The Copenhagen Clarinet Choir is based in Copenhagen but is a pan-European sextet led by the classically trained Irish woodwind player and composer Carolyn Goodwin and features Danish Anders Banke, Maria Dybbroe and Henriette Groth, Italian Francesco Bigoni and German Jonas Engel. Organism is the debut album from Copenhagen Clarinet Choir, and its aesthetics are situated at the intersection of composition and improvisation, and at the nexus of nature and music. This ensemble adopts an egalitarian approach and its music is based on interdependent parts that find an overall, organic shape as a living entity, offering something greater than the sum of its parts.
The Copenhagen Clarinet Choir operates like a chamber choir, and the individual voices of the six homogenous instruments are synergized, creating a warm, pulsating body of sound. Goodwin adds that this choir allows its sound to dissolve into a combined entity, inspired by her Irish roots and culture with its strong sense of community. The choir explores the clarinet as an extension of the body through breath, fingering and posture, creating an intimate and tangible physical connection between the six musicians, as well as compositional ideas within the field of improvised music.
The compositions of Goodwin – the title piece, the two parts of «Flocking», «Hive Mind» and «Water Piece», experiment with a quiet, meditative drone that slowly morphs into a busy, talkative choir, the delicate, cooperative sonic patterns of swarming insects, the elaborate flight maneuvers of birds, and the gentle, cyclical flow of subaquatic streams. She devised these compositions with elastic structures, allowing the choir to take risks, move and stretch its outlines, and even overflow. Banke, Bigoni, Dybbroe, Goodwin and Groth’s «Three movements» suggests three minimalist and options, the first and the third ones offer an almost static, hypnotic entity, and the second one is based on repetitive patterns. The last piece, «An Old Song, Re-Sung», is based on a beautiful and touching Irish traditional melody that has been set to text by William Butler Yeats, «Down by the Salley Gardens», stressing again the impressive, living organism essence of The Copenhagen Clarinet Choir.
Eyal Hareuveni
Anders Banke (cl), Francesco Bigoni (cl), Maria Dybbroe (cl), Jonas Engel (cl), Carolyn Goodwin (cl), Henriette Groth (cl)
