The first canon of J.S. Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer is known as a “crab” canon: two voices play the famous theme and its elaboration simultaneously, one moving forward from beginning to end, the other backwards, running in reverse. They meet in the middle, exchange direction, and return to their original starting points, at which they repeat the process ad infinitum. The work is thus a Möbius Strip, possessing a moment of initiation, but no clear beginning or ending; it is a music that nullifies the arrow of time, presenting the past, present, and future simultaneously at each moment.

Canons in Entropy, commissioned by Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest and the SONICBernheim Series, is a site-specific 4-channel audio installation that uses the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester’s recording of Bach’s crab canon as its source material, both sonically and conceptually. Just as Bach constructs the work by layering the music upon itself, I proliferate this layering in an accretive process: after I present the original recording as Bach had composed it, I splice the recording in half at the midpoint and layer the two halves atop each other. I then splice it in thirds and do the same, then in fourths, fifths, and so forth, a total of 231 times. The music undergoes entropy, as its conventionally “musical” qualities — melodies, rhythms, harmonies, instrumental attacks, etc. — are eroded to a liquefied, homogenized stasis. Over the course of 11 minutes, what began as an awe-inspiring example of human sonic construction begins to bear more resemblance sound as it’s found “in the wild”: the roar of wind, the hum of insects, the enveloping din of a flock of birds. Just as Bach inverts the music in his canon’s center for it to return, symmetrically, to its starting point, so do I begin to reconstitute Canons in Entropy from its molten endpoint back to the original recording so that the cycle can perpetuate endlessly.

At Bernheim Forest, the speakers that played back the work were placed between four Norwegian fir trees along a wooden path between the parking lot and the Visitors Center. As the sounds rotated across the four speakers in various circular patterns, listeners could experience the piece from multiple vantage points and proximities. Though the stereo mix on this page presents a version of the piece from a fixed distance, listeners’ constant movements and shifts in perspective with regard to the sound sources — from close to far, centered to angled — are integral to the work’s sonic experience and its integration in Bernheim Forest’s environment. 

Special thanks to Aaron Rosenblum, Sara Soltau, Andrea Jane, and Claude Stephens for their organizational, technical, financial, and moral support, and for their innumerable contributions to sustaining adventurous art in the Louisville, KY region. 

Canons in Entropy

31 Touch Tones is played via laptop and MIDI connection to the Fokker organ. The number 31 refers to the tuning system of the Fokker organ (31 equal temperament) and the international country code for the Netherlands while “touch tones” refers to the pitches produced by pressing the individual buttons of a telephone. The piece is based on these pitches, though it was necessary in some cases to make small adjustments in order to match the 31 equal-tempered tuning of the Fokker organ (these adjustments were very small, ranging from 3 cents to 16 cents). Using this schemata, six numbers are then “dialed,” including the Huygens-Fokker Foundation, two numbers from the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, the composer’s home phone, the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst, Stuttgart, and Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

Recorded September 12, 2010 at the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ
in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.


31 Touch Tones for Fokker organ/2010

The traditional preview of this year's sunrise ritual in the desert. Tuesday night into Wednesday morning at Robot Heart. 

Track "Pessoa" written by Marcos Balter, performed by Claire Chase http://www.clairechase.net and produced by @TheScumfrog

Image by Vito Fun-Tumbarello


The Scumfrog & Claire Chase - Pessoa

Nox is scored for an open instrumentation comprised of voices, woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings. The performers are organized into four groups that surround the audience. The result is an immersive and highly visceral sonic experience that is played in partial darkness.

The title of the piece is drawn from Anne Carson's Nox, an elegiac scrapbook filled with bits of letters, photos, personal reflections, and a moving translation of poem No. 101 by Catullus. Through the linear and spatial arrangement of these artifacts, Carson forges an intense atmosphere that connects the ancient and the modern, intimacy and distance, present experience and memory. These connected oppositions emerge within the music despite the fact that the piece itself is not expressly programmatic. 

Nox was commissioned by the Ear Taxi Festival and is dedicated to Augusta Read Thomas.

Wie in vielen meiner akutellen Werke transportiert Assembly Line Elemente aus der Popularmusik in einen experimentellen Kontext: eine ausgeprägte Pulsation, tonale Wendungen und symmetrische Strukturen werden mit 16tel-töniger Mikrotonalität und scharfen Dissonanzen durchsetzt. Kompositionen, die ausschließlich vom Klang ausgehen sind schwer zu benennen. In solchen Fällen sehe ich mich gerne nach einem Sinnbild aus dem täglichen Leben um. Inspiriert von den elektronischen Klangfarben des vorproduzierten Zuspielers und der repetitiven Natur dieser Musik kam mir spontan die Assoziation einer automatisierten Fertigungsstraße in den Sinn.

Joseph Michaels - Assembly Line

dead wasps in the jam-jar (ii) (2016)
for string orchestra, objects, and sine waves

Commissioned by musica femina münchen e. V.
Münchener Kammerorchester conducted by Clemens Schuldt
Photo credit: Florian Ganslmeier

dead wasps in the jam-jar (ii) (2016), for string orchestra, objects, and sine waves

In der Luft, da bleibt deine Wurzel (2011) 

for soprano and electronics

performed and recorded by Tony Arnold



Program note:


In der Luft, da bleibt deine Wurzel (2011) largely features, among a variety of other sound samples, recordings from a studio session with soprano Tony Arnold at Slee Studios. While working with her, I was able to notate surprisingly delicate and tiny details of vibrato and glissando shading. Her interpretation of these details, when reflected upon during the editing process, seemed to create a ripple effect throughout the other layers of the sonic atmosphere, and influence the entire musical language of the piece. 

The title is borrowed from the Paul Celan poem of the same name, from his 1963 Die Niemandsrose (The Nomansrose). The first stanza, below, is translated by Michael Hamburger:

In the air, that’s where your root remains, there, 
in the air.
Where the terrestrial rounds itself, clenched, earthly,
both breath and clay.

In der Luft, da bleibt deine Wurzel

The rich overtone harmonies produced from subtly interlocked multiphonics dominate the trio klangNarbe (‘sound-scar’) for baritone saxophone, percussion and prepared piano (2014-15), a jagged soundscape whose topography is subject to constant erosion. The metallic timbres and noise spectra of a multi-coloured percussion section (frequently played with bows) are combined with multiphonics from the saxophone and the sounds of a prepared piano, which sometimes pro- duces 17-tone multiphonic clusters. The pianist also plays inside the instrument, producing sharp accents or glissandos with a hard plectrum or generating mi- crotonal cluster-surfaces with a double-bass bow. Here the tension between con- tinuum and event – between stationary surface and sharply etched crosshatching within multi-dimensional overlaps of sonic foregrounds and backgrounds – is typical of Khorkova’s music and assumes especially trenchant forms. The contrasts in the piece are its programme: ‘klangNarbe plays with the contradiction between contrasting compositional materials that are considered irreconcilable and yet are combined in the manner of a mosaic. I create bridges across the lines of frac- ture in this material, bridges visible as scars. The term sound-scars also applies to the work’s genesis, which extended over a very long period of time and was fraught with upheavals.’
The block-like events, separated by distinct gaps, give rise to violent outbursts and accentuations: harsh cluster hammerblows, drinking glasses scraped on thun- der-sheets, roaring glissandi as the saxophonist yells into the instrument. No scar without a previous wound...
Dirk Wieschollek

klangNarbe [2014-2015] for baritone saxophone, percussion and prepared piano

'Astatine' for saxophone, accordion, cello & electronics
Composed 2019

Commissioned and performed by Trio Saeitenwind
Karolina Öhman: cello
Olivia Steimel: accordion
Jonas Tschanz: saxophones

Live recording at Biel/Bienne on 20 October, 2019.

31 Touch Tones for Fokker organ/2010

Joseph Michaels

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