https://johnsupko.com John Supko | composer Sun, 02 Nov 2025 16:30:49 +0000 https://johnsupko.com en https://johnsupko.com/HOME Fri, 10 Dec 2021 17:28:54 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/HOME John Supkocomposer &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;About &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Music &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Words &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Press https://johnsupko.com/ABOUT Sat, 18 Dec 2021 18:26:54 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/ABOUT Home&nbsp; Music Words Press About John Supko I write music for humans and computers, often&nbsp;together. Sometimes I make software tools that help me slip the limits of my musical imagination. The serendipity of collaboration has long interested me. I think of collaboration as a conversation in which I have to “say things differently…[and] say different things.” I’m curious about the future, but a part of me will always live in the 20th century. I think there’s still more to learn from Surrealism:&nbsp; I find&nbsp;dreams, ambiguity, and the subconscious inexhaustibly alluring. <img width="3024" height="3024" width_o="3024" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aec82c979dcd77eee495746a045c31f05c2ec3198001f32619fccff5db4af834/IMG_1141.JPG" data-mid="127743939" border="0" data-scale="86" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aec82c979dcd77eee495746a045c31f05c2ec3198001f32619fccff5db4af834/IMG_1141.JPG" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="1124" height="1120" width_o="1124" height_o="1120" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/45367c0dcd37256f02d92e0b6721f15ecfdbd8a2c837f077f744959478a62fb8/tangled-up_les_passerelles.jpg" data-mid="127743934" border="0" data-scale="73" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/45367c0dcd37256f02d92e0b6721f15ecfdbd8a2c837f077f744959478a62fb8/tangled-up_les_passerelles.jpg" /> “Teaching” computers to make art and use language with some degree of autonomy has opened up new avenues of investigation, but these pathways can lead back just as easily to André Breton et al. &nbsp; Computation is a form of automatic writing–or it can be. &nbsp;Some of my work exploits this possibility through generative processes. The computer’s memory is filled with huge amounts of raw material, which it fragments and recombines unpredictably according to layers of algorithms I design. I teach at Duke University, where I am an associate professor in the Department of Music with a secondary appointment in Theater Studies. I also teach in the Computational Media, Arts &amp; Cultures program. I co-direct CMAC’s Emergence Lab with Bill Seaman. I hold a BM from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and an MFA and a PhD from Princeton University. <img width="6720" height="4480" width_o="6720" height_o="4480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f3f7d3d2c476a61e4c5d5655ede4940dffbe27b7cd7217f1339a4d1f30e7cae9/180307_AB_Operand_0289-smaller.jpg" data-mid="127743927" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f3f7d3d2c476a61e4c5d5655ede4940dffbe27b7cd7217f1339a4d1f30e7cae9/180307_AB_Operand_0289-smaller.jpg" /> Contact me https://johnsupko.com/MUSIC Sat, 18 Dec 2021 18:34:24 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/MUSIC Home About Words Press Music Crossed Shadows︎ &nbsp; saxophone quartet, (opt. live) drummer, &amp; tape One Hundred Thousand Billion Piecesfor Piano &amp; Computer︎ piano &amp; interactive electronics Biloxi Anapanasati︎ &nbsp; double bass, piano, percussion, &amp; tape Soleil Noir︎ &nbsp; string quartet Music from Pig Film︎&nbsp; electroacoustic score &amp; sound design for the film by Josh Gibson THE OPER&amp;︎ opera for 8 voices, generative electronics, &amp; video Naples ultra︎ tape&nbsp; Divine the Rest︎ mixed quintet &amp; generative electronics L’Imitation du sommeil︎ concerto for guitar, countertenor, chamber orchestra, &amp;&nbsp;generative electronics s_traits︎ generative electronic album bearings_traits︎ generative music system used to create s_traits The Devouring Shore︎ percussion quartet &amp; generative electronics&nbsp; A Free Invention for George Pitcher︎ generative electronics&nbsp; FLESH︎ piano &amp; generative electronics USINE︎ mixed sextet &amp; generative electronics Inland Ocean︎ string quartet &amp; generative electronics This City︎ piano &amp; generative electronics This Window Makes Me Feel︎ mezzo-soprano, alto flute, percussion, keyboards, 5.1 tape, &amp; video &nbsp;&nbsp; Littoral︎ flutes, percussion, 5.1 tape, &amp; video Into the Night︎ oboe, electric guitar, double bass, piano, percussion Songs of a Landloper︎ song cycle for soprano &amp; chamber ensemble&nbsp; Banking︎ string quartet &amp; tape Dream Cuisine︎ cantata for voices, string quartet, keyboards, &amp; percussion The Correspondence︎ chamber orchestra &amp; electronics Mœurs de Césure︎ cello &amp; piano, with seven poems by Philippe Denis Without Stopping︎ open instrumentation &amp; three Discmans on shuffle Straits︎ percussion duo A Song for Sinking︎ live improvisation on Magnus chord organ with electronics Everybody Says Everything︎ electric guitar quartet &amp; tape https://johnsupko.com/WORDS Wed, 15 Dec 2021 02:53:38 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/WORDS Home About Music Press Essays &amp; Other Writings Anticipation: Some Notes&nbsp;︎ Appears in “Handbook of Anticipation” (Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2019), 137-162. Notes on Christian Marclay’s “Surround Sounds”︎ My contribution to a panel on Christian Marclay’s work at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, September 2019 The Easy Speech of the Land︎Appears on Naxos Musicology International, an online platform for music scholarship and opinion, December 2019 How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own Music ︎Appears in the 2013 “Information” issue of Nautilus, an online science magazine Pig Film song lyrics︎ Texts co-written with Josh Gibson THE OPER&amp;: Complete Texts︎ Libretto co-written with Bill Seaman Should Composers Read Music Critics?︎ Appears on NewMusicBox; co-written with Jeffrey Edelstein [TITLE]︎ Appears on NewMusicBox; co-written with Jeffrey Edelstein Para-composition︎ Appears on NewMusicBox; co-written with Jeffrey Edelstein Unbroken Art︎ Appears on NewMusicBox; co-written with Jeffrey Edelstein Recent ‘Voyages, Navigations, Traffiques, and Discoveries’︎Reflections on my recent music ca. 2012 Inland Ocean: Complete Texts&nbsp;︎ Texts from the string quartet Text for s_traits︎ Recombinant poem by Bill Seaman for the album Lectures Maybe Modernism Can Save Us: Reflections on Complexity, Ambiguity, and Serendipity in the Age of AI Invited lecture for the Duke Franklin Humanities Institute’s tgiFHI series on 24 October 2025 AI &amp; the Future of Musical Creation Invited lecture for the Duke Alumni Lifelong Learning program on 2 April 2025 https://johnsupko.com/PRESS-1 Wed, 15 Dec 2021 02:05:14 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/PRESS-1 Home About Music Words Reviews &amp; Interviews ...one of the most accessible adventurers in musical exploration today. –Thought CatalogPraise for divine the rest:The album's most hypnotic setting is clearly Supko's “divine the rest” in the way it merges the group's playing with spoken fragments (assembled via computer, the text consists of extemporaneous utterances arranged in accordance with grammatical rules), field recording samples, drones, and sine-tone textures. A remarkable exercise in dream-like entrancement, the eleven-minute piece mesmerizes, especially when its words are more whispered than spoken.–Textura Speaking of dreams, John Supko’s “Divine the Rest” is nothing short of a mesmerizing daze. It immerses the listener in an ambient electroacoustic soundscape, with calm narration whispering over sparse instrumentation. Each and every note gently rings over the surrounding static to create a slowly shifting musical landscape. –Second Inversion Praise for s_traits:&nbsp;This hypnotic disc is derived from more than 110 hours of audio sourced from field recordings, digital noise, documentaries and piano music. A software program developed by the composer John Supko juxtaposed samples from the audio database into multitrack compositions; he and the media artist Bill Seaman then finessed the computer’s handiwork into these often eerily beautiful tracks.–The New York Times The composer John Supko has collaborated with the media artist Bill Seaman to create this hypnotic disc, derived from more than 110 hours of audio sourced from (among other things) field recordings, digital noise, 1960s documentaries and piano music. A software program developed by Mr. Supko juxtaposed samples from the audio database into multitrack compositions; the duo then finessed the computer’s handiwork into these trancelike, emotive and eerily beautiful tracks.–The New York Times Seaman, Supko, and their circuitry transform more than 100 hours of old tapes and aural detritus into a suite of perky, jittery miniatures, confounding and intoxicating at once.–The Boston Globe With s_traits, John Supko and Bill Seaman have relied on software to help spin a huge tangle of material into a dense, rich fabric of sound. To be so immersed in material requires the composers to give up a degree of agency, it is true, but this does not preclude originality or invention. The reward is to find the potential for surprise in the material itself. As the last lines of Seaman’s text have it, “the code from beneath drives the lines / mercurial as the light.”–The Brooklyn Rail John Supko has designed a generative computer programme that can sift through a database of existing sounds and music, the rhythmic pulse of one piece acting as a frame around which the melodic or harmonic contours of another might find a new home. “Out From The Straits” is one of 26 tiny vignettes included on s_traits, his collaboration with sound-artist Bill Seaman. Music is normally created with the intention of projecting a potent and recognisable identity; but this piece, created by a coincidence of computer code, feels fascinating, anonymous and out of focus.–The Guardian Bill Seaman ist der erste echte „digital Native“ in der Musik. Seine Stücke sind niemals fertig, für immer Übergangsstufen zwischen Sample und Komposition, Remix und Original. Auch für diese Kollaboration mit dem Komponisten John Supko steht die Vorstellung von „Musik als Prozess“ zentral: Aus über 100 Stunden Material entstanden 26 zwei- bis dreiminütige Tracks, jeder von einem kurzen Vocal-Sample angekündigt. Mysteriöser Ambient, experimentelle Klangkunst und verfremdete Neoklassik sind Eckpfeiler. Doch werden de Grenzen zwischen den Stilrichtungen zunehmend aufgeweicht. Ein Album, das eine wahrhaft neue Perspektive zur Musik sucht und findet.–Beat Magazin (DE) Un disque beau et intéressant de musique générative... ou presque. Bill Seaman et John Supko ont créé une vaste collection d’échantillons sonores, puis un logiciel capable de la naviguer pour choisir et combiner des sons afin de composer des morceaux multipistes. Ces morceaux, ils les ont ensuite retravaillés chacun de leur côté. On a donc 26 morceaux d’à peu près trois minutes, sans savoir qui a “composé” quoi au final. Et il s’agit de musiques alliant électronique et musique de chambre. C’est délicat, chantant à sa façon, créatif, différent mais accessible. Le projet dans son ensemble (j’ai sauté bien des détails, mais sachez qu’un poème est inscrit dans ses gènes) offre une cohésion remarquable.–Monsieur Délire (QC) Praise for USINE:On se trouvait emporté, fasciné par la variété des instruments utilisés – qui pensait que l’on pouvait jouer de la pive? …La dernière heure de cet exceptionnel concert s’est terminée en explosion musicale, riche, émouvante aussi.&nbsp;–La Liberté&nbsp;(Fribourg,CH) Praise for drawn only once:Everything about about Drawn Only Once, an impeccably designed CD/DVD by the duo Due East that feature's Supko's pieces, is spellbindingly beautiful. –TimeOut New York (5 stars) …the young American composer's music fascinates, like an accumulating weather system. His intricate soundscapes reveal more with each hearing. –San Jose Mercury News (Best of 2011 list) Birdlike flute sounds range from agitated repetition to dissonant outbursts and a more relaxed seagull-like call, while percussion (often electronic) busily colors Supko's absorbing world. –New Jersey Star-Ledger Praise for Into the Night:John Supkos „Into the Night“ (2005) für E-Gitarre, Oboe, Klavier, Schlagzeug und Kontrabass avanciert zum Höhepunkt des Abends. –Die Badische Zeitung (Freiburg-im-Breisgau,DE) ︎&nbsp;︎&nbsp;︎ Music for Writers Inteview with Porter Anderson on Thought Catalog 15 Questions A long interview touching on my aesthetic philosophy, recent musical work, and teaching at Duke University. Duke Forward La Liberté (Fribourg, Switzerland)&nbsp;Interview (in French) about USINE at the World Minimal Music Festival in Amsterdam With Olivier Cuendet after the Amsterdam premiere of USINE: Spoken [1] x [only] Liner notes for drawn only once written by Jeffery Edelstein in the form of an interview https://johnsupko.com/Crossed-Shadows Sun, 02 Nov 2025 16:30:49 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/Crossed-Shadows Crossed Shadows John Supko · Crossed Shadows The phenomenal&nbsp;Red Clay Saxophone Quartet commissioned Crossed Shadows to celebrate their 20th anniversary. I initially envisioned a piece for saxophone quartet and tape, but the project unfolded in an unusual way. Among other things, I wound up adding an improvised drum track and changing the tape part significantly. It’s no exaggeration to say this piece wouldn’t exist without the essential collaboration of a number of people, starting with Red Clay. The underlying structure of the music came from converting the frequencies and rhythms of human speech into musical material. This process resulted in complex, ever-changing rhythms and meters, which Red Clay spent a great deal of time helping me to adapt for human consumption. But never having written for saxophone quartet before, I was unprepared for how loud the ensemble would be. At the first rehearsal, I knew I had to re-work the tape part. My original intention was to use the electronics as a kind of shadowy veil over the eclectic, raucous, shapeshifting saxes. Alas, it was not to be. The unamplified quartet completely obliterated the tape. So I went back to the drawing board. I decided to beef up the tape so that it could support and amplify the saxes’ strange stylistic odyssey. I used a Synclavier emulator to enhance the nostalgic elements of the music. Then I had the idea to ask the remarkable drummer Jake Richter to record an improvised drum set part for the tape, just to see what might happen. He recorded five different, perfect takes, effortlessly floating over the changing meters, outlining the fleeting grooves and adding his own. From three of Jake’s takes I constructed a hybrid final version.&nbsp; Finally, I worked with the brilliant composer, guitarist, and engineer / producer Andrew McKenna Lee on the recording posted here. Andrew found a way to bring my dream of interlocking layers of live saxophones, retro Synclavier and electronic percussion instruments, and Jake’s drumming to life with clarity, color, and energy.I am immensely grateful to Red Clay, Jake, and Andrew for their tireless, dedicated, indispensable work on&nbsp;Crossed Shadows. Thanks, also, to Sound Pure Studios, where we recorded the saxes and drums. • • • Program Note Two thoughts cross. Then two more, then many more—lines of thought—crosshatching shades of meaning. I'll depict the musical workings of this piece by borrowing from visual art and language, as if a drawing of straight lines crossing to form shadows. I made a list—for fun—of the things English provides with meaningful crossings: there are the stars, of course, that cross lovers; paths, purposes, and destinies can cross ineffably; eyes cross (each other) medically or comedically, while minds are crossed by thoughts; further afield, a proverb advises us to cross the stream where it’s shallowest; but rivers—both real and mythical—occasion more momentous crossings, e.g., the Rubicon, the Styx, the Lethe, and the&nbsp;Tiber, all of which change the crosser; similarly, we can cross the Great Divide on foot or in metaphor, but we might not be able to cross back; we cross our fingers in front of us for good luck (or sometimes, when lying, behind our backs); we might cross someone's palm with silverto know in advance what Lady Luck will do (or to ensure that she does it); we will cross swords, but only as a last resort; floors we cross more prosaically and usually without incident; signals, and the wiresthey travel on, tend to get crossed, and unintended consequences result; to remove the shadow of a doubt about our intentions, we cross T’s when dotting I's. There are many shadows, and perhaps even doubts, crossing in this piece. While often chased and cast, shadows themselves don't normally cross, at least not in language. They appear here as an invention of the computer, an unexpected image generated by a simple program I wrote to transform a famous author's one-sentence story. The computer kept the story's syntax but swapped the original words for a vocabulary of my own. Think of it as a slightly more sophisticated version of Mad Libs. As a result, the meaning of the story changed completely. Repeating this process over 40 times created a longish poem with new themes and characters. Instances of one of them, the "crossed shadow," appeared twice in the computer's output, which I lightly edited: ...O thing, crossed shadow, wake... ...the crossed shadow, and still the face of the shadow... The computer and I wrote this poem in 2018. It struck me as, well, haunting, but I didn't immediately know what to do with it, so I tucked it away in case a future use might arise. The passage of time has a way of working wonders on interpretive meaning. Rereading it five years later, I recognized the face of the shadow—one of them, anyway—and felt the impulse to make music with this text. The initial material of Crossed Shadows was not so much composed as extracted from the sound of my voice reading the poem. I derived pitches—and especially rhythms—from my recorded speech. You can catch hints of my voice speaking the text in the percussion section of the tape part, softly shadowing the saxophones and the electronic instruments. Once I had a melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic framework from the poem recording, I set about shaping the music horizontally (that is, controlling the way the music moves through time) and vertically (how the various live and electronic parts intersect at every moment.) But this is a rather dispassionate description of what proved to be a tumultuous process. I was distracting myself from grief and sadness with the ebullience of bad taste. I wanted the piece to be, in part, about the associations my brain makes with the saxophone, and I wasn't interested in choosing "good" or "bad" associations. I included everything along an idiosyncratic spectrum of jazz, pop, and classical music as a potential reference. There are no quotations, though, so it wouldn't help to name names. This indiscriminate attitude toward musical material also informed the choice of electronic instruments. As a child of the 1980s, the soundtrack of my life is full of saxes and synths. When I discovered a software version of the classic Synclavier synthesizer, the technological nostalgia I had been cultivating went into overdrive. Crossed Shadows is, oddly, dense with counterpoint; the speech patterns and their computational elaborations make the piece rhythmically hyperactive. I found that the Synclavier instruments added clarity and definition, not to mention cultural memory, to the layers of live and electronic sound. These references to different eras and musical styles are never fully or genuinely adopted, however. Shadows can distort appearances. The speech fragments that audibly, if subtly, double many notes and rhythms are an enigmatic presence, conveying something between language and music. The grooves and repetitions imported from popular music and postmodernist aesthetics are in tension with the metrical complications of modernism. An apparently openhearted lyricism is continually thwarted by a relentless sense of forward momentum. It all accumulates into a pre-2000s technological optimism crossed with a 21st-century sadness of interruptions, fragments, and disintegrations. The nearly year-long development of Crossed Shadows&nbsp;would have been impossible without the close and generous collaboration of the Red Clay Saxophone Quartet, for whom I wrote it. Red Clay helped me to clarify the unwieldy, counterintuitive rhythms extracted from the spoken recording so that human musicians could play them, a painstaking process. I marvel at my luck: not only were these world-class musicians willing to invest time and energy into improving the notation and musicality of the piece, but they also spent months and months learning every inch of it and playing it more wonderfully than I ever could have hoped. I am grateful, also, to Jake Richter for contributing an extraordinary improvised drum set part to the tape. I write music principally to surprise myself, to do things I didn't know I could do. Consequently, I don't know if this piece will seem frivolous, intense, disorienting, moving, or exciting to another listener. But not knowing this is what interests me: that any of these reactions is plausible makes the piece somehow more alive and mysterious. I am proudest of the shadows it casts but does not illuminate. https://johnsupko.com/Biloxi-Anapanasati Mon, 10 Oct 2022 17:26:41 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/Biloxi-Anapanasati Biloxi Anapanasati John Supko · Biloxi Anapanasati - Frankfurt 2022 Premiere I wrote this piece at the invitation of the terrific Else, If Else trio in early 2020 and revised it in the spring of 2022. It’s scored for double bass (Zoe Markle), percussion (Nolan Ehlers), piano (Ben Portzen), and a tape part that includes a long text, which I read. Biloxi Anapanasati presents certain difficulties of description. “Biloxi” may be familiar as place name, but “Anapanasati,” while an increasingly familiar practice–a breathing meditation–will likely be an unfamiliar word. But just what does a Gulf Coast city in Mississippi have to do with a form of Buddhist meditation? The real difficulties begin here, I’m afraid, because I can’t provide a straightforward answer to that question. Every attempt seems to me either macabre or preposterous, and so far from my intention, which was to transmute or resolve, if not the suffering itself, then the memory of a person who was suffering. I have to believe art can do this even if I am uncertain that I am personally capable of it. I have to trust that it’s enough to say the text is, partially, an account of the last days of the writer John Kennedy Toole, and that it also quotes the ancient breath-mindfulness sutra. But the piece is also a meditation on time and the feeling of its passage; on photography–a grasping at time–and its distortions; on New Orleans, both Toole’s and the city I finally visited after two decades of imagining it; on death and its interruptions. As such, the text assimilates passages and ideas from Henri Bergson and Vilém Flusser; descriptions of various photographs, including some by Robert Frank; a fragment of clinical research by Edwin Shneidman, which was quoted by Toole’s biographer, Cory MacLauchlin; and a line from Shelley’s last, unfinished poem The Triumph of Life, which has long haunted me. I made a few simple Python scripts to give the computer access to this reading list so that we could collaborate on parts of the text. Some of the text’s mysteries derive from this generative process, which provided an indispensable poetic distance from elements of the story I found impossible to approach directly.&nbsp; [This is a recording of Else, If Else’s European premiere of the work in Frankfurt, Germany in July 2022. They also performed it at the 2022 Banff Summer Festival in Banff, Canada.] https://johnsupko.com/OHTB Tue, 14 Dec 2021 17:20:31 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/OHTB One Hundred Thousand Billion Pieces for Piano &amp; Computer Commissioned by the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival&nbsp;for&nbsp;Conrad Tao The above video and below audio were recorded by Aphorism Studios for Nova Linea Musica’s “Echoes and Algorithms” concert in September 2025. John Supko · One Hundred Thousand Billion Pieces for Piano &amp; Computer (2025) This is an ongoing collaborative project with the astounding pianist and composer Conrad Tao, commissioned for him by the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival. &nbsp;Consisting of an autonomous, interactive software system and improvised live piano performance, OHTB was given its NYC premiere by Conrad in March 2021 as part of a series of pop-up storefront performances sponsored by the Kaufman Music Center. The recordings from that performance are shared below. John Supko · Conrad Tao NYC storefront prem. of OHTB (1) In a typical performance of OHTB, the software generates an initial musical environment out of sound files it chooses from a large, harmonically organized database. When Conrad plays the piano, the computer is able to listen and react to what he is playing. Conrad, in turn, can interrupt or affect what the computer is playing in a number of ways. In addition, at moments of its own choosing, the computer system will allow Conrad to change the harmonic structure of the music and, potentially, begin a new piece. John Supko · Conrad Tao NYC storefront prem. of OHTB (2) The title refers to Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), in which ten interchangeable versions of a fourteen-line sonnet result in a total of 1014 (100,000,000,000,000) possible poems. The large sound file database used by the computer in OHTB makes possible at least this number of unique pieces, and likely many billions more. In practical terms, each performance yields different and unpredictable musical experiences. John Supko · Conrad Tao NYC storefront prem. of OHTB (3) I designed the generative, interactive software system in Max with Conrad’s staggering improvisatory abilities vividly in mind. The goal of my design thinking is best described by the phrase “provocatively incomplete”, a state in which the computer’s musical behavior is compelling and unpredictable, but not entirely satisfying on its own. In other words, there are absences–of intention, of activity, of lyricism–that provoke completion by the live performance. The tricky part is callibrating these provocations: &nbsp;consistently generating the right amount of harmonic, melodic, and/or rhythmic material to suggest a musical context that can be developed or upended by Conrad’s interventions. &nbsp;<img width="3102" height="1854" width_o="3102" height_o="1854" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6f1cd8df373052540afa707fb9f4656d3a659e3c9029d72913419ac9f597fd2a/OHTB_screenshot.png" data-mid="127786962" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6f1cd8df373052540afa707fb9f4656d3a659e3c9029d72913419ac9f597fd2a/OHTB_screenshot.png" /> https://johnsupko.com/Soleil-Noir Thu, 16 Dec 2021 14:16:12 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/Soleil-Noir Soleil Noir Commissioned by the Ciompi Quartet As I was thinking about what I might write in response to a commission from Duke University’s Ciompi Quartet, the memory of a scene from a film popped into my mind. The film was Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) and the scene was the moment when an extraordinary expression appears on Catherine Deneuve’s face. She’s trying to understand what the Duke is telling her about the “black sun” of autumn. I perceive a feeling of intense foreboding in her look, but also wonder, innocence, and perhaps even desire. <img width="2652" height="1580" width_o="2652" height_o="1580" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ac8eedfabd3be9bfb1e3c6d72ac94e62cc0565ab28de63b3d7485627305d1ecb/blacksun.png" data-mid="127573102" border="0" data-scale="70" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ac8eedfabd3be9bfb1e3c6d72ac94e62cc0565ab28de63b3d7485627305d1ecb/blacksun.png" /> That moment was enough to get me going: &nbsp;in the fall of 2019, I began working with musical ideas that communicated a sense of relentless, unavoidable approach. But the approach of what? Probably nothing good. I finished the quartet in February 2020, before the pandemic became a world-changing reality, and I don’t make any claims to prescience. Besides, music about current events doesn’t interest me very much. I can only say that I suspect something of Buñuel’s unease about modernity–often expressed in the surreal and absurd aspects of his films–must have transferred to my quartet. I often feel a similar tension regarding technology in my work. I’m interested in what computers can do for me as an artist, but I almost never grant them unrestricted–or unedited–autonomy. I consider the computer a tool in the same way a pencil or a metronome is a tool. I like to remind people that the book is a technology, albeit a very old one, for portable data storage. Thinking this way, I’ll admit, can lend a contrarian tint to one’s perceptions. When I notice I’ve been laboring under an assumption, I tend to contradict it immediately. There’s an example or two of this in Soleil Noir:&nbsp; relentlessness and resignation; violence and delicacy; the treachery of fastness. The Ciompi Quartet premiered Soleil Noir in April 2021, after the pandemic canceled most of 2020’s live concerts. The video of that performance is posted here along with the program note. Read Program Note https://johnsupko.com/Music-from-Pig-Film Thu, 16 Dec 2021 19:53:54 +0000 John Supko | composer https://johnsupko.com/Music-from-Pig-Film Music from Pig Film I wrote the score and made the sound design for Josh Gibson’s Pig Film, which received its world premiere at the 2018 Edinburgh Film Festival and its US premiere at the New Orleans Film Festival the same year.&nbsp;Called by one reviewer an “hour-long, black &amp; white sci-fi musical”, Pig Film&nbsp;stars actress and soprano Julianna Tauschinger-Dempsey. Josh writes of the story: In an empty world, a solitary female mechanically follows the protocols of a factory hog farm. Her labors are sporadically punctuated by musical rhapsodies as she moves toward the impending end. Is it the end of the world, a program malfunction, or the beginning of a film? Below are eight excerpts from the film featuring the songs and electronic interludes. Josh and I co-wrote the song texts, which derive entirely from historical ephemera of the hog farming and pork industries: &nbsp;film scripts, sales spiels, manuals, television commercials, etc.