after the future

for 16 Intonarumori (2021), 10’

Although the intonarumori were designed to represent the sounds of a future music, now, more than one hundred years later, these instruments are relics of a past that contemplated a future that never quite happened. So what happens after such a future?  While all these instruments were intentionally designed to subvert any possible conventional "musical" sonorities and instead replicate the industrial noises of modern life, in the century since they were first conceived by Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, music has embraced all of these noises and so much more. So, in creating After The Future, I was instead hoping to showcase the inherent musicality of each of the various instruments in the intonarumori orchestra. 

I wanted each one to have a chance to sing and to be heard. So I attempted to create something for these instruments like what Béla Bartók and Benjamin Britten had done for the standard orchestra instruments in their Concerto for Orchestra and The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (two pieces that didn't yet exist when Russolo first built these instruments). Each of the intonarumori has its own magic and when they blend in various combinations with each other, other forms of magic arise.

And then there is silence. There are several long silences in After The Future. Are they supposed to be a reprieve from all the noise? Or do they perhaps allow us to listen to the music in other noises all around us as John Cage taught us to do nearly sixty years ago? And what do we hear when there is enough time given to all of these sounds for us to deeply listen each to them, as Pauline Oliveros taught us to do shortly thereafter? After The Future is designed to create such a listening space, as well as to somehow evoke--in so far as such a musically impossible thing is possible--a world that is beyond time, which is, after all, the only thing there could be after the future. 

Much has changed since the intonarumori were first conceived, but indeed much has also changed during the 2020s. We have all lived through a truly horrific and unprecedented couple of years: a global pandemic that is still with us; a heightened awareness of many social injustices that is a terrible reminder of how powerless most of us are; and an overdue reckoning with the fragility of the planet we all live on which many people are still not willing to acknowledge. It was not lost on me while composing this music that in this strange malaise we are living through the present tense often feels like it is somehow occurring after the future. That, as well as a more personal annoying reality. During the course of the last few months--as a result of a huge water leak in the apartment I live in--demolition crews have wandered in to bang on walls and, in between their visits, industrial fans and dehumidifiers have blown incessantly. The only thing that has kept me from going completely insane has been to hear it all as music.