lag sin is one

for twelve or more sustaining instruments (2024)

Bowling Green New Music Festival
Bryan Hall, Moore Musical Arts Center
Bowling Green State University
October 18, 2025

Christian Glascock, flute
Martha Hudson, oboe
Cruz Stock, bassoon
Lukas Bass, saxophone
Jacob Loitz, saxophone
Samuel Valancy, saxophone
Wesley Nielson, trombone
Sakda Pharchumcharna, tuba
Liam Battle, cello
Thomas Johnston, bass
Stephen Eckert, piano
Orson Abram, percussion/synthesizer
Christopher Harris, percussion
Collin McEneaney, percussion

The title, lag sin is one, is an anagram. This piece invites a group of people to enact an ecological simulation. The ensemble itself and the space it inhabits are
the parameters of the piece. In John Horton Conway’s Game of Life, a node/cell in the two-dimensional environment only has “life” when a certain number of
adjacent cells do. In natural environments, the acoustic niche hypothesis (first advanced by Bernie Krause) suggests that species have an awareness of their
acoustic environments and use non-competing parts of frequency space for their acoustic communication.

These ideas inform the systems shaping this piece. Every person’s sound-making potential is determined by the other activity in the environment and their
decision to respond (or not). Every new individual action (including silence) drives the potentials at every moment moving forward. This interdependency
means that the entire system is only “alive” when a critical mass of individual actions are made concurrently and congruently. To achieve this, people must
pay close attention to each other individually and collectively. Even when not making sound, one must follow the activity of the group closely for the piece to
have continued life.