Piece for solo flute (or solo clarinet) and tape. It was written for Gudrun Racine and inspired by a poem by her son, Renaud, in which he writes about the time of waking when he is transported from one world to another by a crow. The tape uses Renaud's voice reading his own poem, flute sounds and crow sounds, and was realised together with Gerald Bennett at the Bourges Studio for Experimental Music. The proportions of the piece are derived from the proportions of the poem. While working on the formal aspects of this piece I discovered what I call Abelian Form (see below).
Krähenalles has been performed a number of times: as part of the collective piece Das Durchbeissen by Gerald Bennett and his associates, and also as a piece in its own right by Gudrun Racine at the Zurich Conservatory and in Christchurch by Susan Hayes, clarinet.
I considered briefly the possibility of having it performed as a "Music-Theatre" piece:
Was macht die Krähe, die ich in das obere Ende meines Schlafturms hineinragen sehe? Sie holt mich aus der Welt in die Welt in die Welt aus der Welt. Ich bin wo und niergends. Die Krähe ist dort und sitzt oder fliegt und kräht. Ich krähe.
What is the crow doing, which I see at the top end of my sleep-tower looming in? It fetches me out of the world into the world into the world out of the world. I am somewhere and nowhere. The crow is there and sits or flies and crows. I crow.
Kit wrote a perfectly marvelous piece Krähenalles … for clarinet and tape accompaniment, full of crow noises and beautiful, long streaks of sound holding them together. We performed [it] at 11 PM on a summer evening that June (1982) in the large park behind the famous Bourges cathedral…
It was magic: Andres Müller played the clarinet wonderfully from a brightly lit white bandstand, while the accompaniment of crows and exquisite sounds derived from flute and clarinet came from loudspeakers placed near and far all through the pitch-black woods of the park.
Gerald Bennett
Krähenalles has seven sections whose durations are derived from proportions in the poem. Each section is divided into seven subsections in the same proportions as those of the whole piece. The large sections are labeled in the score with roman numerals and the subsections with arabic. In general the material of, say, subsection II 7 is the same as that of VII 2. That this is not always the case is due in large part to the overlapping of some sections; e.g. section III overlaps section IV and part of section V.
If one calls these numbers seconds it makes for a very long piece—much longer than I felt I wanted. I therefore decided to allow the very long sections to overlap with one another.