Prismatic/Plasmonic (September 6, 2024 release) Music for flute and electronics Laura Lentz, flutes Blue on Blue Records album artwork: Will Pyle
Prismatic Wind by Chloe Upshaw (2020) - 7:53’ Chloe Upshaw is a flutist and composer currently living in Arizona. She has a mission to nurture the mental health and well-being of musicians, and she does this by promoting the use of sound exploration as a medium for mindful expression. Prismatic Wind explores evolving textures of tension and meditative release. 2. Plasmonic Mirror by Sean William Calhoun (2024) - 11:38’ Sean William Calhoun is a composer and pianist living in Rochester. I asked Sean to write me a piece that dealt with climate change or the environment in some way. He thought the best focus on the topic would be on whatpeople are doing to ameliorate it. He started looking into recent developments in energy technology, and learned how a team at the University of Rochester led by Chunlei Guo recently made developments dramatically improving the efficiency of perovskite solar cells. This piece is 4 movements and was inspired by this research. I. Light on Perovskite II. Excitons III. The Mirror of Recombination Reduction IV. Photoresponsivity
The first movement, Light on Perovskite features many quick descending figures representing the beams of sunlight striking the perovskite. These increase in intensity, leading directly into the second movement Excitons. When a photon hits a crystal, it can knock an electron into a higher energy state, leaving a hole at its former energy state, which, despite being the absence of a particle, kind of acts like a positively-charged particle. The electron-hole pair is called an exciton. The electronics for the movement alternate between electron music — bright, distorted, and bassy — and hole music — light plucks and pulsing reverb tails. Being oppositely-charged, the electron and hole are attracted, and so the length of each pair of sections becomes progressively shorter until each is less than a beat. But for a solar cell to work, we need to use the charges to generate power, and that doesn’t happen if the exciton recombines on its own, so a part of solar cell efficiency is reducing the rate of recombination of excitons. And that’s where the titular plasmonic mirror comes in — the UofR team found that a thin layer of certain substances beneath the layer of perovskite could create a sort of mirror that, through Weird Physics Reasons (that I never really managed to understand), suppresses the recombination of excitons. So The Mirror of Recombination Reduction has a drone in the electronics representing the mirror, and for everything the flute plays, a part in the electronics plays an inversion of it slightly later below the mirror. Photoresponsivity is the term for the amount of electrical output relative to optical input, so the movement Photoresponsivity is a high-energy celebration of the greater efficiency of the perovskite solar cells.
3. Reimagined Syrinx (Claude Debussy) for alto flute, with electronics by Sean William Calhoun (2024) - 3:10’ Syrinx is one of our most famous flute solos that gives a lot of room for interpretation and emotion. In this new version, Syrinx lives and her voice is represented by a two-note motif in the electronics, written by Sean William Calhoun. Sean and I talked about using a two-note motif in the electronics to represent Syrinx’s voice, because in numerology, the number “2” symbolizes the feminine, representing both grace and power.
Audio files on password protected page, found here
