Digital Escape
Program

What would the forest say if we could amplify its voice? the forest explores this question through an ambient soundscape, featuring audio samples collected from the West Virginia Botanic Gardens. The improvisatory flute, drawing inspiration from traditional Native American techniques, echoes the natural world, while the synthesized accompaniment evokes the ethereal atmosphere of the 1970s-80s New Age music. Together, these elements create a reflective and immersive experience, inviting listeners to hear the whispers of nature's resilience, wisdom, and quiet power.

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Program note written by the composer.

I wrote this piece for solo flute for flutist Laura Lentz.

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I live in a region of Norway with tall mountains, lots of forests and the Atlantic ocean roaring a stone’s throw away from my house. Much of the landscape around me has probably felt, looked and sounded much the same for thousands of years. Major changes happen too slowly for us to perceive, so to us it feels timeless. This piece was inspired by Laura Lentz’ series of comfort pieces, and being surrounded by landscapes unaffected by whatever else is happening in the world is comforting to me. Being in nature can also feel like slowing down time, or getting off the carousel for a little while. Timeless is my attempt at capturing this feeling of being “outside time”.

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Program note written by the composer.

Moss Garden is an exercise in simplicity, drawing inspiration from the principles of Japanese gardening and Brian Eno's music of the mid-1980s. It has nothing to do with traditional Japanese music, which I completely fail to understand. Moss Garden was commissioned by rarescale and first performed by Carla Rees in Los Angeles in the summer of 2005.

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Program note written by the composer.

I Will Note Be Sad In This World is based on the song Ashkharumes Akh Chim Kashil by the legendary 18th-century Armenian troubadour Saïat Nova. The song is often played on the duduk, and the flute player should respond to the ornamentation, intonation, and vibrato of traditional duduk playing.

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Program note written by the composer. Edited by Dustin White.

Alice was inspired by the short animated commercial titled Dear Alice produced for Chobani by THE LINE. On Youtube, THE LINE describes the video as follows:

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What if we created a future for ourselves that was full of optimism and positivity? “Dear Alice” is a love letter from a grandmother to a granddaughter and an optimistic vision of the future of farming. It’s a nostalgic look towards a new era of agriculture, with beautifully crafted backgrounds, delicate animation and a completely unique score by long-time Ghibli composer (and absolute legend) Joe Hisaishi. (Yeah, we can’t believe this happened either).

 

It’s not a perfect utopia, but a version of a future we can all reach if we just decide to put in the work.

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Program note written by Dustin White.

Liminal Highway for flute and four-channel electronics was co-commissioned by the Miller Theatre and New Music USA.

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Cerrone took the title for his new work from a poem by the Canadian indie rock musician John K. Samson, which begins with the premise “when you fall asleep in transit.” Each of the piece’s five movements is subtitled after a particular line in the poem.

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Formally, Liminal Highway suggests an arch form overall: the fifth movement is a rethink of the first, the second and fourth are rapid and rhythm-centric, and the third is the most immersive, awash in reverb effects. Its sound world creates a kind of “counterpoint through resonance,” employing convolution reverbs — a process that uses sampling to recreate the effect of a real environment. One of these source models, Cerrone points out, is reminiscent of the American Academy acoustic, with a “very wet and long-decaying reverb.”

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Written for flutter-tongue piccolo throughout, the first movement is made of delicate layers and loops. Cerrone remarks that he bought himself a $50 flute from Amazon: “As with almost all my solo work, I try to learn the instrument I’m writing for, so I ended up learning how to play the flute.” The percussive second movement, played with key clicks while the mouthpiece is pointed into the microphone, amounts to a reconstruction of that archetypal flute gesture, the trill.

 

In the third movement Cerrone alternates two kinds of reverbs (including what has been documented by the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s longest natural decay,” from an oil rig in the Scottish Highlands) to create a continually decaying sound. Against the high decaying note, Munro plays a simple chorale of multiphonics; the process is then reversed as the sound is reassembled into an explosive attack that transitions into the fourth movement — like the second, percussive and highly rhythmic with its key clicks. Not until this movement does Munro produce an “ordinary” sound, which is expanded into a chorus effect in the dramatic climax of the piece.

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Liminal Highway concludes with a rewriting of the flutter-tongue piccolo from the first movement, but now mixed with what Cerrone calls “the haze of the long attack from the third movement.” Here Munro incorporates another sound source, blowing into a set of mounted beer bottles — the instrument again transformed.

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Excerpted program note written by Thomas May.