Jen Wang: Interstate/Luminesce - for piano and electronics

Premiere & Recording:
Michael Orland, piano
April 13, 2009: Berkeley New Music Project
Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
(recorded live)

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My program note for Interstate/Luminesce:

On foggy nights, where the interstate flows to the ocean, light from the pier and the city hangs suspended in the air as bright, diffuse, constellations. The Ferris Wheel and the funhouse are closed, and the children have all gone home, but the light remains: murky and distorted, vibrant with the city's latent, pulsing, energy.

Interstate/Luminesce is a piece with a simple program, and a more stripped-down, expansive musical language than what I've been accustomed to using. There's a slow development of a single idea in the piano, over a soundscape of traffic sounds and sustained pitches drawn from the piano part, created by shifting and sustaining samples (using Ableton Live and IRCAM's phase vocoder for Max/MSP) of pianos, percussion instruments, and synthesized instruments (using the Sculpture plug-in in Logic).

For me, the piece was an experiment in patience and stretching ideas out over time; some of my earlier pieces feel hasty to me, and I wanted to see what it would be like to push in the other direction. It was surprisingly difficult, and a really useful challenge.

In many ways, the piece is a return to my fascination with Los Angeles, and its weird and beautiful dystopian mystique. It (and my love of traffic sounds) began in earnest back with velocity. In high school, there wasn't very much to do at night if you didn't have much money, and I'd go with friends on long night drives, up into the hills or to the ocean, with the windows rolled down in the heat. My memories of the city are inextricable from my memories of night drives, and my sense of the city's beauty is connected to a restless urge to break from it.