Avanti, Amico! — for clarinet, Version I

Programme note

The title may be translated simply as “Onward, Friend!” Yet these are not words spoken from the safety of the sidelines. From the very first sounds, the performer is confronted with something that seems to run against the instrument's own nature. The opening downward glissandi belong to the gestures that every clarinettist instinctively avoids. Here, however, they become the first test of character. From its opening seconds, the work offers a kind of pact: if you do not turn back after the first obstacles, we shall continue together.

The entire composition grows out of the idea of actus contra naturam—the conscious decision to act against what appears obvious, comfortable and "natural". Where the classical repertoire seeks beauty of tone, balance and effortless fluency, Avanti, Amico! deliberately moves in the opposite direction. Paradoxically, it is the four-note multiphonics—normally regarded as among the instrument's most unstable sounds—that become moments of repose and musical stillness. The work deliberately reverses the instrument's natural dramatic logic.

One of the work's hidden images is the double helix of DNA. The clarinet attempts to evoke it with a single voice: two flowing, intertwined lines that cannot, in reality, exist simultaneously. What emerges is a musical illusion of dual motion—another attempt to push beyond the instrument's physical limits.

For much of the piece, the performer may feel that the composer is deliberately leading them through a succession of seemingly impossible tasks. Technique appears to struggle against the instrument itself, while the mind quietly begins to wonder whether any of this is worth attempting at all. Only when viewed from the perspective of the complete form does it become clear that this very struggle is the true subject of the work. The point is never virtuosity for its own sake, but the continual transcendence of one's own limitations.

The origins of this musical imagination reach back long before 2003. As a teenager, I studied the clarinet for two years as a secondary instrument with Professor Norbert Gabryś. Rather than writing ideas onto manuscript paper, I spent countless hours recording experiments on Unitra and Kasprzak tape recorders: cracked notes, multiphonics, and the most flamboyant, peacock-hued colours I could coax from the instrument. At the time, I had no idea that these youthful explorations would one day become the raw material of a composition in its own right. Avanti, Amico! is therefore also an affectionate return to those earliest discoveries.

Another important source of inspiration came from my own experience as a double bassist and from Iannis Xenakis's way of thinking about instrumental writing. I became fascinated by the possibility of going beyond what an instrument accepts as its own nature, treating performance technique itself as a field of creative imagination rather than a fixed set of limitations.

Although the work was conceived for solo clarinet, I prepared a version for bass clarinet already in 2003, inspired by Toshiko Sakakibara of Ensemble Phoenix Basel. More than twenty years later, while composing Rio, mój Rio (2025), I found myself returning to many of the multiphonic ideas first explored in Avanti, Amico! In 2026 I also returned to the bass clarinet version and prepared a revised edition.

Note from the first phonographic edition (Polskie Radio Katowice, 2004)

The text below is a translation of the author’s note published in the booklet of the work’s first phonographic edition (Polskie Radio Katowice, 2004); the Polish original remains the historical source preserved in the archive.

Avanti, Amico! for solo clarinet is a virtuosic miniature whose musical material consists to a large extent of combination tones. The work was composed in the spring of 2003 and also exists in a version for bass clarinet, inspired by Toshiko Sakakibara, the outstanding clarinettist of Ensemble Phoenix Basel.