Lindenbaum Festival Ensemble - ‘Hidden Whispers’ by Amir Bitran

This piece, entitled “Hidden Whispers”, is inspired by elephant infrasounds—sounds that are too low in frequency for humans to hear (below 20 Hz), but nonetheless audible to elephants. These infrasonic components of elephant calls travel significantly farther than the higher-pitched audible components, allowing elephants to communicate across long distances (up to 10 km) and through dense jungles and other muffling environments. To convert these inaudible sounds into music, I studied field recordings of elephant infrasounds and transposed them up into an audible frequency range. The resulting set of pitches make up the first chords in the piece, which are heard in the winds as a sort of declamatory call. These initial notes then travel to the strings, albeit in muted and modulated form, to evoke the sonic transfiguration that elephant sounds undergo as they travel long distances and only certain frequencies survive. These traveling, shape-shifting sounds eventually build into a dramatic musical arc. This musical narrative reimagines the stories exchanged by majestic elephants—beasts highly threatened by environmental destruction and climate change--as they communicate in ways unknowable to us.

About ‘Lindenbaum Festival Ensemble’

Founded in 2009 by Maestro Charles Dutoit & Violinist Hyung Joon Won, Lindenbaum Festival Orchestra & Ensemble have contributed peace concerts in Demilitarized Zone in Korea with collaborating the members of Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra, Yale Symphony Orchestra, National Children’s Chorus, The Yehudi Menuhin School and The Juilliard School.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensemble started musical experiments with science by performing MIT professors Buehler’s ‘COVID-19 Antibody Music’ and ongoing performances in order to find intuition between science & music.

*Conductor: Reuben Stern

*Violin: Sungjoo Kim, Yeseo Shim

*Viola: Onyu Lee

*Cello: Grant Riew

*Oboe: Andrew Joonseo Lee

*Clarinet: Sungjoon Park

*Alto Saxophone: Seung Bin Lee, Edward Sehyun Park

*Harvard Medical School Chamber Music Society


About Amir Bitran

Amir Bitran is a scientist and composer driven by his desires to understand the basic physics governing life and to distill and portray beautiful scientific ideas through music. Born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1993 and raised in a trilingual household, Amir’s dual passions and musical idiom where shaped by his upbringing under his mother—a cognitive scientist and Northeastern University professor originally from Israel-- and his father—a Mexican-American violinist and member of the Grammy-award winning Cuarteto Latinoamericano. Amir’s early scientific research as a biophysics PhD student at Harvard, under the mentorship of MIT Professor Leonid Mirny sought to understand how DNA is organized into elaborate chromatin structures that ensure different genes get turned “on” or “off” in different cells—a process whose faulty regulation often causes cancer. This work inspired Amir’s composition, “When DNA Makes Loops”, that was premiered at the Salle Cortot in Paris by members of the the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France as part of the first iteration of the Muse-IC project—a unique initiative that commissioned six renowned composers to write pieces inspired by cutting-edge research. He subsequently conducted his doctoral research with Harvard biophysicist Eugene Shakhnovich, and is currently a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley where he is investigating how proteins acquire their “shapes” in the cell that let them perform their functions—failure of this process is linked to disease such as Alzheimer’s.

This research inspired Amir’s “Dance of the Nascent Chain”, a boogie-woogie for piano that portrays how a protein dynamically “folds” into its structure, which was performed at the Boston Museum of Science in May 2022. Beyond his main research areas, Amir has composed works inspired by myriad scientific and natural topics that have been performed by renowned ensembles including the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra and the Grammy-award Parker Quartet, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, and the Cuarteto Q-Arte. These works include a chamber piece about the International Space Station, a string octet based on nocturnal tropical bird calls that was premiered in Bogotá, Colombia in February 2020, and a set of string miniatures inspired by the development of an embryo, which was premiered in April 2022 as part of the Celebrity Series of Boston.


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