“My visceral memory of the premiere is that it went by in a blur, as performances often do, even or especially if you yourself are not performing,” says New York based composer and sound artist Marina Rosenfeld, remembering the debut outing of her 2008 composition Teenage Lontano, soon to be released on LP via Room40. “You are nonetheless inhaling and exhaling with your performers,” she continues, “suspended in a kind of ecstatic state of over-attentiveness and apprehension. Or maybe that’s just me. However, the weeks and days leading up to the premiere are still vivid to me, as I had never before worked with such a large and expert crew, so much technical infrastructure and so massive a site. The [New York] Park Avenue Armory had, I think we calculated at one point, something like 11 million cubic feet of air: a sound field so large it had what felt like different neighbourhoods. When we got the rotating horn up into the air, it bent sounds against distant barriers and reflectors (walls, arches, bleachers) in kaleidoscopic ways. I had never heard sound this way before, and I never wanted to hear my music again without this spatiality and dimension.”

The piece was conceived as a reconfiguration of György Ligeti’s utopian modernist 1967 orchestral work Lontano, adapted to a choral composition for teenagers to perform. The 34 participants take vocal cues via shared iPods accompanied by a horn rotating overhead. Since it's premiere at Park Avenue Armory for the Whitney Biennale, the work has been performed internationally, always with local teenagers taking part.

“The choir of teenagers were also wondrous in their focus and willingness and artistry,” remarks Rosenfeld, again recalling the original performance in New York. “I felt that it was possible to imagine a kind of music going forward that honoured difference, that made room for bodies and voices without compression of any kind – that gave space to the things I wanted to hear. I had been wanting to ask formal questions through praxis not in spite of it. So I felt like on this one night everything did kind of come together and everybody felt it.”

Alongside the vinyl and digital versions of Teenage Lontano, Australian imprint Room40 will also release Index, a limited edition CD and book featuring a series of live recordings and related materials that trace the 20 year development of Rosenfeld’s work with dubplates and turntables.

Wire subscribers can read a 2010 interview with Rosenfeld – where she further discusses Teenage Lontano and more – in The Wire 313 via the online archive.