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

BIOGRAPHY, CV, CONTACT

Travels to the House of Invention
for string quartet

June 2025
score
video

The string quartet Travels to the House of Invention retraces the footsteps of modernist composers working harmonically within equal temperaments beyond the common twelve-tone variety. In the case of this piece, I have explored a harmonic language within twenty-four-tone equal temperament which attempts to exploit and challenge some of the harmonic emotivism inherited from the romantic tradition, in a way that problematizes the rhetorical “directionality” that this kind of harmonic expression often serves.

The title of the piece comes from a concept which Norval Morriseau names in his book of the same name, where his “muse” or place of creativity is described as “the house of
invention” to which he must travel in his spirit to access. My work endorses the potential for harmony to act as a vehicle for the kinds of travelling of the spirit that Morriseau describes, but rather than taking a sense of mathematical naturalism to justify the mystic quality of harmony as is the case in the pythagorean tradition or in many variants of the just-intonation tradition, I embrace a kind of arbitrarily “human,” brute division of the octave to produce emergent results which—to my own sensibility—serve these aims. Embedded within is a harmonic progression that I have used in another piece of mine for organ—which like the omnibus progression—creates a sense of continual harmonic sequence that does not resolve.

Category
Composition