This year’s birthday will certainly be one to remember. Nevermind that I’m turning 30. I’ll be celebrating this October 4th at the Gallerie Icosahedron in TriBeCa with a concert as part of VIM: TriBeCa, a series curated by pianist Kimball Gallagher and composer Judd Greenstein. On offer on the first half of the program will be music by David T. Little, Michael Djupstrom, and the premiere of a new arrangement of Judd’s piece A Moment of Clarity. Dubble8 will join me on the second half of the program, when Hybrid Groove Project will form like Voltron to pass out samples of what we’ve been cooking up in the lab all summer long. Maybe I’ll bill this show as the official CD release party for the album since the quest for an earlier party date at some big place in the East Village has pretty much ended. Hell, maybe my lovely assistant and I should get married that night too. Birthday, concert, CD release party, wedding. I can multitask.

Anyway, that was a pretty big setup for the real subject of this post: the deceptive difficulty of A Moment of Clarity. But first, a little background on how this arrangement came to be. As I was trolling the internet one night looking for the next big thing, I actually found it. (And if you were wondering, as I wrote that last sentence I did, in fact, successfully resist the urge to make a horrible pun with the name of the piece as it related to the feeling I had upon discovering the work.) It was a piece that Judd had written for flute and piano. I was actually so taken with the composition (and the lovely performance given by Alex Sopp and Michael Mizrahi) that I listened to the piece obsessively for the next couple of hours. And then on my iPod before going to bed. And in the car during the next morning’s commute. That’s when I emailed Judd asking him if he’d be game for doing an arrangement of the piece for soprano sax and piano. I was, of course, thrilled that he agreed.

I knew Clarity would be quite a challenge on soprano due to the extreme register demands. Yet I was excited to be the catalyst for getting a new piece into the repertoire that would exploit the soprano’s altissimo range tastefully, tunefully, and not just for show as some recent compositions have been prone to do. In other words, I wanted to push the envelope but without the piece doing the pushing being gimmicky or ego-driven. While most of the altissimo was within range and playable, there were a couple of measures that needed to be changed completely—an altissimo E may be possible on soprano, but it is certainly not desirable. Yet there’s still a lot of altissimo in the piece. I have to admit that I was also excited for the arrangement because it would give me an opportunity force me to seriously confront some substantial altissimo on soprano without having to round up three other people to play the Xenakis quartet.

Like the Xenakis quartet, Clarity has a lot of altissimo. But unlike Xenakis, Clarity’s lines are tuneful and intuitive. (No disrespect to Xenakis.) The fact that you can actually whistle many of the lines in Clarity despite their technical difficulty execution-wise sets up an interesting dilemma. That some of the lines seem so simple—nursery rhymish, really—makes it somewhat dispiriting to practice. In my head I think, This should be so simple!, but the new technical situations in tandem with the extreme register demands belie the phrases’ accessible affect. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Listen to the first score sample given in this post (performed at a practice tempo about 3/4 of the actual performance tempo). Making that straightforward-sounding lick sound effortless, and not to mention in tune, is complicated by the range. However, I’m not complaining in the least. Clarity is exactly what I was looking for—a new piece that is fun and accessible to the listener and also exciting, challenging, and fun to learn and perform. Compositions like this help us to redefine what our instruments are capable of while at the same time reminding us that a piece needn’t be unconventional or out of bounds to expand those possibilities.