Shortly after I had covered clarinetist Ben Goldberg’s Experiments in Sonic Potential concert at the Contemporary Jewish Museum this past November, he wrote to suggest that I might be interested in his From the Granary album. While my queue of recordings to examine had gotten rather lengthy at the time, I still decided to add this item. It is only available through a Bandcamp Web page, but those visiting the page get to name their own price for acquiring a download copy. The recording has now made it to the head of my queue, and I definitely think that those interested in this download opportunity will be well rewarded.
The building where the source material for the From the Granary album was recorded (from the Bandcamp Web page for the album)
The eleven tracks of the album were recorded during a summer when Goldberg was part of a “retreat” along with about a dozen other composers, poets, painters, and novelists. The venue was Civitella Rainieri, a castle in Italy. During that retreat, Goldberg was living in an old granary building on the castle grounds. He used that venue to work on creating solo music for clarinet. In the interest of maintaining what might be called a “laboratory notebook,” all of his work took place before a “live” microphone, capturing everything on digital storage.
Goldberg has not discussed at length what he would do with all of that content. My guess is that, for the most part, he would excerpt individual passages, label each with a title, and then hold it as a candidate for inclusion on an album. The title of that album, in turn, involved nothing more than the fact that the granary was the site where all the recordings were made. However, there is at least one example, “SO LONG JEANNETTE & JESSICA,” in which the “laboratory work” involved multitrack recording techniques. (Goldberg credits Adam Muñoz with training him in those techniques.)
This idea of a “laboratory notebook” is far from new. I recall being told that Sergei Prokofiev always carried a pocket notebook of staff paper with him. He would jot down themes that interested him when they very came to mind; and, when working on a larger-scale composition, he would often consult that notebook in search of “suitable” themes.
Goldberg’s “notebook”, on the other hand, is the product of a performer combining his skills of execution technique with those of invention. This brings me back to one of my favorite paragraphs of text, the one found in the hand of Johann Sebastian Bach on the title page he provided for the two-part and three-part inventions that he wrote into the Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. In that paragraph Bach emphasizes that these 30 short pieces were intended not only to cultivate clarity of execution but also the imagination behind the “inventiones” (ideas) that would provide Bach's son (Friedemann) with “a strong foretaste of composition.”
There is no end of fascinating foretasting going on before the “live” microphone that captured Goldberg’s “inventiones” on a day-by-day basis. Indeed, the attentive listener may even detect a few sly references to Sebastian Bach’s own inventive skills. The samples that he extracted to include on From the Granary make for absorbing listening. One might almost say that the acquisition of “invention skills” migrates from Goldberg’s own mind to the mind of the attentive listener. What more could one ask from a fly on the wall of that granary building where these tracks were initially recorded?
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