Roger Heaton

United Kingdom °1954
research interests: Contemporary art music performance
affiliation: Bath Spa University, UK
en

Clarinettist and conductor I perform with such groups as the Kreutzer Quartet and Fidelio Trio and have been a member of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble since the 1980s. I was a member of the London Sinfonietta in the 1990s, Music Director of Rambert Dance Company and Clarinet Professor at the Darmstadt Summer Courses (1982-94). I have been Professor of Music at Bath Spa University since 1996 and am now Emeritus Professor. Recent recordings include the chamber music of Hugh Wood, a disc of solo works by Tom Johnson, clarinet quintets by Feldman, Fox and Trandafilovski and a solo disc of works by Boulez, Scelsi and Radulescu. My book The Versatile Clarinet came out in 2006 and I have contributed chapters to a number of books including the Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet and the Cambridge History of Musical Performance.

research

research expositions

  • Playing the unplayable - Horatiu Radulescu (2020) author(s): Roger Heaton published in: Norwegian Academy of Music
    Romanian/French composer Horațiu Rădulescu (1942–2008) might superficially be thought of as part of the French spectral group with Grisey, Murail and others, but spectralism is a very broad church and Radulescu’s work, as he states, radically transforms compositional technique away from treating sound from the outside, organising sounds produced in traditional ways; rather, he explores the possibility of sound’s autonomy, of ‘entering the sound’. Rădulescu’s music from the late 1960s onwards is built from sound situations created by different treatments of fundamentals, the spectra produced by these treatments, and the isolation of individual spectra. The music evolves ‘naturally’ from the initial organisation of sound sources and formal structures, its interest lying in the interaction of the resulting harmonics, difference tones, sub-tones, rhythmic beats, and so on. The material of music is no longer the manipulation of pitch and rhythm but a ‘living matter’ that Rădulescu calls ‘sound plasma’. As an example of Rădulescu’s work, this exposition presents an analysis from the performer’s point of view of The Inner Time for solo clarinet (1983), illuminating the challenges posed by attempting to realise this score in performance. The piece, lasting 28 minutes, is composed in 137 modules or ‘aural filters’ notated as microtonal frequencies. The clarinettist uses multiphonics, harmonics and what Rădulescu calls ‘yellow tremoli’ (trills on one pitch, colour trills, bisbigliando) following notated rhythmic patterns where pitches are split apart and the harmonics explored individually, then building and layering on top of each other.
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