Classical Music | Clarinet Music

Recorded on 12/14/2005, uploaded on 02/05/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

For an Actor: Monologue for Clarinet (in A)          Shulamit Ran

Shulamit Ran was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in October 1949. She moved to the United States with her mother at the age of fourteen and was awarded a full scholarship at the Mannes College of Music in New York, where the young composer worked with Norman Dello Joio at Mannes.  It was shortly after this that Ran's music came to the attention of the late Ralph Shapey, composer and new-music advocate at the University of Chicago. The U.C. music department offered Ran a faculty position in 1973, where she is still on faculty, teaching composition and chamber music. Ran was appointed composer-in-residence by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1990, a position she held for seven seasons. Her opera, Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk), received its premiere in 1997 with the Lyric Opera of Chicago.   Ran has been awarded many laurels, including the 1991 Pulitzer, a Koussevitsky Foundation grant (1998), and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim, Ford, and Fromm Music Foundations.

Shulamit Ran has said of her 1978 monologue for clarinet, "For an Actor: Monologue for Clarinet (1978) owes its inspiration in large part to the intensely personal ethos with which the clarinet is associated in my mind.  To me, the instrument in its contemporary usage suggests an incredible gamut of gestures, dynamics, and emotions.  Accordingly, in MONOLOGUE, the player assumes the role of a virtuoso actor who, by purely physical means, goes through a kind of wordless 'monodrama'.

"Though not literally in sonata form, the parts of Monologue nevertheless parallel that form, consisting of: exposition or unfolding in two stages; development-disintegration including a cadenza; coda echoing the opening materials."

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.