Calls from Home, for Horn and Digital Media
Program Notes
International Horn Society Symposium, IHS55 Montréal, Québec, Canada
Friday, July 28, 2023 | 9:00am | Université de Montréal, Faculty of Music, Jean Papineau-Couture
Twenty-Two Snapshots of Spring (2017, 2023)
by Emily Boyer
Length: 5:00″
Composer Note:
In the spring of 2016, I took photos of the view into my backyard that I see nearly every day while playing my horn warm-up routine. The following year, I compiled twenty-two of those photos into a visual progression through the season, and I composed music based on elements that changed, such as the weather and the arrangement of the parked cars. Later, I recognized that I wasn’t only seeing this backyard landscape. I was also seeing springtime in my imagination, filled with memories from growing up on a cherry farm in northern Michigan. This piece combines visual and audio material from both homes, then and now.
Additional Information:
Lovely Agnes by Sally Rogers, performed by Sally Rogers and Claudia Schmidt
Orchard photography by Jan Engle
Family Portrait at Arcadia Dunes, August 2012 (2017)
by Emily Boyer
Length: 5:00
Composer Note:
Arcadia Dunes overlook Lake Michigan on the west coast of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Inspired by a photograph from a sunny, summer family hike on the dunes, this piece strains between nostalgia and joy.
bonvenon for laurie spiegel (2022)
by Rachel Devorah Wood Rome (b. 1986)
Length: 12:30″
Composer Note:
According to the Drake equation, humanity is unlikely to be the only advanced technological civilization in our galaxy. How would contact with another civilization rerender what it means to be human?
bonvenon for laurie spiegel (2022) is immersive creative research into what communication with another civilization might sound like to humans.
The hornist and the electronics player transfigure archival audio materials in real-time from Messiaen’s “Appel interstellaire” (1971); Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark was the night, cold was the ground” (1927); The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “Wood Thrush” recording collection (2016-2020); a sun data sonification by A. Kosovichev from the Stanford Experimental Physics Lab/ESA+NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (1997); as well as an original sonification of prime Pythagorean triangles by the composer recorded by Driftless Winds. Visual materials are collaged by the composer from Voyager Golden Record (1977), Arecibo message (1974) archives, and improvisation by Darryl Davis of the Hayden Planetarium, Museum of Science (Boston) based on the sonic materials.
Additional Information:
Laurie Spiegel (American, b.1944) is a pioneer in electronic music. Her work “Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds” was included on the Voyager Golden Record. Hear that work and others in Spiegel’s album The Expanding Universe (1980, reissued 2012).
Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945) was a gospel blues musician and evangelist in Texas. This essay by Shane Ford published by the Library of Congress describes his life and career, and his music in the context of the Voyager Golden Record. (Link to the essay opens PDF.)
Learn more about the Voyager Golden Record on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory website, including a list of all the music, sounds, and greetings that Carl Sagan of Cornell University and his team selected for the project.
To learn more about how and why scientists and musicians create sonifications of data from space, listen to the 17-minute segment “Listen To Ethereal Sounds Derived From Space” from the public radio program Science Friday. The segment originally aired March 24, 2023.