Other Minds is pleased to announce the 17th edition of the Nature of Music concert series which will take place Wednesday, May 11, 2022 at 7:30 pm at the Goldman Theater of the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California. The event will feature a performance of Christopher Luna-Mega’s Night Music for reed quintet and electronics performed by Splinter Reeds.
Christopher Luna-Mega is a composer and improviser whose work analyzes sounds and data from natural and urban environments and translates them into notated music for performers and electronics. His Night Music is derived from direct transcriptions and arrangements of a 5-channel recording of the summer dusk and night sounds of insects at Walnut Creek Park in Albemarle County, Virginia. The piece is structured in five movements, each taken from a fragment of the original 40-minute recording. The striking increase in harmonic density and loudness as the recording unfolds is the guiding formal principle of the piece. The recording, featured in the electronics, was made with five microphones and each microphone analysis and transcription was assigned to one instrument. The multi-channel recording sought an expanded listening field resulting from the different microphone responses and placings.
By spatializing these field recordings in Night Music, Luna-Mega aimed to capture the constantly shifting sound in the forest throughout the recorded perimeter, expanding the auditory field comparable to a 360º photo, as well as continue his research on the various modes of perception and their compositional implications. Night Music explores the different contents that each microphone and recording device captured of the same environment, expanding the perceptual field. The spatial distribution of the field recording is recreated in the diffusion of the 5-channel electronics track.