A Long Postlude

for solo performer, light bulbs, and electronics, 2018

released on Music from SEAMUS CD vol. 30

Alexander Graham Bell developed the photophone in 1880. The device reflected vibrated sunlight to convey speech wirelessly. While Bell thought it to be one of his greatest inventions, it was too impractical to be put to general use.

This piece explores the mystical properties of light and its applications, using text documenting the photophone interspersed with Mormon prophecies about light. Light bulbs are absent from the story itself (Bell used sunlight for his experiment). As such, the bulbs become bystanders, independent characters since groomed by history, communicating a story of speech by light.

To make the lights sound, I use a magnetic inductor microphone and mix the amplified sound of the bulbs with a vocoder instrument I made in MaxMSP. Text is excerpted from Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude by Robert Bruce (Cornell University Press, 1990). Prophecy from “Bearers of Heavenly Light” by Dieter Uchtdorf (Latter Day Saints General Assembly, October 2017). Read more about the piece in my interview with Andrew Watts: Composition, Technology, and the Post-Human in CeReNeM Journal.