JACK LANGDON

is an experimental composer, filmmaker, and writer who was born in 1994 and is a citizen of the sault ste. marie tribe of chippewa indians.

[archive and documentation of past performances can be found here]

UPCOMING EVENTS

3.8.26

Jack Langdon (bibigwan), Luke Martin (tone generator), Jeff Kimmel (clarinet), Graham Stephenson (trumpet)
Frequency Series at Constellation
Chicago, IL

3.17.26

performance of “Fish Laying Egg in a Circle” by Brightwork Ensemble
Tuesdays at Monk Space
Los Angeles, CA

5.14.26

performance of new work for clarinet by Zach Good
Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University
Evanston, IL

BIOGRAPHY, CV, CONTACT

PHOTO BY HANNAH KRUSE

First Symphony: The New World is Gone
for narrator, soloists, and scratch orchestra
work in-progress

A variable, large ensemble work that thematizes disappearance, apocalypse, abstraction, and prophecy. The work lasts several hours and is organized in seven sections with an extended poem connecting the work, spoken by the narrator.

“In our wakeful hours there are flowers which produce nightmares
We burned continents of silence the future of nations”
-Etel Adnan, from “The Arab Apocalypse”

Category
Composition, Writing, Performance

Mystery Spot
for flute, percussion, and piano

for Fonema Consort
work in-progress

This work is a study in the minimum durational requirements for pitch and harmony to hold a structural identity in a piece of music.

It is a further development of material and form explored in my 2023 composition Happy Life.

Category
Composition

Far Echo Variation
for orchestra

July 2025

score

Far Echo Variation takes its title from a painting by Ojibwe modernist George Morrison, where the artist depicts scenes of the horizon witnessed while looking at Lake Superior. My translation of Morrison’s approach to abstraction seeks similar ends in the sonic medium: a reduction of form to simple elements rendered in peculiar orchestrations to encourage the audience to apprehend the mysterious, spiritual aspects of listening itself.

Category
Composition

Reading Andrew Blackbird
for narrating flutist

work in progress

demo recording

Andrew Blackbird was an Ottawa historian who was born in Waganagisi (L’Arbe Croche, MI) and is most well known for his 1887 book History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan. This text is notable as one of the earliest histories of native life in and around Michilamackinac written in English by a native author. The book features descriptions of everyday Anishinaabe life as well as stories illustrating relations with missionaries and settlers. My Ojibwe forebears lived contemporaneously with Blackbird across the Mackinac Straits, approximately ten miles North, at Pointe Aux Chenes in current Moran Township, MI.

In this work, I invoke the genre of native american storytelling and flute performance by reading selections of Blackbird’s history, accompanying myself on the bibigwan (the Ojibwe wooden flute). In both text and music, I embrace the abstract, the fragmentary, and the unclear to complicate legibility, representation, and moral didacticism.

Category
Composition, Performance

A Family of Things Rendered as Magic Chords
a book of harmony, images, and stories
work in-progress

Created as the first print project of Empty Stage Editions, A Family of Things Rendered as Magic Chords arose from a desire to return to the building blocks of music and to find new paths not taken in the canon of modern tuning systems. The book arose from a questioning in my own work regarding the basis of the harmonic languages I utilize and the imperatives towards “rationality” and “systematicity” in various tuning systems available. Rather than seeking legitimacy in performative pragmatism (keyboard temperments, EDOs) or scientistic schemas (extended just intonation), I radically center my own empirical listening capacity in constructing a series of harmonies based on the unmeasured tuning of tones. Through this method, specious forms of musical universality and theoretical generalizations are avoided. This book acts as a harmonic, pictorial, and narrative companion to my work as a composer—constructing an annex where sound, things in the world, and meaning coalesce.

This work is an attempt towards concieving a system of “non-harmony” through a rejection of various a priori axioms properly understood to be the grounding for most systems of harmony.

Category
Writing

You Expect
for harp

June 2025
score
video

In You Expect, the central objects of focus were the sounding/silence boundary and the feeling of time which results from varying levels of motion and stillness. In the opening, I request the harpist to mute strings midway through their resonating—somewhat starkly enforcing silence upon the beautiful natural resonance of the harp. This contracts and expands throughout the piece, where resonance is encouraged and denied as a parameter of development and manipulation. Extreme contrasts in dynamics and frequency range are invoked to further complicate the “feelings” of sound and silence. Repetitive motives enter to create a sense of telos, which halts, stutters, and disappears at various points thereafter.

On the day of finishing the work, the American experimental composer Tom Johnson passed away. I felt it was appropriate to dedicate this work to him as a small monument to his memory.

Category
Composition

Fish Laying Egg in a Circle
for flute, harp, and viola

June 2025
score
video

Fish Laying Egg in a Circle is a painting by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau from the mid-eighties. It depicts a fish
with an active internal life, with many processes being depicted in and around the central body of the fish. A circular chain of fish eggs surround the fish, with their orange hue matching the color of a single fin, leading the viewer to see the insides and outsides of the fish as being related. Cycles and circles are common in Anishinaabe sacred depictions and often appear in our cosmology and myths.

Cycles, circles, and repetition are features of nearly every musical form and expression. Within my training and study
as a composer, the unresolved and the imperfect cycle or repetition are staples of work I have written and work of others I have admired and studied.

In this work, I hesitate to employ a literal transposition of the circle concept onto a temporal medium from Morrisseau's painting, but to rather imagine this work as traversing the outside of a great circle, with a horizon always slowly arriving, presenting gently unexpected musical phenomena as the playing unfolds, but with the feeling that, if the work were to continue beyond the limits of the page, that perhaps we would arrive back to the same place we started in. Echoes of familiar musical rhetoric move the listener through musical space, but with a larger form which does not attempt to synthesize these smaller rhetorical gestures into a legible total form.

Category
Composition

Cheap Dream
for harpsichord

February 2025
score

Cheap Dream for harpsichord exists amongst several pieces written in the late fall of 2024 that attempt to create a non-teleological sense of motion that challenges the listener’s ability to locate themselves in conventional musical forms. This work utilizes homophony, silence, and repetition to elicit a peculiar sense of the flowing of time. The piece calls for a “buff stop” on the harpsichord, which produces a muted, almost guitar-like sound that, when combined with brief, homophonic chords, highlights the interesting transients of the instrument.

Category
Composition

the other side of the air
Jeff Kimmel, clarinet & Jack Langdon, organ
released February 7, 2025
Dinzu Artefacts

recorded by Alicia Li (Northwestern University)
mixed and mastered by Nick Broste

recording

review by Peter Margasak

the other side of the air is the first recording that Jeff Kimmel and I made following a year of working on a practice together. In the performances and sessions we played in the year prior, we focused on developing a language of intonation which remained ungrounded in a single system, but emphasized the vibrancy and dynamism of close-interval sonorities through retuning my organ and through various clarinet multiphonics.

Peter Margasak had to say about this release: “Those harmonic feasts are addictive, pulling me into the sound and allowing my mind to get lost in those cascading, undulating tones. Sounds align, unleashing the infectious sweep of beating patterns, and clear intonation becomes sour with the incursion of the slightest pitch adjustment.” (Nowhere Street)

Category
Composition, Performance

Langdon & Kimmel, Constellation Chicago

The Cup of Grief
for pierrot ensemble with percussion

December 2024

no performance

score

The Cup of Grief is a work which takes its title from a line in Edward Benton-Benai’s telling of The Seven Fires Prophecy in The Mishnomis Book—the first place where this story appeared in print. The work is 12 minutes long and prominently features the flute as the distant image of a storyteller—wordlessly narrating. In the program note, I write:

“Here, I sit with the problem of representing the poetic, narrative, and historical inspiration for this work. This piece is not merely the fragmentary re-telling of this resonant part of the Seven Fires Prophecy, as I embrace the medium of music for a reason. The formal ground of this work derives from simple transposition of numeric values and temporal notions which are significant to the Anishinaabek, but these are only but one current which shapes the flowing of material in this work among many other currents. While I use these motifs, forms, and gestures to shape an affective architecture which is familiar to my poetics, culture, and desires, I allow myself to not simply "express" myself through the music. Indeed the piece's aim is not to stage an experience of emotional catharsis in regards to the text from which this piece grew, but to point towards something—perhaps far off in the distance or perhaps close, but unacknowledged—that I feel as worthy of staging as an experience of form, symbolism, and affect; to make an undercurrent of this text sensible in an intimate way—with all complexities and contradictions left in tact. In the attempt to transmit this fragment from Benton-Benai’s telling in a piece of concert music, I encounter the edge of what music can actually say or represent. Perhaps this is a good thing.”

This work is dedicated to Edward Benton-Benai: founding member of the American Indian Movement, spiritual leader of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and founder of the Red House School in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Category
Composition

The Harvest Manual, 2
for electronic organ with key-extensions

September 2024

first performance by:
Aleksey Vylegzhanin and Forrest Moody
Kunstuniversitat Graz
12.7.24
score
video

The Harvest Manual, 2 is a work written on the occasion of the Enharmonic Interfaces and Controllers for Keyboard Instruments Conference in Graz, Austria. This is the second work in the series which utilizes keyboard instruments with expanded key systems which enable unique temperaments—in this case a 17-tone meantone temperament with a variety of split semitone keys. The work is focused on small interval variations between sonorities and utilizes colorful organ registration to exploit the pitch complexity in the interaction of timbre and temperament. The work was created for Zeitschleife and Organon Graz.

Category
Composition

Happy Life
for piano and percussion

September 2024

first performance by:
Jon Hannau, piano
Kyle Flens, percussion
Constellation, Chicago
9.7.24
score

Happy Life is a work which I wrote for the Flannau Duo in the summer of 2024. During the previous year, I increasingly found myself questioning common sense approaches to relating emotions to musical expression. This work instigated a re-examination of how musical materials—particularly those of a reduced and simple kind—can signify a stereotype of emotion, but refuse to evoke this emotion. This piece strives to make common emotive signifiers—like a major chord signifying “happiness”—unfamiliar and hollow. Accompanying this, musical materials which have no stereotype of emotional significance are placed amidst the work: groaning noises from a superball-dragged washboard, isolated jingle bell clinks, and muted dyads on a glockenspiel.

Category
Composition