liveoak – a short film and music composition by Tyler Kline скачать в хорошем качестве

liveoak – a short film and music composition by Tyler Kline

liveoak (2020/2025) Film and music by Tyler Kline. Performed by clarinetist Mandi Bearjar. Audio recorded by Gabriel L. Newvine at Penn State University, State College, PA. Learn more at https://www.tylerklinemusic.com _________________ About the film _________________ In the spring of 2025, a storm brought down an already-dead Persian silk tree in our yard. When it was alive, this tree would bloom with the loveliest fragrance. My wife and I even got married beneath it, in our backyard. After clearing away most of the fallen limbs, we were left with a tipped-over stump about four feet in length. Through trial, error, and experimentation, that stump became the central subject of this film. There are no live oaks in this short film, despite its title. But the imagery reflects what I imagined while composing "liveoak:" soil, roots, bark, leaves, canopy – and, eventually, a slow withdrawal upward into the sky. The film traces that evolution across the course of a single day, in a way that mirrors how the composition unfolds through musical material. Certain shots return again and again – slightly brighter, or dimmed with dusk – revealing change over time. Maybe inadvertently, the film has also come to reflect something about my own creative process and where I find myself now. It’s an attempt to lean into an impulse I can no longer ignore: to create work that invites observation and slow noticing. In that way, this is both a memorial for the tree that once stood here – and a visual companion to a piece of music I wrote several years ago. _________________ About the music _________________ Live oaks are a species of evergreen oak trees that grow throughout the world, and are primarily found in the Southern parts of the United States. These trees live for hundreds of years, and sometimes reach over a thousand-years old, producing massive, sprawling limbs. liveoak is a work for solo clarinet that is about transience: evolving from one state of nature to another, on both micro and macro levels. As the title suggests, the piece is also meant to reflect the general shape of a tree from top to bottom. For example, the slow, longtone-based introduction, with sliding tones and quarter-tone pitches, is meant to represent the roots of a tree, buried under the earth. As the piece goes on, the pitch rises, and there is added clarity to the clarinet tone. Various melodic lines mirror the curving branches of a live oak, and delicate tremolos represent leaves of the tree. Changes occur generally over the course of the entire piece (I see the piece as one continuous movement from beginning to end), but also note to note and line by line. While musical material isn’t overtly repeated between sections, small gestures are intended to duplicate themselves into larger structures in a fractal-like way. liveoak is a piece that fits into a larger body of my work inspired by the natural world, and also Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese worldview that values transience, impermanence, and imperfection. It is the result of a commissioning consortium of 51 clarinetists and supporters, led by commissioner Alexander W. Ravitz.