This visual accompaniment provides the listener a window into my synesthetic approach to composing music, and also reflects my passion for the saturated, interactive color palettes of retro video games…My process of writing music is intimately bound up with the intense sensations of color and light that musical sonorities afford me, and composing often feels to me like an experience of gaming - searching for chords and colors and coins, addictively seizing the dopamine of cadences and climaxes, and luxuriating in the long, endless, richly-hued fade-outs of final confrontations, however unresolved they may be. Jenny Olivia Johnson–Photo courtesy of the artistĪnd here’s what Jenny had to say about the process of creating the video for Reflect Reflect Respond Respond: Ten years later, it still sounds completely fresh to me I don’t know of any other music that sounds even remotely like it. One of Wild Rumpus’ very first commissions, it helped define the identity of the group early on. It draws freely from a wide variety of musical genres (minimalism, rock, early music, etc.) yet is completely original. Reflect Reflect Respond Respond is everything that I wanted the music of Wild Rumpus to be: big, ambitious, deeply expressive, and bursting with ideas. Here’s what Wild Rumpus co-founder Dan VanHassel had to say about Jenny’s piece: resulted in the creation of Ninth Planet, a new music ensemble and service organization dedicated to commissioning and performing new music. The 2019 merger of Wild Rumpus with fellow San Francisco-based organization Composers, Inc. Reflect Reflect Respond Respond is one of five world premiere recordings on Vestige (2021), the final album from Wild Rumpus that also includes works by Jen Wang, Dan VanHassel, Joshua Carro, and Per Bloland. Through various contemporary settings of Bach’s Jesu, meine Freude chorale, the composition meditates on sadness, our tendency to repeat past traumas, and the ways in which loss can propel us forward. The visuals that accompany Wild Rumpus’ recording of Reflect Reflect Respond Respond (Echo and Narcissus in Reverse) were created with a video synthesizer and bring textured hues to life. With predecessors including György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, and Alexander Scriabin, Jenny Olivia Johnson is the latest synesthete composer to attempt to share the colors she associates with sound.
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