Looking Ears (1972) for bass clarinet, piano and soundtracks

Looking Ears is a dialogue between eyes and ears. The soundtracks on tape hold suggestions of sounding subjects and situations from our environment, which succeed each other as a kind of imagination of a cartoon and which have been made resonant electronically. They strongly remind us of … but don 't exist in reality. When listening a feeling of contradiction arises. The instruments play a connecting part in this. Looking Ears reflects to me words full of hope of the brain-physician and Nobel Prize winner, Sir John Eccles, who said: "There's no such thing as sound or light or colour in the world. These are just electro-magnetic vibrations, ordinary photons. They're just purely physical things, but in order to perceive them as sound, light, smell, taste or pain, all this is created out of brain; events by some mysterious process that we don't understand".

(from the sleeve notes of the CD Looking Ears 2)

A kind of comical note can be heard in the music. Sounds from our daily environment – e.g. water, birds, wind, a radio signal and a beating heart – are all imitated electronically. This, along with the bass clarinet and piano, creates a strange connection, a type of surrealism in the music.

Commissioned by the BUMA Cultural Fund.

(from the Music Information Centre Donemus MuziekGroep Nederland)