Using only sounds from cicadas that come every 17 years

Neon Scenes (excerpt)

1942 was a pivotal year for Harry Partch. After more than a decade of obscure but steadfast devotion to his unique musical vision, his bold move from the idyllic isolation of California’s Big Sur to the busy streets of Chicago brought him new recognition, putting him before a series of audiences across the Northeast. Those performances were the springboard that soon catapulted him onto the stage of Carnegie Hall, the pages of the New York Times, and eventually secured his place in the pantheon of great 20th Century composers.
Luckily, one presentation of his radically new “Speech Music” was recorded at the Eastman School of Music. These long lost direct-to-disc recordings reveal not only a charismatic lecturer but also a powerful performer, able to transform his arcane theories into captivating music. These are the earliest recordings of this unforgettable repertoire—including Partch’s only solo recording of his famed hitchhiker saga Barstow—captured in stunningly intimate detail. The Grammy winning author & producer traces the composer's arduous steps, aided by facsimiles of his letters, scores, and rare photographs, revealing Partch's tenacious wit, dark sense of humor, and above all, his unfailing creative genius.

1 True Vs. Tempered

Random Dance for Computer Generated Sound (output 001)
Seq 1: init.
Seq 2: Polyphony
Seq 3: Rhythm
Seq 4: Chord
Seq 5: Chord Random Walk
Seq 6: Root Random Walk
Seq 7: Granular Synthesis
Seq 8: Ring Modulation 
Seq 9: RM with Random Walk with random gap
Seq 10: Final total Random Walk!

Random Dance is an (microtonal) algorithmic composition played by a computer with an ideal imaginary piano which plays frequencies, not the tuned pitches.
Inspired by the molecular Brownian motion and also by adopting the random-walk algorithm in mathematics to the SuperCollider code directly, the computer generates different shapes, colors, and movements of frequency particles each time it is played, which reminds me of dancing gaseous molecules or crazy stars. Here I upload one of those, and it is made up with 10 movements, named as “sequences” in the original code. This is a mono version.

Random Dance (2015) for Computer Generated Sound (output 001)

longing is an aviary (2023) for orchestra
 
This work draws its title from Ross Gay’s poem “Because,” which depicts longing with an evocative catalogue of images which are quivering, luminous, and full of motion. I explore this same trembling effect in a series of tightly controlled, virtuosic dances for orchestra which spiral outwards from a single pitch. This music is driven by a kaleidoscopic sense of color, a process of refracting and unwinding, and a momentum which eventually builds into a frenzied, shimmering aviary of birds. longing is an aviary was written for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, conducted by Tim Weiss in Spring 2023.

Performed April 2023 by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and conductor Tim Weiss, Symphony Center, Chicago, IL. Mixed and mastered by Marc Alletag.

Special thanks to Jonathan McCormick and Anna Thompson

Image: 'Aviary' by Annie Davidson

longing is an aviary (2023) for orchestra

“More than 20 years ago, the music critic John Rockwell described Ben Johnston in the New York Times as “one of the best non-famous composers this country has to offer.” What has changed is that Johnston is now, I’d suggest, our BEST non-famous composer.” – Mark Swed, LA Times
In this exquisite chamber music recital, Ben Johnston sets the provocative texts of Rumi [the medieval mystic Sufi poet] in the pure tunings & modes of the Middle East. While THE TAVERN tells of an initiate, intoxicated with the possibilities of a new spiritual life, PARABLE offers a delightful story about a Mouse & a Frog. Rumi uses the time-honored technique of teaching by example, using the relationship between these two tiny creatures, one of the land and the other of the water, to reveal truths about the human experience.
REVISED STANDARDS – Inspired by the midcentury songbook of Billie Holiday, Johnston tells us, “In jazz improvisation, the soloist has very great freedom to play with intonation…In my just-tuned jazz, spontaneity is disciplined in a new way so that all players are creating both melodic and harmonic microtonal innovation that can vary greatly in how it affects the listener, but always innovates in both melody and harmony.”
All of these premiere recordings are performed in Just Intonation.
“Stunning” — LA Times

Ben Johnston - The Tavern | A Children's Game

Ben Johnston - The Tavern | Community Of The Spirit

Ben Johnston - The Tavern | Who Says Words With My Mouth

Ben Johnston - The Tavern | Prelude

Misprints is influenced by the third cantos from a novel written by Nabokov called Pale Fire, a literary work that is part poetry and part prose.  In the third cantos, the character John Shade has a near death experience and sees a “tall white fountain.” He later reads in a magazine about a woman who came close to death, also claiming to have seen a “tall white fountain,” but soon comes to discover that the woman’s account in the magazine was a misprint, learning that in actuality the woman saw a “tall white mountain.” 

If a question is translated into a different language, words sometimes are misprinted and change meaning, yet the question still retains the understanding that it is a question. Therefore, if a Bach cello suite is played on viola, does it still ascribe to the same meaning?  This implies that rather than text (sound source), just like the words mountain and fountain, texture (sound qualities) plays more of a significance.  

This piece is conceived using string sounds to emulate the different worlds of poem and prose.  In Misprints, I attempt to sonically resemble the contrast between poetic and prose structures in terms of having music material phrased as a pseudo-poem that resolves as well as abruptly changes to different environments, versus music material phrased as proses, which sonically resemble a continuous flow of iterations.  The iterations of string sounds become less apparent to their sources and dissolve into a texture of gestalt spaces.  As the piece progresses, the flow is interrupted by a constant change of different sound environments with delayed reverbs imitating sounds of the cinema, in which case the cinema is a misprint of reality.  Both poem and prose become “textures interlinked” to develop a “web of senses.”

Misprints

performed by Robin Meiksins (Summer 2018)

Transcription/ Microwave Popcorn was composed for flautist Robin Meiskins for the occasion of a University of Illinois Group for New Music event. The first incarnation of this work was premiered by Meiskins on 1/20/18 in Urbana Illinois at the culminating concert of this event. This is a revised version of the work.

	Microwave Popcorn, as the title suggests, involves the  transcription (in this case, mostly rhythms/ durations - converted to pitch frequencies via reciprocal of those durations as wavelengths) of popcorn popping in a microwave. The musical structure of this process is fairly straightforward and to me, the aural image is associated with joy and anticipation. I have been interested for some time in instrumental re-synthesis and computer-assisted transcription as part of an algorithmic compositional approach. The unique opportunity and circumstance for which this piece was originally composed provided an opportunity to do this kind of musical ‘still’-life.

Microwave Popcorn (for flute solo)

For an earlier work, I recorded microwave popcorn popping as a transcription source for a work for flute. This current piece explores that original recording as its source material with a focus on aural ‘imagery,’ hence, MicrowaveTelevision. The former work was more about psychological associations, complexity, and translation/transcription. Here it is possibly a commentary on consumerism and what is sold as progress. It might be about the nature of entertainment, the interfacing of technology and culture, and how it connects to our humanity, though it also evokes screens, radiation, and industrial waste.

Microwave Television (stereo fixed-media)

I try to write music that is oriented around acoustical phenomena and virtuosic classical performance practice. Please visit my website for more details.

Random Dance (2015) for Computer Generated Sound (output 001)

DONGRYUL LEE, Composer

Related tracks