Echo Chambers

In the most common current usage, an "echo chamber" refers to a system in which beliefs are amplified inside a community where varied or opposing ideas are shut out, and the process of repetition and confirmation-bias led discourse to become increasingly extreme and polarized. The prevalence of these scenarios is perhaps more pronounced today than it has ever been, in large part through how technology has increasingly fostered these closed systems in media and social networking. The term has its origins in acoustics, describing a hollow enclosure where sound reverberates. When composing for acoustic instruments and electronics, I'm wary of the meaning that the presence of technology on stage carries in our centuries-old performance traditions. As a result, I'm inclined to connect the use of electronics in live performance to paradigms of technology in our lives, more broadly. Thus, in writing this piece for wind ensemble and electronics, I wanted to find ways that our echo chambers of tribalism might connect with the sonic origins of the term, and how growing presence in our socio-technological lives might be explored through musical storytelling. In my piece, you will immediately hear two contrasting and opposing themes (the first in the woodwinds and percussion, the second in the brass). The themes are metrically polarized and in harmonically incompatible modes. Whereas a more conventional composition might develop the music by combining the themes, these two are like oil and water, and despite a third, more lyrical theme trying to mediate them, they persist in separate spheres until they are pushed together and thrown into conflict. Throughout, electronic echoes, filters, and resonances expand the sonic palette, extend the upper register of the ensemble, and egg on our thematic characters. A brief heroic moment of common ground is eventually achieved, but it is fleeting and dissolves before it can be satisfyingly felt as a resolution of two opposing entities. Echo Chambers was composed for a consortium of fifty wind ensembles, led by and dedicated to Edwin Powell and the Pacific Lutheran University Wind Ensemble.