Orchestration

for solo flute (doubling piccolo and beer bottles) and electronics (2016)
for solo saxophone (doubling harmonica and beer bottles) and electronics (2022)

Duration

17 minutes

Commissioned by/Premiere

Originally commissioned by New Music USA and Miller Theatre for Tim Munro; the flute version was premiered November 10, 2016 at Miller Theatre at Columbia University. The version for saxophone was made in collaboration with Julian Velasco and released as a recording in August 2022.

Score

Purchase from Project Schott New York: flute version / saxophone version.

Listen

The saxophone recording is available on various platforms here, released on Cedille Records.

Electronics

Download electronics. Liminal Highway is an electroacoustic work. The performer is asked to cue a series of prerecorded samples that blend seamlessly with the live performance. In addition, the instrument is run through a few forms of very simple electronic processing: reverbs and delay. Three movements utilize click tracks as well. Everything is done through a simple patch made in Max that can be downloaded for free (as can the program). It is suggested that unless the performer is fairly familiar with live electronics they collaborate with a sound engineer for at least the first performance.

Balancing the live instrument and the electronics is essential. It should be noted that movements II and IV need significant amplification to get the key clicks loud enough. A clip-on (DPA) mic might be of significant help here (the patch is set up to take two inputs). The piece however can be performed with a single mic. It’s strongly suggested you consult the video online of the work for setup details.

Note

“Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984), part of the Sleeping Giant collective of six American composers, has shown his remarkable versatility as a composer in works for small ensemble, electronics, large orchestra, and the opera stage, as well as scores for installations at such venues as the New Museum and the Time Warner Center. Invisible Cities, “an invisible opera for wireless headphones” based on a novel by Italo Calvino, points to Cerrone’s striking literary sensibility as well and made him a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize.

Liminal Highway for flute and four-channel electronics was co-commissioned by the Miller Theatre and New Music USA. Cerrone says he had no interest in writing a simple solo flute piece “but wanted to create something completely new. And Tim Munro is so much more than a flutist”: indeed, Liminal Highway’s immersive system of electronic sampling creates the sonic illusion of far more than a single soloist, even suggesting a variety of different environments.

The issue of resonance and how it relates to the process of memory is a central preoccupation in much of Cerrone’s music. As the winner of the 2015 Samuel Barber Rome Prize, he spent his year in the Eternal City exploring the intersections between music, architecture, and acoustics, building an installation in a stairwell in the American Academy.

Cerrone took the title for his new work from a poem by the Canadian indie rock musician John K. Samson, which begins with the premise “when you fall asleep in transit.” Each of the piece’s five movements is subtitled after a particular line in the poem.

Formally, Liminal Highway suggests an arch form overall: the fifth movement is a rethink of the first, the second and fourth are rapid and rhythm-centric, and the third is the most immersive, awash in reverb effects. Its sound world creates a kind of “counterpoint through resonance,” employing convolution reverbs — a process that uses sampling to recreate the effect of a real environment. One of these source models, Cerrone points out, is reminiscent of the American Academy acoustic, with a “very wet and long-decaying reverb.”

Written for flutter-tongue piccolo throughout, the first movement is made of delicate layers and loops. Cerrone remarks that he bought himself a $50 flute from Amazon: “As with almost all my solo work, I try to learn the instrument I’m writing for, so I ended up learning how to play the flute.” The percussive second movement, played with key clips while the mouthpiece is pointed into the microphone, amounts to a reconstruction of that archetypal flute gesture, the trill. In the third movement Cerrone alternates two kinds of reverbs (including what has been documented by the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s longest natural decay,” from an oil rig in the Scottish Highlands) to create a continually decaying sound. Against the high decaying note, Munro plays a simple chorale of multiphonics; the process is then reversed as the sound is reassembled into an explosive attack that transitions into the fourth movement — like the second, percussive and highly rhythmic with its key clicks. Not until this movement does Munro produce an “ordinary” sound, which is expanded into a chorus effect in the dramatic climax of the piece.

Liminal Highway concludes with a rewriting of the flutter-tongue piccolo from the first movement, but now mixed with what Cerrone calls “the haze of the long attack from the third movement.” Here Munro incorporates another sound source, blowing into a set of mounted beer bottles — the instrument again transformed.”

Program Notes by Thomas May
www.memeteria.com

Note on the saxophone version

Liminal Highway was originally conceived as a work for flute and electronics on a commission from Tim Munro. Inspired by a poem of the same name by the poet and songwriter John K. Samson, the five-movement work sought to explode the idea of a traditional flute solo by incorporating new techniques such as key clicks, multiphonics, air sounds, and pre-recorded and live electronic processing.

The work premiered in 2016. A few years later, I began adapting Liminal Highway for the saxophone. Many saxophonists had approached me about a new work; I thought that many of the percussive sounds employed in Liminal would naturally lend themselves to the instrument.

Around this time, I ran into Julian Velasco at a performance at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival at Mass MoCA. We got to chatting and he mentioned how much he liked Tim’s performance of Liminal Highway, so I broached the idea of a sax version; the rest is history. The translation of the work was quite smooth, although some challenges, like a stratospherically-high piccolo, required some creative solutions.

The work is cast in five movements, each one mirroring a line in Samson’s poem. The first, “When you fall asleep in transit,” is focused on layers of flutter-tongue (playing the instrument while rolling the tongue). It is played both on the soprano sax and also the harmonica — the solution to the above-mentioned piccolo issue. The second, “A dream you don’t recall,” features the rhythmic and insistent clicking of keys before layers of slap-tongue, air, and overblown sax take over. The third, “Between consciousness and sleep” alternates a stabbing high note against a bed of quiet multiphonics (using the “wrong fingering” to get two notes at the same time). The fourth, “Liminal,” mirrors the second movement. And the fifth and final, “Suddenly it is needed,” reprises the harmonica and another found object — discarded beer bottles, which are also played with the same flutter-tongue technique.

Press

Cerrone’s gentle duet—a world premiere commissioned by Miller Theatre—made a strong conclusion and was the evening’s highlight. Electronic tones—a soundbed, perhaps—emanated from the back of the room like a lullaby. As if encouraging the audience to drift off—the calm at the end of a frightful night—the result plumbed the subconscious, a realm less peaceful than one likes to imagine.

Kurt Gottschalk, Seen and Heard International

The second movement of “Liminal Highway,” performed by the flutist Tim Munro (who doubles on piccolo and beer bottles), begins with expansive, hard-core repetition before spiraling into its melodic material.

Seth Colter Walls, NY Times

The concert ended with Christopher Cerrone’s mammoth Liminal Highway (2016), a work for flutter-tongue piccolo and four-channel electronics, incorporating sampling to create the illusion of an entire wind orchestra. Thematically, this layered sound evokes falling asleep in transit, the premise of the Canadian indie rock musician John K. Samson’s poem of the same name. The work is supremely enchanting and hypnotic, minimalist in conception but employing stunning harmonies.

Andrew Luboski, Limelight Magazine