funk

Chris DENCH
Born 1953, London, England

funk (1988-89)

bass clarinet, marimba
Commissioned by Duo Contemporain

"not funk, but funk conquered is what is worthy of admiration and makes life worth having been lived"
--Wittgenstein (notebook entry, 1940)

funk was originally requested by the Duo Contemporain. Their core line up of bass clarinet and marimba seemed, although timbrally matched, problematic, confronting a microtonal with an inescapably semitonal sound source. I side stepped this incompatibility by using un-tuned percussion and immediately realised that such a pairing resembled that of the Interstellar Space album of John Coltrane, whom I have admired since my school days. My original clarinet of choice, the E flat contra-alto, transpired to be insufficiently agile for the demands of funk, and although it has been performed with notable success on the B flat contra-bass clarinet I have decided to treat it as a bass clarinet work.

Until relatively recently I was as interested in popular musics as in `serious´; funk is one of my few attempts (my saxophone solo burns is another) to infiltrate a little of, in this case, jazz into my personal sound world. After a performance in London, Paul Griffith described funk as "not complexity at all but a lustily primitive language of incantation and gesture".

must have took me for a fool
when they chucked me out of school
'cos the teacher knew I had the funk
--lyric from Hyperactive by Thomas DOLBY

Programme note © Chris DENCH