cosa verde para descansar los ojos - Luis Fernando Amaya
Visual Artist - Rodrigo Lara Zendejas
June 4, 2022 | St James Cathedral
Music Director - Allen Tinkham

cosa verde para descansar los ojos - Luis Fernando Amaya

For assembling bassoon, electronics, and lights

Written for and premiered by Ben Roidl-Ward

Untimed Time

Día 0

Elena Perales Andreu - composition and clarinet 
Heliä Mailiis Viirakivi - flute
Gon Muruaga - electric guitar
Emeli Solehmainen - piano

To Surpass Constellations - Live Performance

Every iteration on a feedback system is not merely a repetition of itself. Each version of the system has been informed by the previous ones and will inform the ones to come. The idea of feedback is at the center of not merely a repeating process, which was commissioned by Jack Thorpe and based on a series of no input mixing improvisations that I shared with him  to trigger a reaction and start a collaborative process/feedback system that produced the seed material for this piece. 

Jack Thorpe, alto saxophone

not merely a repeating process [alto sax + live electronics]

performed by Abbey Felton on Aug 1, 2025 at Lichtenbergschule, Darmstädter Ferienkurse 2025

written for the workshop "Co-Lab," organized by Yaron Deutsch and Clara Iannotta

recording and mix: Isaac Roth Blumfield

Still hollow | for classical guitar (2025)

Performed by: The Crossing during their residency at Northwestern University, March 2018.
Image: "The Absent-Minded Deciduous Rainforest Man" by Santiago Evans Canales (https://www.instagram.com/santiago_evanscanales/)
Additional editing and noise removal: Grayson Elliott Taylor

This piece is the second of three 'etudes' for 24 voices which serve as preliminary studies for a larger work in progress. 

Program note:

In Roald Dahl’s short story The Sound Machine, we learn about a device made to hear the inaudible. Its inventor—a young, anxious man who lives in the middle of the woods—does not quite know what he will listen to with his machine. The outcome is something he did not suspect: the machine could capture and make audible to human ears the screams of pain that flowers and trees produce when getting hurt.

With this short story in mind, I started to wonder if there could be some sort of vegetal sonic language besides the many other complex ways in which plants communicate. If there were, then how would this sound to humans? Its linguistic variants: would they be separated by species or rather by geography? Would humans relate differently with plants if there was an aural/linguistic element involved?


"Dialectos de árbol" [Tree Dialects] represents three linguistic variants of one imaginary vegetal language. In each of them (short “discourses” by each plant,) we can hear a bit of the plant´s idiosyncratic differences and its personal—vegetal?—character.

Dialecto de Árbol/Tree Dialect (n.2) — for 24 voices (2018)

Luis Fernando Amaya