JURI SEO: Lost Songs

R. SCHUMANN: String Quartet No. 2

MOZART: Serenade No. 12, "Nachtmusik"

Lost Songs for Clarinet and String Quartet

Eric Jacobs clarinet
Natasha Bazhanov violin
Artur Girsky violin
Mara Gearman viola
Nathan Chan cello

Juri Seo, an award-winning composer and professor of music at Princeton University, is known for exploring extreme contrasts within her compositions. Merging a deep love of classical form and tonality with an unorthodox approach and modern palette of timbres, Seo’s music is both humorous and serious, explosive and tranquil.

In her notes for Lost Songs for Clarinet and String Quartet, Juri Seo writes, “We live in cycles, with birth and death being the primary conditions of our existence. The simple act of breathing encapsulates the cyclic nature of life. Song does too, though perhaps in a more abstract way. In song, a call awaits a response; in song, silence is broken and inevitably restored.” This piece centers around two elements: breath and the songs of the ʻōʻō bird (Moho braccatus) of Kauai, Hawaii. Seo was struck by the poignant 1976 recordings from Cornell University’s Macaulay Library, which houses the world’s largest archive of animal sounds. These tapes capture the last call of this now extinct bird, presumably that of a lone male looking for a mate. Seo transcribed these calls and extracted fragments as musical motives, employing the use of microtones and multiphonics in the clarinet, which alongside breaths and tolling bells, evoke a sense of sorrow and passing time.

A meditation on darkness and loss, this piece is also a celebration of life. Seo writes, “If the last calls of the ʻōʻō bird went unanswered in the forests of Kauai, in my music, they are not only answered, but transformed and multiplied into a choir of birds.” The music becomes an imagined paradise, and a welcome respite from so much loss. Seo concludes, “Loss may be complete and permanent to our physical world, but not to our memory, nor to our music.”