a place without language or streets (2022) - JACK HERSCOWITZ

a place without language
or streets (2022)
Composed by Jack Herscowitz
Performed by:
Jonathan Stehney, bassoon
David Saldaña, electronics
Program Notes:
JACK HERSCOWITZ: a place
without language or streets
“And for the first time, he wished
he were far away. Lost in a deep,
vast country where nobody knew
him. Somewhere without language,
or streets. He dreamed about this
place without knowing its name. And
when he woke up, he was on fire.
There were blue flames burning the
sheets of his bed. He ran through the
flames toward the only two people
he loved... but they were gone. His
arms were burning, and he threw
himself outside and rolled on the
wet ground. Then he ran. He never
looked back at the fire. He just ran.
He ran until the sun came up and he
couldn’t run any further. And when
the sun went down, he ran again. For
five days he ran like this until every
sign of man had disappeared.”
- from Paris, Texas (written by Sam
Shepard and L. M. Kit Carson, spoken
by Harry Dean Stanton, and directed
by Wim Wenders)
Composer Bio:
JACK HERSCOWITZ is a Los Angeles
based composer, improviser, and
sound artist whose work engages
impossibility, autobiographical sampling,
performance-as-commitment,
horror, shifting unstable loops, and
the extremities of noise to recognize
music as a multi-sensory social art
form: bringing attention to the situations
in which we experience and
create sound, rather than just sound
itself. His work runs the wide gamut
of participatory sound installations,
noisy electroacoustic improvisations, theatrical performance, process based
chamber music, deconstructed
remixes, and communal spaces
for sound making. His instrumental
music has been performed by artists
including the Arditti Quartet, Del Sol
String Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente,
Syntagma Piano Duo, Atlantic Reed
Consort, Hypercube, and the soloists
of Talea Ensemble, among others. His
work has been presented at IRCAM
ManiFeste (Paris), CENART (CDMX),
Barcelona Modern Festival, The Moscow
Conservatory, The Composers
Conference (as a Fromm Foundation
Fellow), and many others.
Jack is the 2023-2024 composer-in residence
with .abeceda ensemble.
His work and words have been
featured in PRXLUDES Magazine
and on The Watt From Pedro Show.
Jack performs improvised live electronics
on digital instruments with
groups Mystic Elevator and Castle
Anthrax and improvisers including
Ana Luisa Diaz de Cossio, M A
Harms, and Jeonghyeon Joo. His solo
performance practice draws from
noise, glitch, vaporwave, and DIY
electronics to re-claim the sounds of
capitalism’s sonic warfare.