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Score title
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The Flight of the Brave Chicken: Ode to Nina
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Composer
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Shulamit Ran
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Date
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2018
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Instrumentation
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Flute, clarinet
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Other versions
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El Muro was composed with the generous support of The American Bandmasters Association/The University of Florida Commissioning Project. The title is Spanish for “the wall.” At a purely musical level, the walI imagined is a ten-minute long sound structure made up of tightly woven riffs, each suggesting a different style of Latin American music. Some of the styles I suggest are the Colombian cumbia, the Peruvian huayno, the Mexican son, the Cuban montuno, to name a few. My goal was to personalize these styles and to incorporate as many of them as I could without compromising the musical logic of the work. I accomplish this by deriving the riffs from variations of single folk sounding tune heard at the beginning of the work. I pace these riffs and make them interact with more abstract musical elements so as to create drama, build tension, and keep listeners guessing what comes next.
At a conceptual level, El Muro is my response to how I feel about walls, whether these walls exist in reality or in our minds. I should mention that I was raised in a South American city where most homes are surrounded by walls topped with barbed wire. To put it simply, I was raised a land of makeshift fortresses. This is how I learned early on that walls not only exist to delineate space but also to keep people away. In my own imaginary way, El Muro humanizes those people that walls keep away by connecting them to their longstanding cultural traditions. As an adult I learned that these traditions breed soulful, exciting and sometimes even influential music capable of making even the most sturdylooking wall tumble down.
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Program note
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Flute doubling piccolo
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Clarinet doubling bass clarinet
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Brave Chicken was a character developed by Nina Frenkel, gifted illustrator, graphic artist, and beloved friend to many, who passed away at the age of 43 have lost a difficult battle with cancer. Her parents, Marcel and Anne Frenkel, approached me in May 2017 about composing a short work in Nina's memory, suggesting that it be based on four delightful panels that Nina had painted in 2014 before she knew of the recurrence of the disease.
Titled "Brave Chicken Meets the Ogre," "Brave Chicken Fights the Ogre," "Brave Chicken Flees to Safety," and "Brave Chicken in the Healing Hut," the four panels depict a progression from darkness to light. And while my composition does not attempt to follow the four panels literally, I did aim to create two distinctly different musical characters who are posed against one another with one clearly perceived as dominant and threatening, and trace the evolving change in the balance of power, and with it the journey from darkness to light.
Inspired by the knowledge that Nina herself greatly enjoyed playing the clarinet, I decided to pair bass clarinet with piccolo, eventually switching the piccolo over to flute, with clarinet appearing in time for the work's peaceful conclusion. Though I had never met Nina, I felt honored to compose this work in her memory.
Shulamit Ran
