JACK LANGDON



is a musician, filmmaker, and writer with concentrations in experimental music, minimalist documentary, cultural criticism, and political economy.

born in 1994, enrolled in sault ste. marie tribe of chippewa indians

nindaa gichi-neyaashiing

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

UPCOMING EVENTS

8.7.25
Jeff Kimmel (clarinets), Jack Langdon (bibigwan),
Stephan Haluska (harp), & Adam Shead (percussion)
Comfort Station
Chicago, IL


8.8.25
Jack Langdon (bibigwan)
Marmalade
Chicago, IL


8.21.25
Premiere of “Cheap Dream” for harpsichord by Justin Wallace
Britton Recital Hall, University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI


10.12.25
Jack Langdon (bibigwan)
The Whistler
Chicago, IL





the eternal feeling
for pierrot ensemble and percussion

June 2021

26 min.
first performance:
Composers Conference Ensemble
Slosberg Concert Hall
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
1.21.23
score
recording the eternal feeling was written as a fellow for the 2021 Composers Conference at Brandeis University. During the process of composing, I was studying with Linda Catlin Smith, and a particular conversation regarding intuition and planning a piece was of great importance to the direction the work eventually took. A quote from her essay Composing a Theory illuminates the spirit of the direction I took:

“I don’t plan my works. I don’t analyse a work before it is written – that would be like analysing a life before it’s been lived. I don’t prescribe the work. Some religions hold that all is foreseen, all is fore-ordained. But in my music, it is not. There really is a blank page.”

This work, like many for summer festivals, was written under quite a brief, strict timeline—two months in this case. For me, this situation forces a kind of need to allow the unconsious to produce and structure poetic and musical material. In the nascent stages of writing, I left a few lines of text to guide me:

“Behind the notes on the page: McCoy Tyner’s solo on My Favorite Things; the sound of a highway in the distance; my grandmother’s radio; the red carpet of my childhood church; driving north on I-91 in the dark; the streetlamp coming through the vines in front of my window; the endless sound of the pipe organ. All sites of my transfixing.”

This became the poetic backbone of the piece and the fragmentary, distant, yearning affect connected the disparate parts together. Category
Composition
© 2025 Jack Langdon