synthesizer and manipulated field recording
2021

Recorded in Rosehill Cemetery and my apartment in Chicago during the winter of 2021.

In The Shadow Of Four Pillars - IV

Live recording of the world premiere of Spirits Hover as part of the LA Phil Noon to Midnight festival — April 9, 2022 Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA

Performance by Wild Up (Christopher Rountree, conductor)
Mastering Engineer, Murat Çolak
Recorded at Walt Disney Concert Hall, courtesy of the LA Phil

Spirits Hover

for strings, keyboards, and antiphonal percussion
LA Phil Commission 

Excerpt from the January 28, 2025 world premiere by the LA Phil New Music Group, conducted by John Adams, recorded at Walt Disney Concert Hall courtesy of the LA Phil.

The title of this piece is adapted from The Bell by Iris Murdoch. The novel features a legend of an abbey bell submerged for centuries in a lake and an ominous recurring dream from which the dreamer awakens feeling uncertain whether they have heard a sound or dreamt it. The plot also highlights a number of pairings: an ancient bell and a new one, a sacred community and a secular one, dual leaders, twins, and lovers. 

Antiphonal percussion setups mirror each other. Strings are arranged in matching pairs or trios.  Celesta doubles on Rhodes electric piano. As the music retraces subtly diverging paths through a recurring harmonic cycle, the string players are variably asked to play with no vibrato (in order to emphasize the tuning of different pitches against each other) or to play with a slow, measured vibrato, manipulating their pitches in sync with one another in parallel ripples. 

Sound shimmering above the surface of the water. Water shimmering beneath the surface of the sound. A memory of a mirage played back from old tape. Slow, lyrical strains wafting over a landscape. Deceleration and acceleration. Tuning and attunement.


Not a dream sound, but a sound which sleeping we had really heard EXCERPT mm60-95

Audio excerpt from the Febuary 18, 2025 world premiere by ~Nois and Varo String Quartet on the Frequency Festival, Constellation, Chicago, IL

This 40-minute octet features a spatial arrangement with the strings centered in the performance space and the saxophones posted around the perimeter. Tones, players, and quartets sound individually and fuse together into composites, melodic shapes blur into vertical harmony, and just-intonation harmonies are animated as their constituent tones take shape in spatiotemporal patterns.

Poetics of Space Translation Symmetry EXCERPT m189-344

Presented here as excerpts from a choral adaptation developed with the Renaissance Singers, After Life was originally conceived as a piece for solo vocalist (intoning) and ensemble of open instrumentation (grounding/haloing). 

The many influences and inspirations I drew on while writing the text and music include time, cycles, loops, periodicity, astronomy, astrology, the spheres, climate change, vibration, entrainment, scales, solfege, phenomenology, embodied acoustic subjectivity, intimate acoustics, love languages, W. A. Mathieu's book "Harmonic Experience," and the poetry of Robert Lax. The score is written as a melody for the vocalist and a text score for the ensemble which describes two modes of supporting and responding to the soloist, inviting the rest of the group to move between those roles.

Thanks to Antoine Beuger who encouraged me to let this piece become itself, to Chris Wild and Jenna Lyle who originally commissioned this piece for their group Après l'Histoire, and to everyone in the Renaissance Singers for making this reincarnation of After Life possible.

After Life (Renaissance) 2025.6.3

from the world premiere by Jonathan Hannau in Evanston, IL on December 6, 2016

emergemergemergemergemergemergemergemerge

Recorded by Delgani String Quartet at Gung Ho Studio, Eugene, OR on May 8, 2017

IIX IXI XII

performed live by Weston Olencki in McClintock Hall, Evanston, IL on May 24, 2018

Rotations Placement : Providence Everywhere

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.

Trails Bright Phantoms

New Rooms Moon

This is an excerpt from a realization of Held Music at die Station, Neufelden, Austria by Jürg Frey, Antoine Beuger, Marianne Schuppe, Emmanuelle Waeckerle, Joachim Eckl, Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Sophie Stone, Alex Nikiporenko, Masaya Ozaki, and Noah Jenkins.

Held Music (excerpt from June 28, 2019 realization at die Station, Neufelden, Austria)

Not dead, but in a trance... a sad but profound sensation

Noah Jenkins is a composer and violinist/violist from Oregon, now living in Chicago. His music is inspired by tuning, field recordings, synthesizers, acoustic phenomena, and experiences of deep sound in deep time.

In 2022 Wild Up premiered Spirits Hover as part of the LA Phil’s Noon to Midnight festival. In 2023 Jenkins developed and premiered After Life (a 40-minute piece with original text for vocalist and ensemble) in Chicago with Après L’Histoire. In 2024 he released Without Persistent Environments (Sawyer Editions), an album of two electroacoustic trombone pieces recorded by Chicago trombonist and composer Riley Leitch. Peter Margasak (Bandcamp) praised the music’s “sustained lines awash in luxurious overtones” and its “focus on the dynamic interaction of sound drifting into eternity.”

In 2025 John Adams will conduct the LA Phil New Music Group in the premiere of Not a dream sound, but a sound which sleeping we had really heard, a work for string orchestra, keyboards, and antiphonal percussion, and ~Nois saxophone quartet and Varo String Quartet will premiere Poetics of Space Translation Symmetry in Chicago.

Noah Jenkins

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