Pretty Saro Orbital (2020)
A TELEMATIC WORK FOR OPEN SCORING [9 Minutes]
Music by Samuel Beebe.
I learned “Pretty Saro” from a Jean Ritchie recording. After taking a song-writing workshop with Peggy Seeger, I found her doing it on one of her albums, and since then I’ve wanted to make an interpretation of the tune and affect of the song. Pretty Saro Orbital deconstructs the melodic material of the traditional tune and redistributes it into four parts comprised of rotating loops of varying lengths, superimposed in a technique similar to Eno’s Music for Airports. Originally conceived as a telematic work during the 2020 pandemic, the element of indeterminacy served as a method to cope with the lack of precise synchronization of parts due to the limitations of remote performance via video conferencing and unstable home internet connections.
ENSEMBLE DECIPHER:
Samuel Beebe, guitar
Joseph Bohigian, piano
Robert Cosgrove, marimba
Eric Lemmon, synth
Chelsea Loew, guitar
Taylor Long, vibes
Niloufar Nourbakhsh, piano