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The French orillon is a diminutive of oreille referring to the external, protruding part of an object similar to the shape of an ear. It also refers to the name of the street on which I lived in Paris while writing this piece (rue de l’Orillon). I was staying in a tiny Belleville flat on the 6th floor of an old walk-up. Everything in the apartment fit into one miniature room; the bed was on a mezzanine over the kitchen (about 3 feet from the ceiling!) accessed by a ladder, and from that space, you could climb out a small port-hole window leading to the roof where you could see all the chimney tops of Paris and the tip of the Eiffel tower. Du haut de l’Orillon refers to this fantastic bird’s-eye view and the sounds heard from up above.
This piece came out of revisions of a previous work entitled Airplay (2006). Airplay was originally inspired by the flight patterns of the Snowbirds (the Canadian military aerobatic flight team), which I had used as the basis for the melodic contour of the clarinet line and the spatialization patterns of the electronics. Many of the sound-files in fact come from jet or plane related sounds. This new version, however, considerably alters the original concept, reorganizing the form and reinterpreting the material. The electronics are made up of pre-recorded sound-files as well as live processing.
The piece uses four basic effects on the clarinet: one that sounds lyrical and resonant, one that is more stark, one that employs echoes and granular synthesis resulting in reverberant bird like sounds, and one that is slightly warped using ring modulation and delay lines.
The overall mood of the piece is meant to feel as if one is suspended mid-air, however, certain interruptive figures act as a parenthesis to this hovering atmosphere, using rapid accented/staccato articulations.
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