been unaware of early experiments in microtonality which were being undertaken by composers in Europe and Russia at around the same time. 

Performance of the work in its original form required the use of a specially designed guitar capable of performing quarter-tones and a harp capable of performing sixteenth-tones. As neither instrument is readily available today, this ‘adapted’ version uses a standard classical guitar whereby certain strings are ‘retuned,’ and substitutes an electronic keyboard for the harp part.  

Despite Carrillo’s use of such a complex system, this prelude, scored for wordless soprano and five instruments, remains firmly rooted in the tonal tradition. Here, microtonality serves not as the basis of a new harmonic syntax, but rather, as a means of embellishing, of swirling and swaying around the persistent tonal centre of E minor. Its title makes reference not, as some have suggested, to the devastating effect that European colonisation had upon indigenous Americans (of which Carillo was a descendent). Rather, it is intended to invoke the spirit of discovery; Carrillo, in undertaking to explore intervallic divisions at such an extreme resolution, was embarking upon a great journey into the unknown.

Juliàn Carrillo -- 'Preludio a Colón' (1925) -- Adapted for ensemble by P. Clift

'Elan Vital' (2017-18) for flute, clarinet, saxophone & piano

'Shadow Art II' for flute, vocalist & live-electronics
Composed 2017-18

Flutes: Anja Clift
Voice: Jon Roskilly

Living-room studio recording.
N.B. This is one of those pieces that will forever by updated and changed, and never be finished.

Programme note:
A walking path, clearly defined for a while, becomes overgrown and uneven. The person walking it wonders if he has lost his way. But after a time, it becomes demarcated from its surroundings, like it was before. Something seen along the way brings to mind a fragment of a text, which in turn brings to mind another text, and then another. In contemplating the three pieces of writing, a baroque portrait, made incomplete and smudged by memory, appears and reappears.

Texts:
-Jack Spicer, “Any fool can get into an ocean...” (1949); used with permission from Wesleyan University Press

-Heinrich von Kleist, Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden [‘On the gradual development of thoughts in speech’] (1805-6)

-Petrarch, Que' ch'infinita providentia et arte [‘What infinite providence and art’] from Il Canzoniere (1327-68)

Performance notes:
For the realisation of this piece, the following materials are necessary:
• three microphones:
 —one placed in front of LEFT speaker
 —one for vocalist
 —a capsule microphone, attached near the labium of the recorder
• an audio interface with at least three inputs and two outputs
• two video monitors for time-code display
• the performance patch (available on request: paul@paulclift.net) & Max/MSP (or Max/MSP Runtime) V7.x
• a stereo pair of loud-speakers

'Shadow Art II' (2017-18) for flute, vocalist & electronics

'On the celestial hierarchy' for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, viola & cello
Composed 2014

Live performance by neuverBand at Kustraum Walcheturm, Zurich on 12 Nov. 2018, Mike Svoboda, conductor

'On The Celestial Hierarchy' (2014) for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, viola & cello

'Astatine' for saxophone, accordion, cello & electronics
Composed 2019

Commissioned and performed by Trio Saeitenwind
Karolina Öhman: cello
Olivia Steimel: accordion
Jonas Tschanz: saxophones

Live recording at Biel/Bienne on 20 October, 2019.

'Astatine' (2019) for saxophone, accordion, cello & electronics

Paul Clift (b. 1978 in Melbourne) is a composer of instrumental and mixed music. Since 2016, he is based in Basel, Switzerland. His music often attempts to make concrete associations with a variety of concepts such as modernist literature, collective memory and historical musical traditions, notably through the integration of archival recordings in his works. His compositional outlook is marked by formative studies with Franck Bedrossian, George Benjamin, Jean-Luc Hervé, Fred Lerdahl, Philippe Leroux, Fabien Lévy and Tristan Murail. 

His music has been programmed at festivals including ISCM World Music Days (Tallinn), Agora and Festival Ensemble(s) (both in Paris), Weimarer Frühjahrstage für zeitgenössische Musik, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, ReMusik (St. Petersburg), MATA (New York), Rainy Days (Luxembourg), Musikfestival Bern, SMC Lausanne, Koper Biennale (Slovenia), Close Encounters (Georgia), Ultima (Oslo), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin), Klangraum (Stuttgart), AFEKT (Berlin/Tallinn), Sounding Now (Singapore), Music and Art: Sound Correspondences (Spain), SMC (Athens) and the World Exposition in Milan, among others, and has been performed by ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Ensemble l'Itinéraire, JACK and Mivos Quartets, L’Instant Donné, Contrechamps, ICE, Ensemble l'Imaginaire, Proton, Neofonía, Novel Ensemble Modern, Adapter, Vortex, Argento, TAG, Trio Sæitenwind, Sentieri Selvaggi and Vertixe Sonora. In 2019, his large-scale scenic work “Portal Fantasies,” composed in collaboration with cultural historian Barbara Piatti, was premiered at the Zeiträume Biennale für neue Musik und Architektur in Basel. 

Paul Clift obtained a Doctorate of Musical Arts from Columbia University, New York, a Masters of Music at King's College, London, and participated in the two years of the IRCAM Cursus, culminating in the premiere of “With my limbs in the dark” for chamber ensemble, electronics and augmented dancer, composed in collaboration with choreographer Alban Richard. He also attended masterclasses including Royaumont Voix Nouvelles, Centre Acanthes, Domaine Forget, IMPULS, June in Buffalo, MATRIX, Internationale Sommerakademie der MDW and the Darmstadt Ferienkursen. 

Paul Clift is the Artistic Director of Ensemble Recherche. His scores are published by Schweizer Musikedition and are also available online at www.babelscores.com.

Paul Clift

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