why the trees were murmuring 
for orchestra, improvising trombonist and two spatial ensemble 
commissioned by Steven and Brenda Schick
soloist: Peter Sloan 
conductor: Steven Schick
written for the La Jolla Symphony
Premiere, San Diego, February 2020 
live-recording
----
some words about the piece: 

Why the trees were murmuring is an appreciation of diversity and community. 
In writing this piece, I was moved to explore these themes from various perspectives. Performers are positioned around the concert hall and sounds are embracing the audience. A unique collection of diverse materials and practices has come together and formed a hybrid assemblage in which different kinds of musical practices such as - improvisation, vocalization, and spatialization have joined the orchestra and created a multi-diverse community. 
 
The composition of the musical material is also influenced and shaped based on the qualities of a diversified community.  Aside from having an improviser soloist on the stage, the spatialized ensemble surrounding the audience, and the extensive exploration of instrumental colors, every group of instruments functions additionally as soloists in one or more parts of the piece. At the same time that everything is precisely notated, there is always a level of freedom in every section, which allows the realization of the piece to be a co-joint act.  
 
 
Why the trees were murmuring reveals a journey of the colorful pallet of instrumental sounds hybridized with the whisperings of the fragmented texts. These snippets of texts are selected from Braiding Sweetgrass, written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and poems by the iconoclast Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. 
The piece unfolds into an improvised coda by the orchestra, amidst the bird calls, various bells, the traces of hope, light, and love from the orchestra and the solo trombone and ultimately the orchestra whispering  … “I will greet the sun again” …
 
****

why the trees were murmuring (2020)

performed and written for Mikołaj Rytowski for the ATTACCA Festival 2024; premiered on June 1 at Druckereihalle im Ackermannshof, Basel, Switzerland

recording: Robin Michel
mixed by Isaac Roth Blumfield

The electronics for this work were recorded in part at the SWR Experimentalstudio in Freiburg, Germany with assistance from sound engineers Thomas Hummel and Luis Miehlich

link to binaural version (for listening with headphones): https://soundcloud.com/isaacrothblumfield/strange-symmetry-for-percussion-and-ambisonic-live-electronics-2024-binaural-version-use-headphones

strange symmetry | for percussion and ambisonic live electronics (2024) – stereo version

Where darkness swallows the sky (2024)
from The Memory of Water Vol. II

Premiered by Martine Thomas, viola, Thea Mesirow, cello and voice on March 16, 2024 at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, NY.

Where darkness swallows the sky

Paracusia III.descry (2019-2020)
by Camila Agosto

World premiere performed by Justin Massey (saxophone) at Lenfest Center for Arts, February 2020. 

Audio Recording by David Adamcyk.

Paracusia III. descry

With the term "countersinging" bioacousticians refer to the vocal interaction between two or more birds of a same species. It often appears to be a territorial negotiation, but it could also be a kind of courtship display or a way to exchange other types of information. During countersinging the individuals behave according to precise rules conveying messages whose meaning, however, we mainly fail to understand. This piece takes some of the evidence at our disposal about countersinging in birds as a starting point to build an evolving interaction between two instruments. 

Written for and premiered at ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week 2025
Michele Bianchini, baritone saxophone; Giacomo Piermatti, double bass
Audio Recording/Mixing/Mastering: Theocharis Papatrechas
July 13, 2025
Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi
Sansepolcro, Italy

Countersinging

This is the short edit, the long edit is on Bandcamp: https://ausgesuchtestenohren.bandcamp.com/album/memorial-to-a-long-lost-piano

The present work originates from an intimate engagement with a personal sound archive. In 2017, I recorded the interior resonance of an upright piano that had accompanied my childhood — an instrument now lost, along with the family home in which it stood. These recordings, focusing on the raw timbral qualities of the strings, became the basis for Exercises in Minimalism (2018). The material was subjected to reductive processes: attacks were removed, durations extended, and harmonic overtones isolated and layered to form sustained piano drones. Through this process, the familiar sound of the piano was transformed into an abstract field of resonance, emphasizing texture over gesture and continuity over articulation.

Eight years later, I returned to these recordings and composed a new piece derived entirely from the earlier material. Conceived as a funeral music for the lost piano, the work employs convolution reverb generated from the Hamilton Mausoleum — a site renowned for its exceptionally long and unpredictable echo. The resulting spatialization situates the reconstructed piano sounds within a vast and reverberant acoustic environment, blurring the boundaries between presence and absence, memory and space.

This composition explores the intersection of personal memory, acoustic space, and sonic decay. By recontextualizing archival sound within an architectural reverberation, it examines how listening can become an act of remembrance.


Bandcamp

Memorial to a long-lost piano (edit)

The Gardens Between The Pillars

The Gardens Between the Pillars is one of five movements of The Elemental Cycles, where each cycle uses a primary element as the principal character.  In fact, all five cycles are considered works for “cinema for the ear.”  For this cycle, the sole element used is wood, including sound images pertaining to wood.  There are books and creaky doors, wood surfaces where steady and irregular footsteps walk, the flow of trees pertaining to The Pillars, as well as divine and earthly creatures, and pure and warpy, rough music to accompany this cinema for the ear.

The Gardens, first and foremost, are made up of interior and exterior scenes, motions and projections, and the emergence of figurative and explicit sounds from the decentralization of The Pillars.

In search of a narrative, doors open and close, pages turn,
The duality of images that represents:

Theory and Knowledge
Beauty and Violence
Life and Death
Temptation and Enlightenment

The duality of these sound-images contains the same motion ‘not two’: Advaya
The Pillars points at transcending this duality through 
The reallocated sound images, sound function, and motions
As ways to navigate The Gardens Between

The Pillars¬ are the paths, which reveal the interconnection of the natural, the inter-complexity of the nurtured, and the intervening of scenes through insertion
Which often feel that what is represented is horrific and cruel

We recognize from the far plane The Gardens as a gestalt labyrinth
Up close we perceive the many, many paths and narratives
Between The Pillars, we are presented implications of sounds that have neither beginning nor end

A wanderer severed from illusion in the infinite forest
An area of the Everblossom trees, a life of fleeting beauty 
It is the worldly sculpture of the Bas and High-Relief 

Realms of the Divine and Mortal

An immersion of boundless rhizome—a chiasmus of sonic ascription
An immersion of all materials of wood perceived 
A duality must be understood to walk the way broadly 
And you will hear it in everything 


The Gardens Between The Pillars

Zaubersprüche (2019), composed on ritual texts from old German (Althochdeutsch) features six solo voices performing in various spatial disposition so that acoustic sound projection simulates a sound spatialization.
Each refrain or section is composed on a different text representing an old ritual, whereas singers are placed in various positions in order to create a timbre (and dynamic) variation of a single pitch/word. 
Further tools and small objects will also be used to project the vocal sounds in some peculiar ways, giving to each movement a special timbre and atmosphere.

The character of such texts consists on one hand in their unique linguistic nature: words sounding familiar but are actually rather inscrutable, on the other, in the incomparable mix of christian religion with archaic and popular practices, sort of esoteric rituals suggesting unusual music (sonic) situations.

Zaubersprueche (2019)

Adumbration: to suggest, disclose, or outline partially; to foreshadow vaguely; overshadow, obscure.

Adumbrations goes through a series of statements towards a sensibility of ideals and shadows, utilizing female voices reciting a series of tongue twisters that iterate sibilant, fricative, and bilabial sounds. If spoken incorrectly, the sound qualities of these tongue twisters are heard as curse words. Therefore, there needs to be consistency in the process of speaking these tongue twisters explicitly. In the English language curse words can function as multiple parts of speech, and as the saying goes, people who curse more frequently are more honest. 

This piece explores the dichotomous relationship between certain ideals and shadows, i.e. consistencies and inconsistencies, actuality and potentiality, and the explicit and the honest, as it goes through a series of musical adumbrations that “halo” the process of these tongue twisters. Through these adumbrations, the contradictory can be either one or the other of the ideals or shadows turning on itself, and at times the appearance of the clarity and the inaccuracy are in an indefinite flux through these halos.  This occurs as inconsistent phonemes are turned from inaccurate iterations of the tongue twisters into something sounding consistent.  The halos are supplementing the voice within varying simultaneous parameters that include shimmering, radiating around the iterations and vice/versa, and existing as a spatial supplement revolving in different stereo planes around and as a process, and out of the immersive comes our personal perception of the contradiction.  One can think of this adumbrated halo, in this sense, as a place where the dichotomous relationship becomes indistinguishable, and laughter for a flawed system. 

This piece is partially inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s movie Persona.

Thank you so much for the wonderful voice recordings:
Elizabeth Gartman
Caroline Mckinzie
Logan Piker

Adumbrations

Whale Song Stranding


Inflections as sound process to sound quality
Emanating otherness of the
Sound quality to sound process from the reflective

Resulting in an immersive rhizome-like sound world of the omnipresent of the dream like and the very literal 

As different zones are successive, simultaneous, above, below, before, and after, to neither rise nor sink but only float 

A longing as the friction, disputes of the literal and dream-like

And

A persistence of a pulse, heavy, through the literal as a constant movement and the abstract ingenuous stillness, a sound world of the discursive and the narrative

Chiastic process and quality is undermined as the reflections and inflections recur in rounded proportions.  The immersive and form is only tangible through this insistence that is perceived as a dream occurring in real-time

Figuratively
Whale Song suggests, quite literally, uncertainty that is

Stuck between the discursive and the narrative,
The moving streams/waves and the pure tones surrounding within,
Stranding

Whale Song Stranding

Camila Agosto is a composer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator whose electroacoustic music examines how
we perceive sound and vibration, exploring their physiological, mental, and emotional impacts. In her work, Camila collaborates with
musicians, visual artists, choreographers, and instrument builders, seeking to uncover intersections across artistic fields. Her work
includes both fully notated and improvisational compositions emphasizing timbral and textural exploration. She aims to reveal the
sonic potentialities of acoustic instruments while highlighting the human element in live performance. Her projects encompass
acoustic and electroacoustic concert works, interdisciplinary collaborations with visual media and dance, installations, and fixed media
creations.

Camila was honored to be the youngest fellow to be accepted to the American Academy in Berlin and is a recipient of the Fall 2023 Berlin Prize and Deutsche Bank Fellowship in Music Composition from the Academy. Her music has been commissioned and performed by leading artists and featured by venues throughout the United States and abroad. Camila is currently an ABD doctoral candidate at Columbia University in Music Composition.

David Quang-Minh Nguyen is an audio engineer, sound designer/re-recording mixer, and composer of concert music. His current interests lie in composing acousmatic works that explore multi-channel loudspeaker expansion, various types of sound spatialization, and immersive audio.

Recognized nationally and internationally, David has had his works presented at the June in Buffalo New Music Festival, where he received individual master classes with Harvey Sollberger, Martin Bresnick, Roger Reynolds, and Brian Ferneyhough. He was an active participant in the Festival DME under the direction of Åke Parmerud, Musique & Recherches Académie d'été de composition électroacoustique under the direction of Annette Vande Gorne and João Pedro Oliveira, and the Sounds Around Me Festival under Thomas Gorbach. He was also selected by Master Artist Robert Normandeau for a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

His works have been presented at more than fifty national and international events, and he is a laureate or finalist in numerous competitions.  He has been published on ABLAZE Records' Electronic Masters Vol. 7 and received an honorable mention at the XII° Destellos Electroacoustic Competition 2019 for his work Misprints.  He also placed 2nd in the XIII° Destellos competition for Adumbrations, was a finalist for the PRIX CIME 2019, and won 2nd place for the ASCAP/SEAMUS Award for his work Weight Stranding. In 2021, his SEAMUS-commissioned piece Whale Song Stranding was selected for presentation on the SEAMUS 31 CD and received the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis selection.  David was awarded the Prix CIME 2023 Residency Award for Whale Song Stranding.  His work Texture Arc the Points won 1st place in the ULJUS Međunarodno Pijanističko Takmičenje Smederevo Competition and 2nd place in the prestigious Concours Biennal de Composition Acousmatique Métamorphoses.

David Q. Nguyen holds a BM from Old Dominion University, where he studied with Andrey R. Kasparov and Mark Chambers.  He also graduated at the top of his class from The Omega Studios School of Applied Recording Arts & Sciences with a focus on Audio Engineering in the Music Industry and Film/Television.  He has received his Master and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his primary teachers are Reynold Tharp, Erik Lund, Eli Fieldsteel, Sever Tipei, and Scott A. Wyatt.

Acousmatic music, sound art and field recordings from Vienna and elsewhere.

The works of the composer and conductor, Valerio Sannicandro, are the product of different cultural influences and of his own reflections about the parameter 'space' that he researches consequently, first as compositeur associé at IRCAM (Paris), then at the Technische Universität (Berlin) where he got a Ph.D. in Musicology and at Experimentalstudio (Freiburg). Compositions like Strali (2002), Fibrae (2005), Ius Lucis (2006/2007) and Forces Motrices (2010) are the most outstanding examples of his interest in large orchestral instrumentations, as well as of his concern with the role and the aesthetic of (live) electronics. He is currently working at Experimentalstudio of SWR (Freiburg) on Finesterrae, a new work for voices, viola and live-electronics. He has been awarded among others the Claudio-Abbado Prize from the Academy of Berlin Philharmonics in 2014, the Musica Viva Composition Prize, München in 2002 and 2010, the Giga-Hertz production Prize as well as the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (2000). His works have been recorded on CD for Wergo and Telos Music Records. He has been invited at the Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto) and is new music advisor at the Philharmonisches Orchester Cottbus (Germany). His works are published by Edizioni Suvini-Zerboni (Milan).

contact: isaac.blumfield@gmail.com

Isaac Roth Blumfield is a composer from Saint Paul, Minnesota, currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 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. He is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University, studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku.

Anahita Abbasi’s music (Iranian-born/world citizen) has been described as “a dizzyingly sophisticated reverie, colorful and energetic. It embodies tremendous timbral exploration and multilayered performance gestures”… (Classical Voice America and A Cunning plan). 

According to Guardian …”She takes even a more radical line with creating dense and pulsing textures”… “Her music has the capacity to immerse the hall into a dark multichannel throat and hissing” … (Bachtrack) 

Volkskrant describes … “the Iranian Anahita Abbasi, shows herself to be a composer with guts in the two-year-old Intertwined Distances Alienating whistling noises and furious fistfights with the keyboard, alternated with delicate strings, lead to a theatrical listening experience” …

Ernst. M Binder also writes: …“As it is also vivid from the titles of her works such as Dialogues, Situations, Distorted Attitudes, she investigates and gesticulate thoughts and emotions. It is manifestation/ observation of a scene or multiple scenes, which occur simultaneously. She has the tendency to take us with her music on a mystical, puzzling journey and leave us within our thoughts, to find out the “ending” ourselves”… 

About her piece for Mahan Esfahani Boulezian Blogspot writes: …” There was, without doubt, an extraordinarily inventive musical imagination at work, but it was never merely invention: it was a sonic and instrumental drama that seemed somehow to summarise, to extend, and quite properly to question many of the tendencies we had heard so far”…

Anahita Abbasi’s works explore the "organic physicality of sound" (Sound Barrier). Each of her works grows out of a fascination with a specific sound and its distinctive tonal color.  

Abbasi’s music has been commissioned and performed worldwide by renowned musicians, including Mahan Esfahani, Steven Schick, Ilan Volkov, Vimbayi Kaziboni, Jack Adler, Sergej Tchirkov, Ensemble Modern, International Contemporary Ensemble, Meitar Ensemble, Der gelbe Klang, Radio France, EBU, Zaafran Ensemble, Contrechamps, Contemporary Chamber Orchestra Elbe, Broken Frames Syndicate, Kommas Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Seattle Modern Orchestra, Ume Duo, Long Beach Opera, Quatuor Diotima, Mivos Quartet, Argonaut Quartet, Thin Edge, neuverBand, Omnibus Ensemble, Schallfeld Ensemble, and others. 
 
Her works have been featured internationally at festivals such as Darmstädter Musiktage, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Acht Brücken Festival, Radialsystem, Beethovenfest Bonn, Podium Esslingen, Tritonus Festival, Elbphilharmonie (Germany), IRCAM - Manifeste Academy, Présences Festival, Festival Ensemble  (France), Time of Music (Finland), BIFEM (Australia), Klangspuren Schwaz, Impuls Festival (Austria)  Sound State Festival (Southbank Centre, London), Tectonics (Glasgow),Klang Festival (Copenhagen), Contempuls (Prague), Tongyeong International Music Festival (Korea), Musica Polonica Nova (Poland), Atlas Festival, Grachten Festival (Netherlands), Borealis Festival (Norway), Festival Archipel (Geneva), Gaia (Tel Aviv), Mostly Mozart Festival, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, The Kitchen, Roulette, National Sawdust, Time Spans (USA), and many others. 

Ms. Abbasi has received numerous awards, including a work-scholarship from the Experimental studio of SWR, Freiburg (2014), a Morton Gould ASCAP Young Composers Award (2015), a nomination for "Composers of Our Time" (2017), the Composition Prize of the Acht Brücken Festival (2020), the German Record Critics’ Prize 2020 (Mahan Esfahani’s album MUSIQUE?), and the New Music USA creator’s fund award (2025). In 2022, she was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy, a Ucross Foundation Residency in Wyoming, and a three-year residency at the Fondation Singer-Polignac in Paris. She is also one of the recipients of the 2024 Music Prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, recognized by Georges Aperghis. In 2025 she received the New Music USA’s creator's fund for her project “Thawing Tides”.  

In addition to being a founding member of the Schallfeld Ensemble (Austria, 2013), she is also a founding member of the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA, USA, 2017). Anahita Abbasi studied composition with Beat Furrer and Pierluigi Billone at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG) in Austria and worked closely with Georges Aperghis, Franck Bedrossian, and Philippe Leroux. In 2014, she moved to the USA to pursue a PhD in composition with Rand Steiger at UC San Diego. 

Currently, Anahita Abbasi lives in Flensburg, and Paris, where she holds a three-year residency at the Fondation Singer-Polignac (Paris, France). Her recent projects include commissioned works for Ensemble Modern and Jack Adler, both premiered at the Darmstädter Musiktage in 2023.  Her upcoming projects include a commission for solo percussion (USA) as well as a commission from Radio France for an ensemble piece for Philharmonie de Radio France for the opening night of Présences Festival (2026).

Popular tracks tagged #spatialization