Five Fragments: for prepared contrabass clarinet & prepared alto saxophone

Five Fragments is a collection of works for prepared or enhanced instruments exploring variation technique and polyphony. The first piece of the cycle (not included in this album) was created as a companion piece to J.S. Bach’s Partita in B Minor for Solo Violin, specifically focusing on the doubles, or variations, that Bach provided for each movement. Unlike Bach, Méndez takes a highly abstract approach to the concept of variation, constructing the works in Five Fragments as sets of five “modules” or fragments, each of which is conceived as a variation of sorts on a non-existent or imaginary original. These fragments, which can be performed in any order, play with a fixed set of sounds and gestures, including motives derived from the names of artists who inspired the cycle (Bach, naturally, but also Cage and Cash, after John Cage and Johnny Cash). In Méndez’s words, the effect of the pieces of Five Fragments is one of witnessing “scattered fragments of a fictional whole, as if the fragments were remnants or debris from something larger.”
In Five Fragments for Prepared Contrabass Clarinet and Alto Saxophone, the saxophonist introduces additional layers of sound by scraping and hitting a spring drum inserted into the instrument’s bell.