The Bucket Rider Part Of "Opere Della Musica Povera" by Martin Bresnick Bass Clarinet - Sheet Music

SKU: CF.CY3158F

ISBN 9780825886645. UPC: 798408086640. 11 x 14 inches.

We are pleased to make available the score of the eighth entry in Bresnick's 12-part series, Opere della Musica Povera ("works of a poor music"). Be Just! and Bucket Rider are both inspired by the writings of Kafka, but present very different moods and styles. See a YouTube performance of Be Just! by Bang on a Can, and listen to Bucket Rider at the Art of the States website.
The Bucket Rider and BE JUST! were both written in 1995 and are the seventh and eighth pieces from a group of 12 called Opere della Musica Povera, which means "works of a poor music."xa0 The Bucket Rider is the title of a Kafka story about a man who is so poor and wasted away he can ride on his empty bucket to the coal dealer to beg for coal.xa0 In Kafka's story, “In the Penal Colony”, an explorer goes to a prison camp that has an exquisite, aging apparatus that imprints on the flesh of a condemned man, by means of thousands of needles, whatever rule or commandment he has disobeyed.xa0 In this way, though the prisoner is ignorant of his sentence, he will learn it bodily.xa0 The officer in charge (who is also the judge) tells the explorer, "Guilt is never to be doubted," and places the prisoner into the machine.xa0 The explorer is unimpressed.xa0 Infuriated, the officer changes the original sentence from "HONOR THY SUPERIORS!" to "BE JUST!" and climbs into the apparatus himself.xa0 Kafka had a very complex sense of the political.xa0 He was also a pretty weird guy, and I wanted to get some of that weirdness into the music.xa0 I give myself permission to do anything in my work so long as I have a palpable structural integrity that grants the various musical utterances plausibility.xa0 That's been my goal, to get as free as I can about the means and genres in which I write, while holding them together with an internal coherence.xa0 The Opere della Musica Povera pieces reflect a politics of "Witness," a kind of personal report on my state and the nation's.xa0 There's a bit of the Three Penny Opera in them, "an opera written with the splendor that only a beggar could imagine," as Brecht said.xa0 That's part of it - to create something out of very little material and make it seem splendid: an invitation to the necessary pleasures of austerity.