After many years of work, Lex Leto x The Christine Burke Ensemble are about to release an album: I am here but I must go. We spent some time discussing the long process that led us here. 

Pre-order the album and get the whole thing on 2/7: https://lexleto.bandcamp.com/album/i-am-here-but-i-must-go-3

Come to the album release show at Close House in Iowa City on 2/8: https://www.publicspaceone.com/events/llxcbe

Find all the old iHearIC stuff at ihearic.com, and stay subscribed to Rock Hard Caucus to get future podcast episodes. There's a patreon too where I upload lots of improvised music: https://patreon.com/ihearic

https://rockhardcauc.us

iHearIC Radio

iHearIC Radio 141 with Lex Leto and Christine Burke (2/1/2025)

grandFather (2012-14) for amplified bassoon
by Chris Fisher-Lochhead

Ben Roidl-Ward, bassoon
Galvin Hall, Northwestern University
January 22, 2016

grandFather (Premiere)

Unknown Album (10/25/2007 4:30:28 PM)

Alvin Singleton - Et Nunc

It may not be anything for recorder, cello, piano 4 hands
어쩌면 아무것도 아닐지 몰라

Apr 16, 2017 - Seoul, J's CAVE
작곡을 전공한 서른 언저리의 이들은 무엇을 하는가 - 첼로와 리코더를 중심으로
Hyowon Lee, Recorder(S/A)
Jee Won Kang. Violoncello 
Sangwook Lee, Semin Shon, Piano

I have always wanted to deny myself made from my time and memories for the very reason. I also have wanted a certain orientation of who I am being to be gone , which would free me from it. I have wanted my imaginations to float in the midst of isolation, independent of their history. I have wanted abstractiveness and concreteness of music to go their own way separately so to be far from each other. I have wanted the distance between them would make large room enough for everything to be free and encounter in it, which would lead to disappearance of any conscious identities of them and it would make an existence between of being music or not. No control have I wanted. Any attempts to contol must have no impacts on their being. Concerntraing on sound got me to my own imagination that its temporality and temporality would be movable on thire relationship. That might be a little proof about a potential relationship of music and sound. An experiment leads to another one, which makes me feel alive.

시간과 기억이 만든 나의 존재를 그렇기에 나는 부정하고 싶었다. 나의 방향은 사라지길 바랬고, 그럼으로 자유하길 원했다. 나의 상상은 그것의 역사와의 단절로 고독하게 부유하길 원했다. 음악이 가지고 있는 추상성과 구체성은 그들의 한계를 향해 가길 원하고 그 둘은 서로 먼 존재가 되길 바랬다. 그 멂처럼 음악이라는 틀 안에 모든 것들이 자유롭길 원했고 다시금 상쇄되길 바랬다. 그럼으로 인지에 의한 정체성은 사라지고 음악이면서 음악이지 않은 그 사이적 형태로 존재하길 난 갈망했다. 컨트롤 하고 싶지 않았다. 어쨌든 어떠하든 존재하는거라면 말이다. 소리에 집중하다 그것의 공간성과 시간성이 소리세계 위에서 서로 상호적으로 움직일 수 있겠다는 개인적 상상을 해보았다. 그것은 어쩌면 앞으로의 음악과 소리의 잠재성에 대한 작은 증거일 수 있다. 실험은 또 다른 실험이 될 것이고 그것은 나의 삶이 살아있음을 느끼게 한다.

It may not be anything for recorder, violoncello and piano 4 hands (2017)

Chicago Civic Orchestra Composers Project. 

Trio 1: Gordon Daole-Wellman (clarinet), Matt Baker (trumpet), Matt Kibort (percussion/EBow+Guitar)

Trio 2: Maria Arrua (violin), Kip Riecken (viola), Kenji Sasaki ('cello)

Composer's Project 2017

from the signal (2017)

Performed by TALEA Ensemble 
Live recording from DiMenna Center for Classical Music, New York City, NY, USA, August 1st, 2017. 
Produced by The Earle Brown Music Foundation, recorded during the TIME SPANS 2017 Festival

Discursive Unities [2017]

Performance by Longleash trio
Recording by Chris Kincaid

score video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqTRB0bQjQw&t=541s

PROGRAM NOTE
Pietà was written during the Spring and Summer of 2017 for Pala Garcia, John Popham and Renate Rohlfing for the Loretto Festival 2017.

Our father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come. 
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
…

Pour the unhappiness out
From your too bitter heart,
Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.
It is in the water of tears
Its black blooms rise.
…

“…I’m tired now.
Sometimes I talk too much. That’s happiness.”
…

Give us this day our daily bread…

(Fragments from: Lord’s Prayer – English vernacular version, Another Weeping Woman – Wallace Stevens, Three Views of a Mother – John Ciardi)

Pietà (piano trio)

for uilleann pipes and string quartet aka the brilliant Pádraic Keane and ConTempo Quartet!

something like light but not (string quartet and uilleann pipes)

Szilárd Benes, clarinet
Sehyung Kim, piano

Sijo_011115 [version for clarinet and piano] (2016)

SLEEPCHAINS

Who can sleep when she - 
hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
fan her restless decks.
Cicatrice by cicatrice
all the links
rattle once.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

- Anne Carson, "Sleepchains" from Decreation

Live performance by Bearthoven
Karl Larson, piano
Pat Swoboda, bass
Matt Evans, percussion
http://www.bearthoven.com

Sleepchains

performed by Mivos Quartet May 2, 2019 at Northwestern University

1. 
In 2015, musician Nick Cave’s son Arthur died suddenly at age 15. Below is an excerpt from Cave’s response to a fan’s letter asking whether he and his wife felt that Arthur was still somehow in contact with them.
 
"… Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed."
 
2.
In the wake of a traumatic or negative experience, we often engage in counterfactual thinking in which we imagine how changes in our own behavior might have resulted in a different outcome. Although this can seem futile (dwelling on the past cannot change it), counterfactuals can provide an opportunity to consider how we can change our future behavior in order to avoid negative outcomes.   
 
3. 
Each time we recall a memory, that memory is rewritten. This allows imperfections in the recollection to be incorporated into the new version of that memory. The more we recall a memory, the more opportunities that memory has to be corrupted so that our most-frequently revisited memories can also become our most-heavily revised. 
 
My piece Trails Bright Phantoms explores these ideas of imagined alternate outcomes and rewritten memories, dwelling on a musical object as its wake takes different forms across repeated iterations.

from the signal (2017)

Christine Burke

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