Night Music, for Reed Quintet and Electronics
Files
Description
2022 composition performed by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2024. All the musical materials in "Night Music" are derived from direct transcriptions and arrangements of recordings of the summer dusk and night sounds of insects and other creatures in a Virginia forest. Every movement in the piece is a fragment taken from a 35-minute recording of dusk. The striking increase in density and loudness as dusk becomes night is the guiding formal principle of the piece. The recordings, featured in the electronics, were made with five simultaneous microphones in a pentagonal formation, at a distance of ~30 meters between each mic. Each of the five microphone analyses and transcriptions was assigned to an instrument (mic 1 to ob.; mic 2 to cl., etc.), rotating the pairings in each movement. The multi-channel recording sought an expanded listening field resulting from the different microphone responses and placings. Among the various features of the night sounds, one particularly caught my ears: constantly microtonally morphing triads and their aggregates resulting from the superimposition of the multitude of crickets.
Document Type
Artistic Work
Publication Date
1-1-2024
Publisher
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
