Push Process

Details:
for Flute, Bb Clarinet, and Piano
13 minutes

Written for and premiered by Alex Carpenter at Southern Illinois University; 2018. Revised in 2019.

About the work:
Push Process takes its name from a film developing technique in which film is overdeveloped in order to compensate for underexposure. The three elided movements represent an image coming into focus in the process of developing a photograph; the darkest colors appear first, followed by the vague semblance of form, and lastly the detail of an image. This process mirrors the form of this work. The first movement takes a single harmony as its core material, the second movement develops that idea into a harmonic progression implemented as a passacaglia, and the last movement creates a melodic fragment that is then developed and manipulated to create intricate detail. The three movements are played without a grand pause until the image is fully formed.