Distant Voices for clarinet and CD (2011).

Years ago, I became fascinated by the idea that sounds from long ago could be preserved. I read an article about Richard Woodbridge III, who was supposed to have extracted sound from 6,500-year-old Mesopotamian pottery. His recording was supposed to be scratchy and indistinct, but in it one could hear the sound of a potter’s wheel in addition to vocal sounds. I’m not sure whether the recording is real or a hoax. Still, the story is evocative and it gave me the idea for a piece—Distant Voices. The end of Distant Voices was inspired by the Mesopotamian recording. It contains noise with faint vocal sounds. The rest of the piece is based on other sounds from long ago. These include the sound of a choir of thousands singing Handel in the Crystal Palace (from the 1880s), a bit of Brahms, a concert band circa 1900, an advertisement for an Edison phonograph, and the voice of Edison himself. The end of the piece includes the most distant sound of all— the sound of the Huygens space probe flying through the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon, Titan
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Distant Voices, Michael Dean, clarinet (excerpt).