For Saxophone Quartet, Fixed Media, and Audience Participation with Cell Phones

An invitation to become an aspen grove

Pause a moment, exhale and let your breath meet the wind.

Feel the cells of a leaf quiver in anticipation of the wind.

In the vastness of the Rocky Mountains, there is a place I have loved dearly for over fifty years — a place where the wind is constantly seeking to chose a body. Wandering across peaks and valleys, always in a liminal space, it brushes against the leaves of an aspen grove, finding a temporary home among these delicate skins of one of the oldest and largest living organisms on Earth.

Pause, breath, let the wind play you

In the wake of this encounter, the leaves begin to quake — twisting and turning, brushing and tapping, their trembling bodies whispering what the wind cannot say alone. This is what silence sounds like when it learns to breathe through leaves. Each flicker is a pulse of listening to a language without grammar. The wind conducts this forest and invites us to join it. Not all rhythms need counting. Not all songs need notes. Some music is made simply by holding space between sound and its memory. When the oldest and largest trees exhale across centuries in our presence, we are invited to still ourselves — to listen — and remember.

Become the grove

Pick your favorite voice and when prompted from the stage, press play and just let it run. Don’t worry about coordinating. The sound will fade in and out on its own!

⚠️ Make sure your phone is set to play sound even in vibrate mode and make sure airplane mode is off. Turn the volume up!

Before the live musicians enter, you are already a part of the forest. Use your phone to play the wind’s memory. Let it shimmer from your palm into the shared sonic field of this space. Together, we create the grove. Together, we become the instrument. The quartet will join you, not as performers, but as fellow listeners, breathing into what we make together.

After the piece is finished, feel the the cells in your body shimmer as do the aspen leaves, and feel your body amongst the rest of the grove in the concert hall.

Press play on a sound file when instructed.

This page was designed and written in creative collaboration with a large language model.

The music was written by Paul Rudy