For soprano saxophone and piano
from (No) Time for Turnage
I have long admired the work of the clarinettist and composer Tony Coe who during my teenage years produced some outstanding cross-over pieces that I found then, as I do now, most exciting. Back in the 1960s musicians who embraced the whole business of jazz alongside the new trends in contemporary art music were rare animals. To have the opportunity thirty years later to write a work for this special musician was a welcome challenge.
The idea of Fragments was to present a short, fully-notated score full of potential for extension through improvisation. It was to be a piece that could exist as happily in a ‘set’ during a jazz club performance as in the more formal programme of an art music concert.
Tony Coe was particularly interested to have a score that had been created with the Symbolic Composer software, a system he had just begun to explore. For this reason Fragments became a test bed for a number of small innovations in composing with a computer language, particularly in the use of this software’s library mechanism. The Symbolic Composer Library is able to store all kinds of material (rhythms, tonalities, melodic patterns) . This material may be ‘picked’ from library locations by using and applying algorithmic processes to build unique template structures. The score-files for Fragments, with annotations by Phil Legard, are made available below to encourage performers who have access to the software to create and extend their own versions of the score through customizing and recompiling the score-files.
Downloads
Study score [pdf]
Reference recording [mp3]
Annotated Symbolic Composer score [pdf]
