IDEAS: Inaudible Music – Ensemble Dal Niente

The final performance event for the IDEAS 2025 season features Ensemble Dal Niente, as part of their UC San Diego residency, performing a collection titled Inaudible Music. 

The event features original compositions by UC San Diego graduate students presented with UC San Diego Professor of Music Lei Liang.

RSVP for free at Eventbrite. Reception to follow. 

Inaudible Music

Using ultrasonic microphones, Lei Liang’s “Instrumentation Lab” captured the infrasonic frequencies emanating from musical instruments, including the human voice. What renders these signals inaudible to humans? It is not only their frequency range but also their temporal scale. For instance, to perceive the richness of certain signals, we must transpose their frequencies and decelerate the playback by 10 or even 100 times. This concert features new musical compositions that reflect on the inaudible.  

Dal Niente’s residency was sponsored by the Eric L. Lasley Music Student Composition Fund. 

Ben Roidl-Ward, bassoon

Jesse Langen, guitar

Ben Melsky, harp

Ensemble Dal Niente performs, develops, and sustains new and experimental music from small to large chamber ensemble. We are dedicated to growing relationships with artists, composers, and listeners; advancing distinct and challenging musical voices; and sharing that work with our Chicago, U.S., and international communities. To find out more, go to www.dalniente.com.

Program: 

Iglap ng Kaningningan, or “An Iridescent Instant” by Joshua Ansale
breaking — rising  by Emily Barger
Interpercept by Daniel Cui
Shadow of the Ocean by Haihui Zhang

Composers’ Bios: 

Christian Joshua Ansale is a Filipino composer based in Manila specializing in contemporary classical music. “Josh,” as he is known by his colleagues, studied music composition at the University of the Philippines, Diliman under the tutelage of renowned Filipino composers Chino Toledo and Maria Christine Muyco. His works, described by Lifestyle.INQ columnist Gideon Isidro as “stylistically eclectic” have been featured by several fellowships such as the Center for Heritage and Indigenous Cultures, the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Asian Composers’ League. His orchestral pieces “Tugtugin” and “Ang Ouroboros” won the Finalist Prize at the Banaue International Music Composition Competition in 2018 and First Prize at the 2nd International Composers’ Competition at Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan in 2020 respectively. He also served as a classical music expert at FUGA and Naxos Digital Services and one of the founders of MusiKolektibo, a collective of new-generation Filipino classical composers.

Devoted to the interpretation and creation of contemporary music, soprano, poet, and composer Emily Barger has performed as Echo in All Wounds Bleed, Psyche’s Sister The Golden Ass, Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, the voice in Babbitt’s Philomel, the soprano soloist in Orff’s Carmina Burana and has sang as Clémence in L’amour de Loin and Anne Trulove in The Rake’s Progress. Beyond staged works, Emily embraces the chance to sing in chamber, electronic, and in improvisational music settings, exploring the endless possibilities of vocal timbre and expression. Her compositions have been premiered by eminent groups such as the Fonema Consort, Duo Gelland, Dal Niente, and Aurora Borealis. Emily is currently writing the libretto and music for her chamber rock opera and frequently connects her poetry in her compositions. Her poems are published under pseudonym eda bee in several art magazines and in the collective Because You Are Not Alone. 

Daniel (Jingyang) Cui is a Chinese-born composer whose music draws deeply from his cultural heritage, exploring themes ranging from history and social issues to the quiet intricacies of daily life. Having spent significant time abroad, he offers a personal and nuanced perspective on cultural relativism through a wide range of musical expressions, from intimate chamber works to full-scale orchestral compositions. Currently pursuing a PhD in composition at the University of California San Diego, Cui is the recipient of numerous prestigious honors, including the Artzenter Institute Emerging Composer Grant, the American Composers Earshot Fellowship, and the Georgina Joshi Commission Prize. His works have been performed by renowned ensembles such as Wild Up, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Prism Quartet, and Tacet(i) Ensemble, among others. His music has also been showcased at festivals including the TUTTI Festival, CAMPGround, and Connecticut Summerfest, among others.

Haihui Zhang is a Chinese composer based in the U.S., currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition at UC San Diego under Lei Liang. A graduate of Manhattan School of Music and winner of the Waldorf 100 Grand Prize in Germany, she is the youngest composer to collaborate with the Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra. Known for her philosophical and detailed musical voice, Zhang integrates Asian elements with a contemporary, interdisciplinary approach. Her works have been internationally performed and awarded, including at festivals in Italy, Germany, and China. Major compositions include Hourglass, Four Rhymes, Shadow and Sojourns in the Parallel World.

Program Notes: 

A famous video produced by the MIT Media Lab in 2011 shows a single pulse of reflected light traveling through an empty Coca-Cola bottle, captured by an array of special cameras with a rate of over one trillion frames per second. In Filipino, “kaningningan” is a polysemous word. It could mean something which shines with a spectrum of colors, hence “iridescent.” However, it could also mean something which produces a bright but momentary flash of light — perhaps the word “brilliant” would be an apt translation for it. Seeing that video made me realize how squarely my ancestors hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial head.

And indeed, the general inspiration for this piece is the quantization of incredibly fast events in an incredibly attenuated space. Imagine a single event too fast for eyes to see, or even the brain to know. Its details, such as the melange of photons which makes light so radiant or the overlap of colors which makes it white, made all the more evident through slowing things down at an exponential rate. In this piece, I’ve extrapolated that impression of slowed phenomena and quickened perception to music. Like that pulse of light, a singular pulse of sound is no longer just so in a slowed-down, hypersonic field of listening.

– Christian Joshua Ansale

breaking — rising captures a narrative path of a group of bubbles in the ocean – – the bubbles start as air from the surface being mixed into the water from breaking ocean waves, which turns into tiny seafoam bubbles. Some bubbles – – the ones from our story – – become lulled underwater, where they join with other bubbles to form larger ones. Then, because air is less dense than water, our bubbles rise to the surface, changed by their togetherness, and pop as one once the bubble and the air meet again. Using extended instrumental techniques to recreate these sounds, breaking — rising explores the wonder and transience of a single moment: the bubble.

– Emily Barger

Shadow of the Ocean is a piece that explores an unfamiliar world—one hidden beneath the surface, filled with sounds beyond our ordinary perception. Though separated by different realms, we remain connected through a shared breath. This “parallel world” represents a bipolar space where two existences converge, not through sight or sound alone, but through the act of breathing. In this fusion of worlds, breath becomes the bridge—an invisible thread weaving life and destiny into a shared, resonant experience.

– Haihui Zhang

Interpercept, a title derived from the words interference and perception, explores the phenomenon of the beating sound, which is a rhythmic fluctuation in intensity perceived when two sound waves of slightly different frequencies interfere. My inspiration developed from studying inaudible, high-frequency material captured with ultrasonic microphones. When slowed down, these recordings revealed delicate beating patterns, full of instability and subtle motion. This piece channels that fascination through the instrumentation of bassoon, harp, and electric guitar, treating the trio as a kind of collaborative synthesizer. By manipulating pitch, rhythm, and timbre, I aimed to generate a wide range of beating effects, both shared and distinct across the instruments, allowing their sounds to blur, converge, and diverge in constantly shifting textures.     

– Daniel Cui