New Juri Seo Co-Commission Completed - "Birds, Bees, Electric Fish"

Drawings by Juri Seo. Image by Tessa Brinckman

Caballito Negro is the lead commissioner for a new work recently completed by Princeton composer Juri Seo for flute/percussion quartet titled Birds, Bees, Electric Fish. The 28-minute, three-movement work is the first of its kind created for double flute/percussion duos, and is inspired by Umwelt, the German word for environment used in biology to denote the perceptual world as experienced by a specific organism.

In Juri’s words: “While our perception is limited to our own Umwelt, delineated by the limits of human perceptual capacity, we can imagine other animals’ Umwelten by studying their physiology and behaviors. The attempt at this impossible task of exiting the self-centered perception is a deeply human endeavor that may help recontextualize our relationship with other organisms and with the living world. To compose the work, I began by selecting three organisms I found particularly interesting: birds, bees, and electric fish. How do birds hear their own songs? What goes on in the mind of a bee in a colony? And what does it feel like to be a fish feeling its three-dimensional surrounding via an electrical sensa/on on its skin?

The audience is encouraged to mentally map their surroundings replete with diverse vibrating objects. The translations of senses become more abstract as the piece unfolds; from birds to bees and to electric fish, various senses—auditory, visual, kinetic, and tactile—are alluded to through sounds only. Ironically, my attempt to enter the minds of other beings necessitated a heightened sense of humanity, as I strove to imagine their diverse non-human senses through a lens of familiarity and empathy. It involved hearing birds slower, imbuing them with lyricism; imagining the serene and joyful minds of bees; and experiencing a sense of touch and sight through the act of listening.”

Caballito Negro led a cosortium of 32 flutists and percussionists to commission this new work. We are excited to present the premiere of Birds, Bees, Electric Fish on Wednesday, April 17, 2024 at the Music Recital Hall at the Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, along with Sarah Tiedemann and Christopher Whyte of Third Angle New Music from Portland, Oregon. Additional performances for 2024–25 are being scheduled for New York City; Princeton University; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Portland, Oregon.