Today's musical closer concerns a clarinet player who's unlike any other clarinet player. For one thing, Evan Ziporyn has been composing since he was 10 years old. Ziporyn's new album features his clarinet, and his clarinet alone. And, as Jill Kaufman reports, his main inspirations are the "gamelans," or percussion ensembles, of Indonesia.

Evan Ziporyn: That's not the most attractive sound in the world but it showed me there was just a world of sound in there. Jill Kaufman: According to Evan Ziporyn, all you have to do to radically change the sound of the clarniet is peek into its cracks. That means, he says, do the things to it you weren't taught to do.

EZ: If you just started alterning the way that you blew into the instrument, you could bring out some of the hidden notes in the instrument, and get some really amazing sounds.

JK: Ziporyn is a professor of music at MIT in Boston, and he's one of the foremonst performers of Gamelan music in the United States. Gamelan is the ancient tuned percussion music of Java and Bali. Ziporyn once lived in Bali and he says the music has influenced his approach to the clarinet.

EZ: Alot of times what I do when I hear Gamelon is I kind of retune it in my head, so that it aproxmates a western tuning.

JK: Ziporyn says what seems normal on the gamelon becomes very stange on the clarinet and that's what he likes about it.

EZ: One of the things that attracted me to balinese music and to balinese culture was that the music was very challenging in a certain sense, but it was also people's music. Just regular folks that did it and people knew about it in the villages. It was part of village life. I always had this sense that I felt that music has to fit in to society, it has to be a part of social life, or it's meaningless; you're just sitting in a room somewhere. It's like stamp collecting if you don't connect to people.

JK: In the piece called Honshirabe, Ziporyn diverges from the straight ahead approach of clarinet playing. He wrote this piece based on Japanese flute compostion.

EZ: That music is very concerned with subtle gradations in tone quality. So, I just looked for fingerings and ways of playing that would take a very simple melody and turn it into something much more focused on sound.

JK: Evan Ziporyn's not the only musician translating music from around the world through the clarinet, and he doesn't think of himself as an innovator. But his latest work is unique. Solo clarinet albums are not common and he admits, he's not sure he'd want to listen to it either! Ziporyn has named his most recent album, "This is Not a Clarinet." The title comes from the Rene Magrite Painting "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" which translates as "this is not a pipe" and indeed for Magrite it was not. It's a picture of a pipe. Ziporyn says his pipe, or clarinet, is really not a pipe, and for that matter is really not a clarinet.

Jill Kaufman