How might a musical composition demonstrate meaningful engagement with research in other fields? For composers, especially those involved in academia, this can seem like a tired and redundant question. Artists are familiar with the wealth of possibilities afforded by cross-disciplinary collaboration. Practice-based methodologies, sometimes drawing on strategies such as data sonification and process-driven composition, can facilitate demonstrable links between non-musical source materials and musical outcomes. Nonetheless, any creative process that seeks to transform non-musical research materials into artistic practice can raise fundamental questions regarding the nature of meaning, understanding and communication. Where does the research end and the music begin – if these distinctions are even useful? Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes, by Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang, is the striking result of two contrasting research projects. The composer's programme note draws attention to the multidisciplinary, collaborative environment that enabled these pieces to come to fruition.
The first work, Hearing Landscapes (2014), is a three-movement electronic work with a total duration of around 20 minutes. Materials available through the composer's website and Lei Lab, the research centre spearheaded by the composer at Qualcomm Institute (UC San Diego), provide fascinating details about the project. To create this piece, the research team focused on the landscape paintings of Huang Binhong (1865–1955). Lei Liang frames the project as an attempt to reconstruct a lost world, beginning with the questions ‘can images be heard, and can a sound be seen’.Footnote 1 While an audio team developed software to create sonic analogies to Huang Binhong's painting techniques, a visual team conducted detailed analyses using procedures such as X-ray fluorescence and multispectral imaging. The paintings that form the basis of this piece were all created during the 1950s, after Huan Binhong had lost his sight. In reference to this time and place, each movement draws on a different recording made in China during this decade.
Lei Liang's detailed discussion and analysis provide invaluable insights, yet the musical material is immediately striking even when heard out of context. The first movement, ‘High Mountain’, opens with a recording of the evocative, highly ornamented singing of Zhu Zhonglu, from Quinghai province. Sustained, glassy electronics seem to drift in and out of focus, subtly complementing the singer's abrupt shifts between strident chest voice and floating falsetto. Harmonic material is slow moving, its sense of pentatonicism inflected by the electronics’ delicate microtonality. In contrast, movement 2, ‘Mother Tongue’, focuses on material of indefinite pitch – the spoken language of Lei Liang's Beijing dialect. The movement is made from archive recordings of two comedians, Hou Baolin and Guo Qiru, engaging in xiangsheng [crosstalk]. Although material is often fragmented, temporally stretched or compressed, the performative quality of the original dialogue is somehow implied through the composer's attention to timing and pitch contour. At times, the juxtaposition of unaltered words and phrases with dense clouds of vocal sound seems reminiscent of Berio's Thema – Omaggio a Joyce. Movement 3, ‘Water and Mist’, returns to recorded music for its source material, drawing on a performance of Water and Mist over Xiaoxiang by guqin master Wu Jing-lüe. Beginning with a rain effect, ‘created by sounds of Styrofoam peanuts dropped into an open piano’, guqin samples are re-presented within a relatively static, microtonal harmonic world. Towards the end of the movement, the original recording comes to the fore, set against a resonant backdrop of birdsong, before fading away into bell-like sonorities that seem to hint at Lei Liang's idea of a lost world.
Hearing Icescapes (2018–22) marks a striking change of direction. All references to human culture and history are gone, replaced by non-human sounds recorded in the Chukchi Sea, north of Alaska. The subtitles of Hearing Icescapes’ two movements refer to the processes of sound impulse and response used in echolocation.Footnote 2 The work's extended duration, totalling around 56 minutes, seems to confirm Lei Liang's proposal that ‘[t]hese sounds call for a different way of listening’. The first part, ‘Call’, is an electronic work. Ambiguous, muffled, crunching sounds emerge from silence into a sparse, austere soundscape. The programme notes identify a number of these sounds, such as ‘nilas sea ice formation’, ‘bowhead whales’ and ‘pods of belugas’, together with precise timecodes for when each sound is heard during the piece.Footnote 3 The composer's intervention is subtle. Other than changes to panning and volume, it is not immediately clear which sounds, if any, have been transformed and edited. This gives the work a documentary quality, in stark contrast to the intricately constructed, compositional detail of Hearing Landscapes.
In the second part, ‘Response’, the material of ‘Call’ is replayed, with the addition of three improvising musicians. The repetition is not exact, since ‘Response’ is about ten minutes longer than ‘Call’. Lei Liang describes ‘Call’ as a ‘set of interactive modules’, providing the improvising musicians with a ‘score’ for ‘Response’. In contrast to the harmonic basis that seems to underpin so much of Hearing Landscapes, the material of Hearing Icescapes focuses on timbre and texture. At the start of ‘Call’, David Aguila (trumpet) demonstrates a vast array of articulations, air sounds and lip pressures, seamlessly blending with the ambiguous, watery soundworld of the electronics. Teresa Díaz de Cossio (flute) adds a wealth of air sounds and subtle effects to the kaleidoscopic array of timbres. Around 18 minutes into the piece, violinist Myra Hinrichs shines in a dazzling display of virtuosity. In response to the rising and falling whale and beluga calls that dominate this section, Hinrichs launches into a rapid succession of ascending and descending figurations, deftly drawing on a huge variety of harmonics and bowing techniques to colour and shape her material. Moments of the ensemble improvisation seem to allude to the type of fragile, timbral subtlety that is often heard in the music of Chaya Czernowin, with whom Lei Liang also studied.
Given the detail and lucidity with which Lei Liang describes the scientific processes that underpin the two projects, there is tantalisingly little information regarding the nature of the improvisation in ‘Response’. Questions such as the role of the composer, choice of instruments and replicability perhaps exceed the scope of a programme note. Interestingly, Lei Liang's subsequent work, Six Seasons, which premiered in October 2022, combines many of the electronic sounds heard in Hearing Icescapes with an improvising quartet. Perhaps this is indicative of a different direction in the composer's future work.
In the context of Lei Liang's varied and prodigious career, the contrast between Hearing Landscapes and Hearing Icescapes might not solely be attributable to the passage of time. Instead, musical diversity seems indicative of the vast breadth of Lei Liang's interests, as demonstrated by Lei Lab and his extensive catalogue of works and recordings. In addition to the cultural and ecological ideas explored in this album, Lei Liang's other compositions have examined social issues such as gun control (in the opera Inheritance, in 2018), and climate change (in his Grawemeyer Award-winning concerto, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, written in 2019). The home page of Lei Lab refers to upcoming projects with intriguing titles such as Singing Earth and Inaudible Ocean. Given the scope and variety of his work to date, it seems almost impossible to imagine the soundworlds of his next work. Lei Liang clearly has much more to say.
