Release Date: August 9, 2019
Catalog #: NV6241
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Chamber
Clarinet
Piano
Violin

Lachlan Skipworth

Lachlan Skipworth composer

Akiko Miyazawa violin
Aleksandar Madžar piano
Ashley William Smith clarinet, bass clarinet
Anna Pokorny cello
Bella Hristova clarinet
Ben Caddy viola
Emily Green-Armytage piano
James Guan piano
Jon Tooby cello
Kate Sullivan violin
Louise Devenish marimba, psalterphone
Umberto Clerici cello

Can you satisfy God with one sound? This question was repeatedly posed to Lachlan Skipworth by his shakuhachi teacher during a three-year period of intensive study in Japan. It sparked a deep exploration of cross-cultural aesthetics that finds expression in this self-titled Navona Records album. At the beginning of each shakuhachi lesson, student and master begin by repeatedly playing a single note on the end-blown bamboo flute. This focuses their minds on core questions of technique: “have I made progress? Am I closer to mastery of this, shakuhachi’s most fundamental note?”

A focus on fundamentals permeates this collection of chamber works composed by Skipworth, a rising star in Australian contemporary music. In the first moments of the Clarinet Quintet, listeners are drawn into his unique sound world with its cascade of angular string entries. Against this, the round cool tone of the main clarinet line articulates, expanding slowly from a single note into the beautiful and at times dramatic melodic line. It sets the scene for the rest of the album, which includes works that reflect traits of the shakuhachi’s honkyoku repertoire; a palindromic reverse-canon evoking Reichian phasing; propulsive, Shostakovich-esque melodies; and meditative explorations in using silence as texture that is indebted to the principles of classical Japanese aesthetics.

There may not be an answer to whether God can be satisfied with one sound. Listeners, however, will be drawn into Skipworth’s innovative and singular musical language in this meditative and original collection of works.

Listen

Hear the full album on YouTube

Artist Information

Lachlan Skipworth

Composer

Hailed by The Australian as possessing a “rare gift as a melodist” and by Limelight as expressing “both exquisite delicacy and tremendous power,” Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth writes across the mediums of orchestral, chamber, vocal, and experimental music. His vivid musical language is colored by three years spent in Japan where his immersion in the study of the shakuhachi bamboo flute inevitably became a part of his muse.