by Charles Gran
in three movements
for solo clarinet and electronics with improvisation

Performed by Jesse Krebs
Recorded Sunday, November 8, 2009

…Sensing Angeles was conceived as a solo piece in which the acoustic sound of the clarinet would be manipulated in real-time by a computer. Today, this isn’t so remarkable and can be achieved by a variety of means. For the project I chose to use Csound primarily as a challenge, but also for a certain kind of historical connection.

If the clarinet is an instrument with history so is Csound. A direct descendant of software created at Bell Labs in the 1950s[2], many would consider it antique in the same way the clarinet might be seen. Of course, it turns out they are both quite modern. Like most things, modernity is about use. Today, the use of a command-line interface and computer code for the creation of music is as much a point-of-view as a practicality…

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