This site is home to Alea Publishing & Recording, specializing in music for the bass clarinet.
We offer a growing catalog of creative, artistic transcriptions and new works for bass clarinet solo & ensemble.
Václav Kucera (1929-2017) was a Czech composer of international stature. After studies in Prague and Moscow, Kucera served several important roles with Czech Radio, the Union of Czech Composers, and the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In 1975 he was appointed to the chair of composition at the Prague Academy of Musical Arts.
Kucera made significant contributions to the bass clarinet repertoire, largely through his collaborations with the great Czech bass clarinet & piano duo, Due Boemi di Praga. For them he wrote Duodramma (1967), Invariant (1969), Tabu (1971) and Prague Ritornelles (1986). Metathesis (1998) and this work, Hidden Light, were both dedicated to Michael Davenport.
Hidden Light is a single-movement work for solo bass clarinet, about 12 minutes in duration. The composer makes frequent use of flutter-tonguing, as well as more occasional use of slap-tonguing, shouting into the instrument, and multiphonics. As is common of Kucera's works for the bass clarinet, he makes use of the instrument's full range, utilizing both the extended-range down to low C and the altissimo register. This manuscript publication allows the performer to view the composer's original notation, along with explanatory notes. 7 pages.
PDF Edition
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Kim Davenport
President
Duo Alea, the father-daughter duo of Michael and Kimberly Davenport, began performing music for bass clarinet and piano in 1996. As performers searching for new repertoire and teachers working with students eager to develop as performers, it quickly became clear that there was a need for more repertoire featuring the bass clarinet. Filling this need became the mission of Alea Publishing & Recording.
Since our first publication in 1997, the Alea catalog has now grown to include over 300 titles. We pride ourselves on the accuracy and quality of our sheet music, as well as our ability to ship directly to customers around the world.
We are proud of the diversity of our catalog in terms of the inclusion of works by composers and arrangers from around the world. We are interested in continuing to expand this diversity, representing musical ideas from around the world.
Following Michael's passing in 2019, Kim has taken over solo management of Alea Publishing. In 2020, Alea established the Dolphy Prize, an annual composition award for new works for bass clarinet by black composers.
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