Life After Death? by Maya Miro Johnson

A collaboration with fellow Curtis Institute of Music student Maya Miro Johnson.

Live Improvised Performance from 2021
Markus Lang, Double Bass
Maya Miro Johnson, Composer
Curtis Institute of Music

“In September 2020, the journal Nature Astronomy published a paper authored by a team of scientists from around the world entitled “Phosphine in the cloud decks of Venus”. Since its publication, an error in the data set has come to light that might preclude the conclusions of the article, but the basic assertion was that the presence of phosphine potentially detected in the atmosphere of the second planet from the sun could possibly be an indication of organic matter, the building blocks of fundamental life forms. What does it take to make an afterlife? As much as it takes to make life itself? 13 billion years and a little bit of oxygen, hydrogen, and plasma? Or was David Bowie right when he wrote, “but the film is a saddening bore, cuz she’s lived it ten times or more”? This piece asks, what is the sound of deep space in the innards of a cell, the edges of reality in the spark of a quark? How can we be so rare and so insignificant at the same time? Something’s got to give. While I personally believe the rarity is the more likely lie, as Toni Morrison said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Tracing the edges of phosphine readings as though it were Kandinsky… listening for a song in radio waves emitted thousands of years ago... asserting the self in the void… this piece essentially works as an improvisation ‘live-processed’ through techniques suggested by the graphic score, which uses the phosphine spectrograms as visual art by which to derive sound. Markus and I worked together to devise a scheme for the piece, methods of reading the graphs, framed by pitches from a fragmented transcription of the eponymous Bowie song, and he deserves as much credit as I do for bringing the piece to life… I guess now the only thing left to do is wait 13 billion years and see what happens.”