a murder of cranes/a siege of crows (2023)

In late 2021, i was conducting research on contemporary music for shakuhachi with fixed media. through my research i got to meet flutist and composer Gavin Stewart. His PhD work focused on contemporary music inspired by shakuhachi honkyoku. After speaking over zoom, we decided to sit down and collaborate on a duo for two Kingma flutes and fixed media that would feature sounds inspired by shakuhachi lore.

In writing this piece, i wanted to both pay homage to the shakuhachi through which i have learned so much about myself, and complicate my own relationship to it. it was imperative to make a work that could not be played by shakuhachi but also drew on its history and mythology. part of this process included taking shakuhachi techniques such as korokoro and re-imagining them to work for the kingma system flute while still maintaining a shakuhachi timbre. However, the reimagining of this did not stop here: hocketing recurs throughout the two flute parts and in the tape track, an obscure reference to shakuhachi works like Shika no Toone, Hou Shou Suu, and Tsuru no Sugumori, compositions that anthropomorphize birds and are often performed as duos with call and response.

Ultimately, this piece is both a love letter to the shakuhachi and an angry journal entry. Its source materials are based around shakuhachi techniques that I once found highly alluring (especially harsh overblowing techniques and korokoro) but I fear are now overused or misunderstood.

I also try to hyperbolize a long-standing interest of shakuhachi players –imitating nature sounds on flute. Instead of having the flutist imitate those sounds, I sample them and distort them in the fixed media track. The resulting piece is a noisy meditation on place and belonging.

the title a murder of cranes/a siege of crows is derived from the words used to describe groups of cranes and crows (murder of crows/siege of cranes). 

a murder of cranes/a siege of crows is dedicated to Gavin Stewart and is 11 minutes long.