David Bithell

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Transcriptions and Arrangements

Below I have highlighted some of my recent transcription projects.  Some of these are arrangements done for practical
reasons, but most are creative transcriptions in which I intend to give a new interpretation of the original composition.
Katajjaq à 6 instrumental composition inspired by traditional "throat games" of the Inuit.
This piece is another in a series of transcription projects that sfSound has undertaken over the last few years.  In this case, the subject isn't taken from contemporary classical music but, instead, from a traditional vocal practice of the Inuit peoples of Canada.  Katajjaq is a genre of vocal game often referred to by outsiders as "throat games" due to the guttural sounds that make up the timbral gamut.

Two women sit or stand facing each other and create a complex interlocking texture of inhaled and exhaled sounds - as one woman is making sounds exhaling the other is making sounds ingressively. 

As a group we have attempted to collectively find an instrumental equivalent for these vocal techniques.  The form is meant to explore pre-determined as well as improvised interlocking games.
 
sfSound premiered this arrangement on June 26th, 2006 at the ODC Theater in San Francisco.



Entr'acte composed in 1924 by Erik Satie to accompany a film by René Clair.
This was a practical arrangement, done so that sfSound would be able to present this amazing work.  I transcribed outward from Satie's solo piano version of the piece but made no attempts to duplicate the orchestration of the original (of which I only had recordings).  The final arrangement was for Ob, Cl, 2 Tpts, Tbn, Pno, 2 Vlns, and Cb.
 
sfSound premiered this arrangement on August 1st, 2005 at the ODC Theater in San Francisco alongside a projection of the René Clair film.

View the score (.pdf)                         Listen to .mp3 (~18MB)



Three Voices creative transcription for instrumental sextet of Morton Feldman's composition.
The methods used in creating an instrumental version of this piece came rather fluidly from materials I found in the original.  I took the idea of "three voices" to mean "three lines".  For the most part only three people are playing at one time, but the lines slowly evolve throughout the ensemble.  Patterns of repetition are usually played out in corresponding patterns of orchestration.  Similarly, I have mapped out the rather loose uses of localized structure (e.g. repetitions and retrogrades of metric patterns) using loosely formed structures of my own.

The most obvious choice that we had to make was what to do with the text – sparingly used portions from Frank O'Hara's "Wind".  I was inspired by the technique used by traditional zither players in Burundi.  The player whispers a text in time with the zither – blending the two and making the whisper sound like an eerie half-voiced singing.  While the result is quite different using the instruments in this arrangement, there is still some of the ghost-like quality that seems to match with the original intent of the work.

Premiered by sfSound on September 25, 2005 at the Community Music Center in San Francisco.  The full instrumentation was: 2 vlns (David Ryther and Erik Ulman), cl (Matt Ingalls), a sax (John Ingle), and 2 tpts (Tom Dambly and David Bithell).

Listen to Excerpts (.mp3)



Laborintus III  a “re-compositional” transcription and homage to Luciano Berio.
This was a large-scale collaboration with Matt Ingalls, Chris Burns and the sfSoundGroup that was realized in Spring 2004.  Using techniques similar to Berio's Mahler movement from "Sinfonia", we used the composition Laborintus II as a skeleton to which we affixed 50+ quotations selected from Berio's complete works.






Experimental Music Theater Compositions

Instrumental Music Compositions

Transcriptions and Arrangements

List of selected compositions (.pdf)