It is June.
My 2015 song cycle Bound begins with the spoken line, “it is June”. On the morning of every June 1 since Bound premiered, I have texted those words to mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen, who has appeared as soloist in every performance of the work. I texted Megan, “it is June”, yesterday, and I’m using the arrival of this personally auspicious month to share a little update about Bound X, my electronic remix project that celebrates the Bound’s tenth anniversary in 2025.
When I announced this endeavor on March 14 (the song cycle’s literal tenth birthday) I held the ambitious hope to release Bound X today. But, the whole thing is not finished just yet. Nevertheless, this post is about previewing more of the project and I’m thrilled to share, “A Many-Chambered Heart,” my new remix of the movement “Bound I” from Bound:
For your reference, here is a recording of the original “Bound I” movement from the premiere performance, which features Megan as the vocal soloist alongside violinist Timothy Steeves, clarinetist Jacen Paige, saxophonist Andy Hall, and percussionist Chris Sies of the fabulous chamber ensemble Latitude49 (all but Jacen continue to be in the group!):
Bound’s text sets poetry I commissioned from Lauren Clark, a dear friend of mine in graduate school at the University of Michigan who continues to inspire just about everything I do creatively. The title of the remix movement, “A Many-Chambered Heart”, is one of Lauren’s lines that I set in “Bound I” back in 2014-15.
Bound X will mostly follow the original song cycle’s structure, but vary in the intensity of its transformations. As you can hear in the recording linked above, “A Many-Chambered Heart” is very abstract and uses countless samples from the recording of Bound’s world premiere performance that are chopped, distorted, and woven into intricate, multi-layered webs of sound.
The first preview recording of Bound X I’ve shared presents a very different, ‘chiptune’-inspired soundworld in a more straight synthesizer arrangement of the “Interlude II” movement of Bound that was originally written for voice and percussion:
Now that I’ve finished my pre-composition of Bound X, and begun work on over half its seven movements, it is clear to me that these two examples represent the whole work’s aesthetic poles.
On one hand, I plan to present some straightforward remixes with a boisterous, synth-forward, and highly-stylized character. On the other, I want to use my composition process to reflect on my memories of Bound and the experiences I’ve had as a composer over the last ten years. The dense abstraction of “A Many-Chambered Heart” takes this perspective to an extreme, but its spacious, atmospheric qualities introduce important and recurring sonic themes.
My new goal is to complete and release Bound X by my next birthday (September 10), and I will write at least one more post here to share my progress and more preview recordings.
If you are interested in hearing more of my original music before September, you should attend my performance with Julie Zhu and Sara Tea at the Ann Arbor Summer Festival (Wednesday, June 18, 6 PM)! As I will write more in the coming weeks, it is a true thrill to appear at this landmark of local music, particularly because the three of us are able to continue the wonderful ‘Resonant Soundscapes’ project we started in 2024. Our performance on June 18 also marks the first time A2SF has featured the bells of the Charles Baird Carillon atop Burton Memorial Tower in its presentations.
This ‘Resonant Soundscapes’ event will feature Julie’s carillon improvisation to ambient electronics music Sara and I composed and premiered last November. My contribution, O Beata Maria, is a spacy synthesizer treatment of the first half to Vicente Lusitano’s 1551 motet of the same name. You can listen to my O Beata Maria on its own here:
