SPLICE Ensemble Presents: Ansible

For the last ten years, SPLICE Ensemble has been dedicated to the development of innovative repertoire for an uncommon instrumentation: trumpet, piano, percussion, and electronics. Comprised of Keith Kirchoff, Adam Vidiksis, and Sam Wells, the ensemble’s body of work is rooted in deep compositional collaboration and passion for the wealth of musical potential within electroacoustic composition. 

In their newest performance, Ansible, the group presents three pieces commissioned over the last decade that showcase SPLICE Ensemble’s textural approach to electroacoustic music while exploring the universal theme of time. 

SPLICE Ensemble began playing together through the music organization SPLICE, which serves to promote innovations in concert music such as utilizing various forms of electronics in compositions. All three members of the ensemble are educators at SPLICE’s Summer Institute, where they began playing chamber music and eventually became the in-house ensemble. 

SPLICE Institute offers composers space to not only read through new ideas, but to synergistically connect on their formation with the group. Collaboration is baked into their process; SPLICE views the pieces they commission as “artifacts of collaboration”—music born from trust between composer and performer. Many of their commissioned works have been crafted over long periods of time in the group workspaces such as the studio, concert hall, outdoors, or over the phone, all born from a shared musical understanding.

The concert title work, “Ansible,” represents the first deeply collaborative effort for the group, and over the years has become a defining part of their sound. Composer Caroline Louise Miller had a pre-existing relationship with the trio—she is a good friend of Sam Wells, with whom she had gone to high school and undergraduate studies—and this unique bond of trust made the creative process highly rewarding. The piece was formed over the course of a year, including a weekend of workshops in New York City, during which Miller brought a series of sketches that they together sculpted into a larger work. 

This work was written in memoriam for the author Ursula K. Le Guin, who wrote about a device called an ansible that could communicate instantaneously across the universe. The contraption appears across several of her novels and serves as a tool to explore the pitfalls and promise of communication; its potential for both utopia and disaster in equal measure.

Miller’s music explores these ideas—how messages across centuries or galaxies can either be clear or distorted through time—through a series of supernatural hums that conjure the feeling of interstellar stardust, the vastness of outer space, and the history of social justice movements in one fell swoop (another ode to Le Guin).

The piece opens from a distance with a couple of scrapes and a decaying piano that swirl around each other, ringing like a toy box unearthed from the depths of the past. Eventually, it erupts in frenetic drums, a testament to its great range—from the sparsest, eeriest communications to the most massive, intergalactic pulses of sound. By the time the final movement arrives, the music has grown an immense galaxy built from a gliding trumpet melody shrouded in static haze, giving one final moment to contemplate the fuzziness of time.