Moon Bounce
Thursday, February 13, 2025 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall, Room 003 (Daltry Room), 60 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.
Wesleyan's Toneburst Laptop and Electronic Arts Ensemble examines the creative possibilities of reflecting signals off the moon, and transmission arts more broadly, this spring.
Composer Yvette Janine Jackson, Assistant Professor in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry, Department of Music, Harvard University, will present the Wesleyan Music Department Colloquium in Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall at 4:30pm. In the talk, “Radio Opera Workshop: Transformation of Sound and Process,” Jackson explores her relationship with radio opera as a compositional and performance practice. She will highlight the ways she synthesizes radio drama, electroacoustic music, and soundscape composition to create immersive sonic narratives through her solo works and the Radio Opera Workshop ensemble. This presentation will examine her use of text, spatialization, and repetition as creative tools, while sharing examples of the collaborative and technological processes that shape her works.
A reception will follow at 6pm in the Van Vleck Observatory, located on campus at 96 Foss Hill Drive in Middletown, Connecticut. The Toneburst Laptop and Electronic Arts Ensemble will perform, and multidisciplinary artist Jen Kutler of Wave Farm will collaborate on the start of this spring's "Moon Bounce" experiments outside of the observatory.
In the years preceding his passing, the late John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Emeritus Alvin Lucier (1931–2021) was working on "Moon Bounce" and "Silk," two pieces which explored reflecting radio signals off the moon, audio transduction through instruments, and vibrations through spiderwebs. Lucier had approached Professor of Music Paula Matthusen and several Wesleyan faculty to inquire about making a transmitter available on campus for Wesleyan students to “bounce sounds off the moon.” While this proved difficult to achieve in his lifetime, the creative energy and possibilities in Lucier’s pieces underscore much of what is being pursued here: the exploration of the human and non-human; vibration as communication, survival, and inquisitive possibility; the savoring of difference in surfaces (e.g., the moon) though reflection and touch; and the translations between how waves (airborne and electromagnetic) may be transduced and brought into contact with one another.
In collaboration with Wave Farm, an international transmission arts organization driven by experimentation with the electromagnetic spectrum based in Acra, New York, Matthusen will realize this project that brings together acoustic and astronomical space. At the intersection of art and science, Matthusen has assembled a team of experts in experimental music and radio-wave transmission.
Learn more about the "Moon Bounce" project.
Presented by the Creative Campus Initiative and Professor of Music Paula Matthusen as part of MUSC 464 Laptop Ensemble. Additional sponsorship from the Astronomy Department, Music Department, and the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life.
The Creative Campus Initiative of the Center for the Arts supports cross-disciplinary collaborations that center the arts as a way of teaching, learning, and knowing at Wesleyan University.
Photo of Alvin Lucier by Amanda Lucier. Photo of moon by Gregory H. Revera, Wikimedia Commons.