Selbstgesprach

Selbstgespräch (Talking to Yourself) – Duo for Clarinet and Flute by Barbara Heller

Score form – 1 copy

Duration: 3:00

Throughout the piece, both flute and clarinet choose their own selected narrative tempo, without a specific time signature: senza misura.  They never come exactly together.  The musical lines are never synchronized.

The Bb clarinet enters as a solo voice after the short and freely played introduction from the flute.  The clarinet is the main voice.  At the same time, the clarinet shapes it’s own agogic and dynamics.  The flute part serves as an embellished improvisational accompaniment with it’s slowly descending motion and long quiet tones.  Later in the piece, it can, ad libitum, play the short grace notes written in front of the long tones.

Both instruments play independently, as if they are alone,  At the same time each player has to listen to the other and use the given bar lines as an orientation for keeping more or less together.

A good suggestion would be, that when performing, the soloists do not see each other.  Therefore they do not have to stand next to each other on the stage.  The flute can, at will, extent the introduction by playing the beginning tones while walking onto the stage.

Flute only:  the whole notes do not have any time signature, they can be played about with one, two or three short grace notes in the same line of an upbeat.

German composer Barbara Heller was born in 1936 in Ludwigshafen, where her father was an art restorer and conservator.  She studied music in Mannheim and Munich and taught piano at the Mannheim Academy of Music from 1958 to 1962.  Two of her notable teachers were Hans Vogt and Harold Genzmer.