A Grin Without a Cat - 2017
for bass clarinet, contrabass, piano + percussion, ca. 10'00"
A Grin Without a Cat, (2017) uses Lewis Carrol’s famous children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as a basis to explore the ways in which textual intelligibility can be limited or obscured without being destroyed outright. The selected text is from Alice’s first encounter with the nebulous Cheshire Cat, a conversation which is rife with semantic games, and logical inversions. These sorts of inversions are taken to an extreme level in this work, with the discussion often presented as a tangled web of text, approximating sonically the confused and disorienting nature of the conversation at hand.
full recording
Madison Greenstone, bass clarinet; Matt Kline, bass
Mari Kawamura, piano; Sean Dowgray, percussion
Steven Schick, Conducting