Tongue River Artist Residency
Dayton, Wyoming - July 1-30, 2024
Project
“Tongue River Music” is a piece for voice, flute, string quartet, and pre-recorded electronics. The work is in multiple movements, setting field recordings, recorded interviews with locals, and improvisations done by myself, Chelsea Meynig (flute), and Emily Denham (violin) for the ensemble.
During my time in Dayton, I conducted interviews with locals in Dayton, Ranchester, and Sheridan about their relationship to water, how that relationship has changed overtime, and what they think about how it might change in the future. The piece, as a whole, is about the different ways we engage with water: as a natural force, as a substance of childlike wonder, joy, and fear, and as an economic force. I weave excerpts of the interviews together as a kind of backing track at various moments in the piece where folks have talked most poignantly about their memories of the Tongue River and how it has changed over the years. The Tongue River starts in the Bighorn Mountains at three different headwaters and ends in a confluence with the Yellowstone River in Montana. The field recordings trace the length of the river and also include recorded improvisations me and Chelsea Meynig made along the river at various locations.
After completing the initial residency, Chelsea and I spent a week in Casper, Wyoming, with violinist Emily Denham, to workshop some of the initial musical ideas and materials. Together, these initial sketches and workshopped materials, along with the over 20 hours of recorded interviews and 15 hours of field recordings, this piece is aims to capture something about Dayton — and Wyoming more broadly — that I, as a composer briefly passing through, cannot capture solely on my own.
What’s next?
Through ENAensemble and the Plastic Club of Philadelphia, we are working to present a premiere of the work in mid-April 2025 in Center City Philadelphia. Beyond that, we are looking at ways to bring the final work back to Wyoming for a performance in Sheridan in mid-2026.
Pine Meadow Ranch Artist Residency
Sisters, Oregon — July 18-August 14, 2024
The Project
This residency started as a project to collaborate with a local chef to design a menu and write accompanying music using scientific techniques developed in the Crossmodalism Lab at Oxford University. This resulted in a suite of music for cello, recorded and live processed electronics, and “Irrigation Flute” that was performed at the Pine Meadow Ranch during the residency. The theme of that year’s residency was “Food and Agriculture” and I was interested in making music about the infrastructure of agriculture. The field recordings for the Dinner Suite trace the water from the ranch’s creek through the pump station and out the pivot sprinkler. I recorded the cows, the bees, the wind in the trees, the sounds of agricultural equipment, and the sounds of cooking. I then built an “Irrigation Flute” — a sound sculpture that dispersed sounds along the long table everyone was eating from, repurposing old irrigation pipe with strategically drilled holes to “tune” the flute’s timbre while pumping music in either end via loudspeakers.
The Dinner Music Suite is in four movements:
Salad Music — featuring recordings of the irrigation system, from creek to pump to sprinklers.
Salmon Music — featuring a poem about salmon spawning by Brigette McConville (who shared the poem with me for this performance) of Salmon King Fisheries, a Native Owned Business from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon.
Dessert Music — featuring the sounds of bees and cows, the creators of the desserts we had that night.
Space Music — using the overtone series to ‘evaporate’ the music into space. Everyone was asked to lay in the field behind the table and stare at the Milky Way while digesting their dinner.
With the performance happening relatively early into my time there, I then worked through some long-pressing issues in my music making. The end result was the start of a larger project of recording interviews with people who worked at the ranch. While the topics we covered ended up all over the place, each conversation started with questions about the worker’s relationship to food and water.