for percussion trio

Instrumentation: three bass drums, each prepared with six electric bass strings, vibrators, aluminum foil, and coins

premiered and commissioned by line upon line percussion: Adam Bedell, Cullen Faulk, Matthew Teodori

Program note: 

The internet is ubiquitous but largely experienced as immaterial. Often it is experienced like a ghost or spirit; an invisible, ethereal animating force rapidly reshaping what we think of as reality.
While learning about the United States National Security Agency’s global spying program, exposed by Edward Snowden, I was struck by the descriptions of the physical infrastructure that makes the internet function. I knew nothing about the fiber optic cables buried at the bottom of the ocean which allow the internet to function across continents. These extremely thin cables send patterns of light across oceans, transmitting data. They create a web of wires wrapping around the world, like a sunken land-bridge. Our experiences, conversations, hopes, dreams, and intimate secrets are transmitted from one continent to another through these thin threads of light; they bind the world together in this strange, beautiful, and terrifying way.

Sunken Landscape: thread of light | for percussion trio (2020)

contact: isaac.blumfield@gmail.com

Isaac Roth Blumfield is a composer from Saint Paul, Minnesota, currently based in Basel, Switzerland. He writes experimental music for acoustic and electronic instruments which explores resonance, materiality, and memory through expanded sonic approaches towards instruments and objects. His music looks for the strange spaces between subjective and unconscious experience, exploring uncanny places between beauty, pain, and strangeness.
His music has been influenced through  through work with performers such as ensemble sonic space basel alumni, Schallfeld Ensemble, violinists Austin Wulliman and Chris Otto, line upon line percussion trio, Ensemble Modern, Barcelona Modern Ensemble, guitarist Francesco Palmieri and Jamie Monck, and Quartetto Maurice at programs such as the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, the Banff Centre for Creativity, Yellow Barn Young Artists Program, New Music on the Point, Valencia International Performance Academy, Ticino Musica Festival and Freie Universität Berlin im Sommer.  
His music has been broadcast on Swiss Public Radio and supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Fondation Nicati - De Luze, and the Hirschmann Stiftung. He graduated with his Bachelor's degree in composition at New England Conservatory in Boston and a Master's degree in composition at the Hochschule für Musik FHNW in Basel, Switzerland and is currently pursuing post graduate studies at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. His primary teachers have included Stratis Minakakis, Timothy McCormack, Caspar Johannes Walter, Svetlana Maras, and Clara Iannotta. In fall 2024, he will begin a PhD at Harvard University, studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku.