Echoes in the grain

Juilliard’s Center for Innovation in the Arts commissioned this work for a unique performance format: two ensembles, one in New York with a live audience and the other in Cremona, Italy performing together in real-time.

The initial expectation was for new works on this concert to use improvisatory or aleatoric techniques to work around the inherent delay of remote performance.

For my contribution, though, I sought a means of making this delay integral to the music. The solution was to use the delay of the relay system itself as the determining pulse for the performance and to also use it as a chain of delays that could act as an additional layer of music.

The music from the live quartet was captured and sent to Cremona where the second quartet heard this music on headphones. The signal’s trip took a length of time I treated as an eighth-note pulse. This signal was then amplified in a space in Cremona, captured on microphones again and sent back to New York, where it was heard in the headphones of the first quartet. The whole journey there and back took, on average, a little over one second. Along the way the signal picked up digital and ambient qualities of its route. Throughout the work it is used to keep the first quartet on track, but is also occasionally played over speakers in the hall, acting in canon with the musicians.