THE SKATING BEAR

Ivar Römer said about his clarinet quartet The Skating Bear, written in 1977: “Once, as a 12-year old sitting in the back of my parent’s car, I thought of a melody with ‘chord colouring’. I saw an image with it as well. It was of a winter scene of a bear happily skating around on the ice. I had for some years had a lot of fun playing the clarinet, listened to classical music and was very envious of composers like Mozart, who had written his first minuets as an 8-year old prodigy. Now, that was genius for you! Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos were also music to my ears. How on earth was it possible for someone to hear and write so many melodic lines at once? From the age of 11, I tried to put music to paper myself. How does one do that? Hearing music with one‘s inner ear, playing it on the clarinet and then trying to put it to paper … that is one way of approaching musical notation from a completely different angle. How do you write sharps and flats, rhythms time signatures, antimetric figures and so on? How many bars does a melody have anyway? Much to my joy, we bought a piano, which I could then also use for composing, allowing me to ‘control’ polyphony much better. In those days, of course, there were no computers with notation software, which meant that I was also able to develop my solfeggio. I wasn’t yet able to compose very quickly, but I took consolation from the fact that a composer such as Beethoven wrote sketchbooks full of melodies which he kept polishing until they were right.
This is how my first compositions were realized, including The Skating Bear, which was the second one, that is, opus 2! It is a happily swinging carefree little ditty, with exciting moments of pressure in the middle part, in which both the lowest as the highest notes of the clarinet are used. Because of the higher notes in the 2nd voice, an e-flat part has been added. Although a b-flat clarinet is the preferred option, the first page can also be played by an e-flat clarinet and the second page on b-flat clarinet.”

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