I'm making my YouTube debut with the world premiere performance of Renderings of Things We Couldn't Take Home for percussion quartet, featuring the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players (Joel Davel, Ben Paysen, Loren Mach, and Christopher Froh). Special thanks to the performers for giving me permission to use this video, and to Dave Coll for shooting it. Enjoy!

The BBC documentary "The Outsider: the Story of Harry Partch" (2002) is available on Youtube:

For those of you who don't know of Harry Partch, the documentary can explain his work and his life far better than I can. He's best known for his unique, handmade instruments, and his interest in alternate tunings. The two combined yield music that is truly unlike any other.

The website for American Mavericks, a 2003 radio series produced by American Public Media with the San Francisco Symphony, includes a virtual collection of Partch instruments so you can play with them yourself.

Post-orals, I felt this momentum for continued productivity, but no project to which to apply that productivity came to mind as being most urgent, so I ended up downloading Processing and checking it out. I've been meaning to for a long time (years, really); Processing is what has made many of the incredible information visualization projects of the last few years possible. The History of Sampling (by Jesse Kriss) is still one of my favorites, and Jesse's former professor Golan Levin has a simply ridiculous body of amazing work.

I've made a few little first forays into Processing so far. Here they are:

1) A sketch that imports data (a composer's name and years of birth/death), and creates a timeline graph at the appropriate scale. It took a little time to make the graph update dynamically based on the data it got.

2) A bouncing ball. Mindblowing, I know.

I passed my orals on Tuesday. For those of you who are wondering what that feels like, I refer you to this picture of a unicorn and a rainbow, in the style of a late '80s to early '90s Trapper Keeper folder:

My orals are on Tuesday. To mark the occasion, here are three of the six pieces I've been working on for the past semester or so. Luckily, I still love them. I also still love the other three, which I couldn't find on Youtube: Toru Takemitsu's riverrun, John Cage's Two (no superscript), and Kaija Saariaho's Amers.

György Ligeti: Síppal, dobbal, nádihegedüvel

Morton Feldman: Rothko Chapel

George Crumb: Black Angels

Saturday, I was silly enough to ask someone at Amoeba Records if they carried any copies of La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, and got laughed at (not unkindly). Apparently, recordings of his work are notoriously difficult to get; the original releases were generally (completely?) done through small, now-defunct labels. The thing was, I had seen a copy of it for sale at the Amoeba in Hollywood, years and years ago. It had cost a lot, but not the $500 or so that Amazon's third-party sellers want for it now.

However, it's on Youtube! All five hours of it (!!), in thirty parts. If you're short on time, you can at least get a sense of the sound world of the piece by leafing through the sections.

If you don't know the piece, The Well-Tuned Piano is a work for solo piano that has been tuned in just intonation (the term given to any tuning system in which intervals are determined using integer ratios). The exact tuning system used for the piece is published on Kyle Gann's website with permission from Young. Gann also has a short, lucid explanation of just intonation itself available here. (If you happen to be an academic type with access to JSTOR, you can read Gann's article about the piece from Perspectives of New Music vol. 31.1 here.)

One of my favorite effects of the tuning is the "buzz". The first time I heard this piece, I thought the piano was being subtly electronically processed because the timbre of it was so unlike my idea of what a piano could produce. It's just the buzz. In sections where the music is spare, there's a subtle "crunch" to the sound. In sections where the music is really loud and active (like Part 11/30), there's this sense of a low, steady drone that arises as a result. (That section also makes use of pitches that aren't-quite-in-unison to wonderful effect.) While I've never heard this piece live, I have heard justly-tuned piano with a similar texture live, and it's the kind of sound that fills a hall and reverberates in a completely stunning way.

I'm a bit too sleep-deprived to say as much about this piece as it deserves, so, in conclusion: ♥

The ads below are header images on the website of KUSC, the only classical radio station in Los Angeles. (The slogans are also used in other forms of advertising; I noticed them on the sides of all the buses on campus at USC.)

I've been unsure for a while now about whether this was or was not worth blogging about. Complaining about these ads seems too easy, in a way. Everything I would say about them seems foolishly self-evident, like the written equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. But, then, the fact that the ads exist at all suggests that I'm probably wrong.

Not pictured is my actual least favorite slogan: "Less Bombs, More Brahms".

Yup. That just happened to you.

I decided to channel my self-consciousness while re-writing my composer bio into a constructive solution. Thanks to everyone who supplied words.

Jen Wang (b. 1980) writes music that rotates from diffuse, dire sonic explorations to glorious games with superlative, tasty musical narratives, influenced by her study of sex and Prickly Listening, her love of Michael Chabon and fairy tales, and her pursuit of absolute and blank sounds.  Her work combines a love of gloomy exploration (originating from her work with geese) with a drunkety-drunk-drunk sensibility (drawn from her experience as a butcher and a diva).

Jen's work has been mutated at the Chicago Algorithms Conference (The Garden of Clean Boots With Fur, murdered by George Gobel), the Voluptuous Bling Music Conference (Crabs Under, polkaed by Planned Parenthood), the Bow On A Homework Winter Institute (The Gypsy Gardens, punted by Nanook of the North), the Mordor Nostril Unit Residency at Arcosanti (This Offensive and Obstreperous Room, performed by the Mordor Nostril Unit), the Root 1971 and 1888 festivals, and the Gnome Festival (failsauce).

Jen has worked with a number of red urologists and other choral directors, including the Wasilla Platonic Immense Players (Stephen Colbert, conductor), menacing, grandiose ensemble NeXT Ens, and reality-show contestant Sonia Sotomayor.  Her choruses include works for the Cult Sea Cucumber Quartet (Penguins of Cigars We Couldn't Squash Behind), the Galveston Impenetrable Chorus (Schmaltzy), Sonia Sotomayor (Hepatitis Songs), NeXT Ens (Crabs Under), and Lady Gaga (aebleskiver).  Her first universal health care work, Cluttered Barbie Doll (for quaking data and grits), had its premiere as part of Velociraptor, an eon-length multi-macaroni performance featuring choreography by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

This summer, Jen will be in choir boy at the Eisenstein Colony of the Brambles, beginning work on her first flesh and a guiltless work for mezzo-soprano Cyndi Lauper.  Other zeitgeisty projects include a larynx work for synthetic dust mite equipment in collaboration with actor/vocalist Falcon Heene (Balloon Boy), and a work for dumpster.  A graduate of the Sierra Club (Ph.D.) and Blackwell Asylum (J.D.), she is currently pursuing her Doctor of Divinity at Los Alamos National Laboratory, studying with Princess Diana and Justin Timberlake.

A few thoughts:
1) I am saddened by how much cooler these piece titles are.
2) The combination of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was particularly serendipitous.
3) Mordor Nostril Unit.

Yesterday was the world premiere of Sanctus, a work for double SATB choir and soloists (SSA). It was commissioned by Marika Kuzma, conductor of the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, and premiered by that ensemble. And it was, in short, a lot of fun, and a really unusual project for me. First of all, it was the first choral work I've ever had performed. I've arranged for choir many times in the past, I had a shady double life in college as an a cappella group arranger, and I wrote a choral piece a few years ago that's never been (and probably never will be) performed, but this was my first time having a performance of my own choral work. It was also unusual in that it was a setting of a liturgical text, which I've never done before. The text of the Sanctus is my favorite section of the ordinary, for the simplicity of the text and the vividness of its imagery, so it was really helpful to begin with that.

A lot of the fun, though, was the experience of writing for an ensemble of which I am a member. I've been with the Chamber Chorus for four years now, and it was a pleasure to write for musicians that I know in the way that you know people you've performed alongside for years, in many cases. Writing for friends and making friends through performances is, very luckily, not new for me. But writing for a group of which you're a member is a different kind of intimacy; it's fun to have something you know so well be a source of inspiration, and a special kind of thrill to hear your music performed by a big group of your friends. You end up feeling like a somewhat undeserving recipient of a great deal of goodwill.

So, a big and heartfelt thanks to Marika, the soloists (Emily "SuperFrey" Frey, Chelsea "C-Span" Spangler, and Melanie "No Nickname But Nonetheless Amazing" Anderson), and the rest of the group, for a deeply satisfying and exciting concert. I had a fabulous time.

Coming up is the premiere of Renderings of Things We Couldn't Take Home for percussion quartet. The world premiere of the piece will be on April 4th with the Berkeley New Music Project, and the East Coast premiere will be on June 1st in New York City by the Iktus Percussion Quartet. The piece was written for Iktus as part of a set of pieces written for a labyrinthine structure of percussion instruments. As the members of Iktus play through the pieces, they will navigate the labyrinth. The other composers featured on the Iktus labyrinth program are Christopher Bailey, Meg Schedel, Joseph Waters, Michael Barnhart, Robin Estrada, and Jenny Olivia Johnson.

Also coming up in between those two performances is one of the New Spectrum Ensemble's premiere concerts, on April 17th in San Francisco, which will include two of my older pieces, Spaces Between and This Empty and Luminous Room, on a concert including works by Dan Becker, Elliott Carter, and Beethoven. The New Spectrum Ensemble is truly brand-new, and it's an honor to be a part of their debut concert as a full ensemble. (One earlier concert will feature the ensemble's directors, Sandra Gu and Kathryn Bates Williams.) It'll also be strange and (hopefully!) good to hear these pieces again. They were written right at the time when I was just starting to experiment with musical directions that have become really important to me since then.

Up next for me, compositionally, is a work that's essentially written as an exercise for orals. The composition professors on my orals committee decide on an instrumentation, and I have one month to write a piece for that instrumentation that we'll discuss during my orals exam. I wasn't originally looking forward to this, but I have been ever since I realized that it's basically a "Project Runway" challenge. I now cannot wait to get my instrumentation, which should be happening soon. I don't know what the musical equivalent is of making a dress out of coffee filters, sandpaper, and rivets, but I'm really ready to find out. I hope it's truly weird. Like, tuba-trio-with-clarinet weird.

After that, I'll be taking orals. Doom!

Assuming I survive orals, I'll be in residence at Millay Colony for the Arts this summer working on (maybe? hopefully? possibly?) an opera. And in the fall, there will be a theatrical collaboration with Caitlin Marshall on a work using synthetic vocalization machines. That's all that I can say definitively about that project at this point, but I'm really excited about it. It's going to be something new, and wacky, and very, very cool. Stay tuned!

Edited to add: I've just heard that I will also be in residence at the MacDowell Colony this summer as well! I'm so, so excited.

Anybody who habitually records sound has those moments of serendipity when the recorder happens to be rolling while something really wonderful happens. Similarly, there are the sounds that get away, the ones that end while you're fumbling with the mic cables, or with the cell phone. Or the ones that are physically impossible to record (or close enough to it for our purposes).

I've only gotten to go to the Deep Listening Retreat once, in 2006, but it changed the way I think about sound, particularly the degree and the quality of the attention I give it. There are times when I find myself inordinately drawn to remembering the sounds that I couldn't record, and it's interesting to realize how, even though they aren't there, you can still study them, you can still notice new things about them. The richness of the sound and the experience of hearing it doesn't diminish over time. It's surprisingly unrelated to the presence or absence of a recording.

We got home the other night after sunset, but while the sky was still darkening, and as we got out of the car, a flock of geese took off. From every direction, there were loud, individual rustlings of brush and branches and leaves and a rapid beating of wings as each goose took off. You could hear the noisy ascent through the trees into open air, and you could hear them calling as they flew, the calls coming from every direction and coalescing in the distance. It was as if we had accidentally wandered into the middle of a secret goose ritual, and now that we had found them out they had to scatter, and fast. It was a surreal moment, even more so because, try as we might, we couldn't see a single goose.

I snapped this picture while grabbing for my cell phone, hoping to capture some semblance of the sound by recording a video. This is the exact color that the sky was.

How about you? Any favorites?

Orography premiered on October 12 on the first Berkeley New Music Project concert of the semester, featuring special guest performers SoundGEAR (Toshiya Suzuki, Stefan Hussong, Satoshi Inagaki, and Kuniko Kato). We're very lucky at Cal in that our works are usually performed by some of the best new music interpreters in the Bay Area, but it's always exciting to get to work with a visiting group, and SoundGEAR was no exception. In addition to being gifted performers, they had prepared a great deal in advance, and so our brief time together was efficient and enormously satisfying. It was just a wonderful experience. The other graduate student composers and I are really indebted to the BNMP staff (Ken Ueno and David Milnes, the faculty advisors/directors; and Dave Coll and Amadeus Regucera, the student heads), the Music Department staff, and Keiko Harada (who is primarily a composer, and a wonderful one, but also acted as SoundGEAR's manager and primary contact throughout the planning process). David Milnes was also kind enough to step in and conduct my piece with relatively short notice.

Right now, I'm in the process of wrapping up a percussion quartet for the Iktus Percussion Quartet, part of a set of pieces being composed for a labyrinth installation taking place in the spring. The piece is based primarily on bowed tremolo effects used on tam-tams to produce high harmonics, and vibraphone used to emphasize and contrast with those harmonics. There's a strong noise component to these sounds despite the clarity of the pitch. I'm really excited about it.

There are other projects in the future, including Searchlight Songs, but after this I'll probably begin work on a larger piece, something that won't just be finished in a semester, maybe a work for orchestra or a set of pieces for choir. They're both projects that I've always meant to try, and I think now will be a good time.

You're also looking at my brand-new, re-designed website. The old design was starting to look like the Apple screensaver more and more to me, and it was kind of making me crazy. Right as I finished this redesign, I realized it looks just like a purse that I have. At least it's a purse that I like.

The primary new feature on this incarnation of the site is the blog. I've been finding more and more that I'm seeing interesting things I'd like to share, or reading things that I'd like to respond to, and lacking a venue to do it. So hopefully, this will be it. I'm not entirely sure what it'll be "about" yet. It may not be "about" anything. But it's there.

But what I think I really loved about it was that it was a truly special community to join for the summer. It's unusual among composition programs in that, in addition the composers and performers, there's also a large contingent of adult amateur musicians who study chamber music, coached by the professionals who perform our works. They were really interesting people to talk to and a friendly, intelligent, enthusiastic audience—the kind of listeners that it's a real pleasure to be around. And the performers treated our music with more than just professionalism; I felt extraordinarily well cared for, as a composer. And many of the performers and amateur musicians have been coming to Wellesley for years. Even though I didn't have old friends to meet up with there, it's hard not to feel happy in an environment where people are joyfully reuniting constantly.

It was refreshing to spend all day every day listening to and thinking about music. I'm home again now and just starting the school year, after a month spent with family in LA post-Wellesley. And while I'm very glad to be home, and I missed my cats and my bed and my slightly sad-looking fig tree, it's an adjustment to get used to juggling time for music with time for teaching, time for singing, time for being with friends, time for running errands and doing chores. While I was home in LA, I wrote Orography, a short piece for soprano/great bass recorders, accordion, percussion, and piano. It'll be performed October 12th as part of the first Berkeley New Music Project concert of the semester, also featuring works by my friends Heather Frasch, Dave Coll, and Daniel Cullen. That concert will feature guest performers Tosiya Suzuki (recorder), Stefan Hussong (accordion), Kuniko Kato (percussion), and Satoshi Inagaki (piano). (There will also be a second concert this semester, following our normal, anything-goes format and the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players.)

Next up is the full version of Searchlight Songs for Janet McKay, an dear friend and fabulous flutist. She's performed the shorter, original version (which I thought of as a kind of proof-of-concept study piece) here in the USA while on tour last spring, and has since been featuring it in concerts in her native Brisbane as well. Janet has a clear, lovely, mid-range singing voice, and she's a thoughtful, intense presence onstage. I chose to write a piece for her that makes extensive use of singing while playing, combining and teasing apart those two voices. I'm really looking forward to it.

(Pictured above: Performance of The Garden of Forking Paths at the Wellesley Composers Conference: Mary Nessinger, mezzo-soprano; Barry Crawford, flute/piccolo; Jean Kopperud, Bb clarinet/bass clarinet; Christopher Oldfather, piano; Stephen Paysen, percussion; Cyrus Stevens, violin; Michael Finckel, cello; James Baker, conductor.)

I'm at Wellesley right now. It's incredible.