In this edition of New Sounds, we hear the different ways composers combine acoustic music and electronics to create ambient and almost ambient music.
As the 2010 Rome Prize winner of Musical Composition, Huck Hodge was commissioned to write Pools of shadow from an older sky to commemorate the first demonstration of Galileo’s telescope. This demonstration took place on the same grounds where the Rome Prize fellows live and work. This piece for live-processed piano, computer-realized sound, and video projection premiered exactly 400 years after the demonstration in the same location.
Irish composer Linda Buckley takes an old 12th century hymn from Léonin and creates a lush soundscape with just one voice, layering several segments of Michelle O’Rourke’s singing on top of each other. In Jon Hopkins’ “Immunity,” you’ll hear typical house noises—a creaking stair, a closing door—repeat and melt into the rhythm of this piano and vocals track.
Cóemgín Cùil takes classical music works and digitally processes them so extremely that the acoustic and original sounds are completely obscured. In “There Was No Gravity,” Cùil reverses and slows down a very famous classical piece. Can you figure out what it is?
PROGRAM #3669 Electroacoustic Music (First aired on 12/4/2014)
ARTIST: Cóemgín Cùil
WORK: There Was No Gravity, excerpt [1:30]
RECORDING: Murmurations
SOURCE: Ambient 5
INFO: Amazon
ARTIST: Huck Hodge
WORK: Pools of shadow from an older sky [17:55]
RECORDING: Life is Endless Like Our Field of Vision
SOURCE: New World Records 80758
INFO:newworldrecords.org
ARTIST: Ergodos Musicians
WORK: Linda Buckley: Revelavit [9:52]
RECORDING: All the Ends of the Earth
SOURCE: Ergodos
INFO: ergodos.ie/shop
ARTIST: Jon Hopkins
WORK: Immunity [9:56]
RECORDING: Immunity
SOURCE: Domino
INFO: dominorecordco.us
ARTIST: Cóemgín Cùil
WORK: There Was No Gravity [11:34]
RECORDING: Murmurations
SOURCE: Ambient 5
INFO: Amazon