Composer Jennifer Jolley (b. 1981) teaches composition at Lehman College in New York City. Her music spans multiple genres, from choral and wind band works to electronic chamber and flexible music. Her music often addresses provocative subject matter, from school shootings to climate change to #MeToo to COVID-19. This approach speaks to performers and audiences everywhere: her music has been performed around the world, and she has taken part in numerous composer residencies and commissions. She is also an advocate for new music and underrepresented composers, writing for NewMusicBox and advising the Institute for Composer Diversity. Her blog addresses (and normalizes) the rejection and failure that composers often face. She has bios at her website, Lehman College, the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and the American Composers Forum, which also features an interview with her.
Sounds from the Gray Goo Sars-CoV-2 is a product of the 2020 COVID pandemic, which radically changed the way that bands operate for the better part of 2 school years (so far). It uses a completely flexible instrumentation and form, allowing essentially free improvisation within certain pitch, rhythm, and form parameters. But it has its true origin much earlier in Jolley’s career, as an electronic piece. Her original program note (from her website) reads:
Sounds from the Gray Goo started (SftGG 1.0) in a live electronic music class with percussionist Kevin Lewis. This setup for the series had an acoustic performer improvising within certain established parameters with a prerecorded and manipulated version of themselves controlled by the laptop artist.
Named after a potential apocalyptic scenario of nanorobots self-replicating to the point of drowning civilization in a “gray goo” because a careless programmer forgets to insert a kill switch, the large-scale vision for the series is to have several similar pieces for various instruments and the program flexibility to pick and choose among them to form a complete set. In other words, Sounds from the Gray Goo is to become a shiny black oil slick in the sea of electro-acoustic music. It would seem that the humans still hold dominion over the machines…for now.
Sounds from the Gray Goo 2.0 and 3.0 followed, written in 2010 for clarinet solo and electronics and in 2012 for 2 woodwinds and electronics, respectively. There is also a version 2.1 for clarinet ensemble. The program notes from this version, which is fully acoustic, further illuminate the piece:
After witnessing my first experiment for percussionist plus laptop performer, clarinetist Rebecca Danard wanted me to write a laptop improvisation piece for her, so I eventually did.
Rebecca suggested that we work with pentatonic scales for our improvisation, so I created ten cells of notes (ranging from low to high) based on four Japanese pentatonic scales, then I recorded Rebecca improvising with the notes of these cells—all forty of them. The recordings of these improvisations were then electronically processed; this is included in the second clarinet part.
I adapted this version (SftGG 2.1) for (acoustic) clarinet ensemble.
The Sars-CoV-2 version thus goes one step further than 2.1, opening the instrumentation to include literally any instrument.
Here is a recording calling itself version 2.11, which uses the 2.1 instrumentation and best encapsulates what the open instrumentation version will sound like, but using only clarinets. Follow along in the score here:
Sounds from the Gray Goo Sars-CoV-2 is available from Murphy Music Press.