JAVS Summer 2021

melodies. The long notes pass back and forth to become one melodic line, the accented notes another, and the fast passagework is not about microtonal precision, but singing expressively as if they were ornaments. Listening back to our first performance, we were shocked at the sonic result. We clearly knew the nuts and bolts of our own parts, yet in a recording we could no longer identify what was my viola and what was Maya’s violin. Behzadi morphed andPlay into one super-instrument that sighed, cried, pleaded, and exploded over fifteen minutes. This work represents our “more than” principle as the violin and viola are no longer separate entities. Instead, Behzadi established a new form of virtuosity by seamlessly merging the two instruments, requiring the performers to simultaneously create multiple, interlocked lyrical lines.

our vocabulary to widen the possibilities of sounds and timbres that we can produce on our instruments. These contemporary sound worlds have equal value to the ones we’ve been trained to play all our lives; therefore, they must be approached with the same amount of attention to detail, intention, and specificity that we would use to interpret a phrase of Bach or Brahms. While not all of our commissioned works include extended techniques, we choose to work with composers who take an integrated approach when using extended techniques in their compositional language. In 2013 we commissioned David Bird (b. 1990) to write Bezier , a work that has since become a keystone of our repertoire. Our collaboration began with a workshop where Bird recorded us improvising sounds that we enjoyed making and also working off of prompts from Bird, like “sound like a dial-up modem” (which probably only means something to readers born before 1995). At the end of the day, Bird walked away with hours of material which he whittled down into a brief lexicon of sounds that were mainly simple extended techniques like a short scratch behind the bridge, or a col legno ricochet. In Bezier , he used this vocabulary as literal

2. Extended techniques as intentional, not “sprinkles”

As players of contemporary music, we spend a lot of time working on and exploring extended techniques. But the term “extended techniques” can be a bit of a pet peeve for us. We don’t view these as special effects, or something that can be sprinkled onto a piece as a final flourish. Instead, these techniques have simply extended

Figure 1. An excerpt of the key for David Bird’s Bezier, describing the extended technique notation.

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 37, 2021 Online Issue

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