Richter and Fluxus Inspired Score for Contrabass Clarinet

 

My solo contrabass clarinet score pulls ideas from Gerhard Richter’s “Strips” paintings and from Fluxus. It mixes visuals, chance, bits of traditional notation, and a hands-on performance setup. The point is to loosen the usual rules of composition and let the player build the piece in real time, almost the way you would assemble an artwork from parts.

Richter’s “Strips” as a working model

Richter made the “Strips” by slicing an abstract painting into horizontal bands and then rearranging them. The result still carries the DNA of the original painting, but it becomes something new through cutting, reordering, and digital processing.

That logic maps well to sound. In this score, musical ideas are broken into fragments and then put back together in different ways. You do not get one fixed, linear “story.” You get sections that can be combined and recombined, so the piece stays tied to its source material while changing shape each time it is played.

The format supports this. The score is a set of individual cards stored in a box. Each card is a piece of the whole. The performer chooses an order, makes connections, and builds a flow, like assembling a collage out of small units.

Fluxus and “intermedia” thinking

Fluxus pushed against clean divisions between art forms. It treated performance, objects, music, and everyday actions as materials that could overlap. In that spirit, this score is not just something you read. It is something you handle. The physical act of selecting, arranging, and moving cards is part of the work.

Chance and modular structure are central here. There is no single correct version of the piece. The cards are meant to be flexible components. The contrabass clarinet is a good match because it can move from pure tone to noise, from delicate breath sounds to heavy low pressure, and it can handle quick shifts in texture without losing character.

Technology, distance, and the “camera” feeling

Richter’s process also points to how digital tools change the way images get made and understood. I carry that idea into sound and notation. The score does not treat notation as a sacred, fixed language. It uses notation as one material among others, something that can be cut up, reframed, and re-presented.

Some of the notation leans toward a photoreal, almost camera-like attitude: clean, exact, detached. That matters because it changes the emotional temperature. It asks what happens when music is shown with the cool precision of a lens rather than the expressive handwriting of tradition. It is not nostalgia. It is a direct look at how contemporary mediation affects what we think music is.

The performer as builder

In this piece, the performer is not just executing instructions. They are shaping the form. They choose how fragments connect, how long things last, and how the overall arc emerges. The cards are small self-contained worlds, but the performance is the act of linking them into a larger landscape.

That shared control is the core of the work. The score proposes possibilities, and the performer turns those possibilities into a specific version. Each realization becomes a dialogue between the fragments on the page, the physical handling of the cards, and the sound-world the contrabass clarinet can produce.