Christopher Cerrone — The Insects Became Magnetic [Score-Follow]

The Insects Became Magnetic
for orchestra and electronics

performed by the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
conducted by Roderick Cox
April 22, 2023
Haus des Rundfunks
Berlin, Germany

Recorded and engineered by Joerg Riemer
Mastered by Mike Tierney

When I started composing The Insects Became Magnetic, noise was on my mind—and it quickly became urgent. I’d set up a microphone to record myself playing the piano, opened up my laptop, and clicked record. But I’d forgotten to plug in the mic, leading to the computer speakers feeding back a painfully high screech.

Fighting the normal human impulse to turn it off as quickly as possible, I thought: maybe there’s something in this noise. I grabbed my iPhone and quickly recorded a 30-second snippet before the sound became too much for me. I thought: could I possibly make something beautiful out of this obviously unpleasant sound? Rather than avoiding it, maybe the key is to find a way through and finally out of the noise by thoroughly exploring it.

Noise itself has long been the condition of modernity. Articles proclaim a need for “Mindfulness in an age of Twitter noise.” The Guardian inquires: “Is modern life too noisy?” Nate Silver wrote a book about separating the “signal” from the “noise”—that is, getting rid of the noise to get to facts. In my own life in New York City, I can often feel overwhelmed by the noise of a routine commute—the train itself, not to mention the Ivesian cacophony of 30 strangers’ headphones bleeding beats over one another.

Back in my studio, the first thing I tried was pitch-shifting the screeching feedback down a few octaves: It immediately became much more palatable. Then I slowed it to a third of its original speed, at which point it became a lush, evocative, slowly changing soundscape. It reminded me of the guitar solos in the music that I grew up with — feedback is littered throughout Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine records — music that turned the manipulation of feedback into a powerful expressive device. This became the sonority that opens my piece.

From there I set out to blend the orchestra with this sonority. Bowed vibraphones and crotales—almost electronic-sounding instruments themselves—became the glue that melded the electronic with the acoustic. Swarms of string tremolos connected to the insect-like electronics, and finally—after being detuned down seven full octaves—the now almost unrecognizable feedback became low swells in the trombones and tuba.

While recording myself improvising the middle section of the piece (a lullaby-like section), the water kettle went off, producing a harmonica-like drone. When I played it back among the other sounds of the piece, it happened to be just in the right key, and, keeping in the spirit of incorporated noise of daily life, I felt I had to incorporate that too. Hence, the harmonicas.

As the piece progressed, I began thinking about a passage from Adam Clay’s “Goodbye to All That, the Birds Included”—a poem I’d loved for years:“I hope the insects become magnetic,
to eat plastic hillsides, to pull a drone down, even.
It might even be a collage, now that I look.”

I realized I, too, was making a kind of collage: mixing electronic feedback with centuries-old violins, street noise and rarified orchestral acoustics, the canon and the vernacular, hoping to find something new in it all.
More information about the work:
https://christophercerrone.com/music/...