Memorabilia

Richard David HAMES
Born 1945, England

Memorabilia (1984)

clarinet solo, clarinet(s) obligato

Since Marcel Duchamp exhibited his Bicycle Wheel in 1913 the concept of the `readymade´ has been a seminal yet relatively undocumented aesthetic principle underlying much contemporary art. Artists have always borrowed from each another. Quotation is by no means a recent phenomenon -- nor is it confined to music. In literature, for example, the art of reference, and indeed plagiarism, was given positive scope and endorsement through the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and post-punk writers such as Cathy Acker.

Likewise, in the music of our century the significance of quotation and cross-reference has changed markedly - modifying our perceptions and revealing a synthesis of disparate and even opposing (e.g., cultural) elements. This often leads to perceptual ambiguity, the total effect of which may be interpreted by the listener in different ways, and on different levels, each according to their means. This new aesthetic, having become an intrinsic stylistic element of Hames's work by the early '80s, is immediately applicable to Memorabilia where explicit references to pre-existing materials provide the raison-d'etre for the piece.

The basic compositional idea in Memorabilia is the cross-cutting and progressive collages of speeding and slowing groups, as well as various kinds of interaction between musical space and time. These materials, or `memorabilia´, are assembled from re-worked and disguised allusions to the clarinet literature of Schoenberg, Berg, Mahler, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms and Mozart, chosen as much for their potential as for their actual (even incestuous) relationships.

The process whereby these fragmented recollections are incorporated into an experiential aural logic is epiphanic -- recalling similar procedures at work in Finnegan's Wake: there is neither thematic development nor straightforward recurrence of material as such -- all is in a state of continuous transformation.

The final section, marked Abschied, is both an apotheosis and, by implication of its context, a repudiation of the classic Germanic tradition. Here, an almost hypnotic state is created, the sound consciously sculpted into contours reminiscent of the second movement of the Mozart clarinet concerto. The sense of familiarity ebbs and flows. But the gesture is ultimately a travesty of semantic diffidence -- the purely referential functions of this specific objet-trouve alluding on many levels to the past as a reservoir of stylistic and nostalgic discontinuity rather than as any source of communicative or aesthetic perspective. And it is precisely this varying degree of function and perceptibility at different moments that is essential to the nature of the work.

Memorabilia was commissioned by Lawrence Dobell with fund provided by the Music Board of the Australia Council and is dedicated to the memory of Rosemary Hopkins. The score is prefaced by this extract from Tristan Tzara's, L'Homme Approximatif -- "Je me souviens d'une deception sineuse tirant du passe son amere substance".

Programme note © 1988 Annette Cahaill