Michael Blake
FIVE PIECES FOR PICCOLO & TUBA
Bardic Edition BDE1423
Graphic score.
Five Pieces for Piccolo and Tuba grew out of a whim: the perverse idea of the two extremes of the woodwind/brass sections of the orchestra duetting with a kind of no man’s land between them, and perhaps also something comical about these two quirky members of the orchestra.
I notated it as a graphic score because of my interest in Dada, and in Johannesburg in the 1970s Dada was one way of responding to the stiflingly conservative politics of the time. The score came about largely by accident: having chosen the instrumentation, I sought out piccolo and tuba excerpts from various standard orchestral works – but also including the famous piccolo and tuba solos from Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes” – and then photocopied and cut them up, and made A4 collages. When photocopying them – on an early Rank Xerox machine – I accidentally removed a page too soon and discovered something like a photocopying equivalent to the canvasses of Jackson Pollock. This became my first chance composition.
I composed Five Pieces for Piccolo and Tuba in 1971 in the same year most white South African composers were responding to commissions in praise of the Second Republic - that of the apartheid regime – for performance at various 10th anniversary festivals for the white elite. My work most definitely did not commemorate this occasion.
I never found piccolo and tuba players to interpret it, so it ended up in the bottom drawer for four decades, travelled around the world with me, at some point the original Xeroxes getting lost (but fortunately I had copies), and having found willing players in the 21st century, it was performed for the first time on 30 April 2015 at the Young Blood Gallery in Cape Town. The performers were Marietjie Pauw (piccolo) and Le-Nique Brand (tuba).
In 2015 Willem Boshoff suggested I turn the score into a limited edition artist book of 5 copies, which I did in collaboration with Heléne van Aswegen. Michael Blake
Five Pieces for Piccolo and Tuba grew out of a whim: the perverse idea of the two extremes of the woodwind/brass sections of the orchestra duetting with a kind of no man’s land between them, and perhaps also something comical about these two quirky members of the orchestra.
I notated it as a graphic score because of my interest in Dada, and in Johannesburg in the 1970s Dada was one way of responding to the stiflingly conservative politics of the time. The score came about largely by accident: having chosen the instrumentation, I sought out piccolo and tuba excerpts from various standard orchestral works – but also including the famous piccolo and tuba solos from Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes” – and then photocopied and cut them up, and made A4 collages. When photocopying them – on an early Rank Xerox machine – I accidentally removed a page too soon and discovered something like a photocopying equivalent to the canvasses of Jackson Pollock. This became my first chance composition.
I composed Five Pieces for Piccolo and Tuba in 1971 in the same year most white South African composers were responding to commissions in praise of the Second Republic - that of the apartheid regime – for performance at various 10th anniversary festivals for the white elite. My work most definitely did not commemorate this occasion.
I never found piccolo and tuba players to interpret it, so it ended up in the bottom drawer for four decades, travelled around the world with me, at some point the original Xeroxes getting lost (but fortunately I had copies), and having found willing players in the 21st century, it was performed for the first time on 30 April 2015 at the Young Blood Gallery in Cape Town. The performers were Marietjie Pauw (piccolo) and Le-Nique Brand (tuba).
In 2015 Willem Boshoff suggested I turn the score into a limited edition artist book of 5 copies, which I did in collaboration with Heléne van Aswegen. Michael Blake
