John Kannenberg

Major Sound Works

• A Sound Map of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo
• Collections: UMMA
• The Landscape Series
• Autumn Enso
• A Canticle For Leibowitz
• Four Painters
• Gelidus
• Folktales 1: Lave

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ [2005]

Format: MP3 release
Released by: Nishi
Running time: 67.33
> Download the album & artwork

About the project

Originally commissioned by NoType's Sine Fiction sub-label (an imprint that offered mp3 releases of electronic music "soundtracks" to famous science fiction novels), this album was ultimately released on another NoType sub-label, Nishi.

Working with a sonic narrative, especially after creating my own fractured sound narrative Lave for the Folktales series, was a welcome challenge. For the source material I chose A Canticle For Leibowitz, having read the book when I was very young. I had also listened to the radio dramatization produced by National Public Radio in 1981, and I revisited both the radio series and the book in preparation for working on my "possible soundtrack."

After re-listening to the radio drama, I realized it had been one of my first exposures to minimal experimental music, since its score consisted only of a synthesizer, sparse percussion, and a church choir. Along with this, the book's themes of long-term temporal responsibility, the cyclical nature of history, and the conflict between the spiritual and scientific worlds held connections to many concepts I had been investigating in my own work, making the project a very personal one. My original plan had been to create three short pieces, one for each of the three sections of the book. However, it quickly became apparent that the story was too complex and required more detailed illustrative work; I eventually produced over an hour of material - eighteen separate pieces of music.

The novel, written throughout the mid to late 1950s and inspired by the angst of the first decade of the nuclear age, concerns the history of the Leibowitz Abbey and its library of scientific texts holed up in the desert of the southwestern United States. Beginning 600 years after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed modern civilization, the book spans 1,000 years of the abbey's history; the abbey's library and its "booklegger" monks dedicate their lives to copying and preserving ancient scientific texts - long been outlawed - that they themselves do not understand. They follow the teachings of Saint Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a Cold War-era nuclear engineer who rejected science after the war and turned to the priesthood. As time passes, scholars use the abbey's library to piece together the rudiments of scientific thought, and the resurrection of science eventually leads to the resurrection of hostility; by the book's end a second nuclear war threatens to wipe away civilization once again.

I approached the soundtrack as if I were scoring pieces for a film adaptation of the book, with those tracks which related to scenes with heavy dialogue having less musical complexity than tracks relating to action sequences. As each of the three sections of the book tell a different story from the abbey's history over a thousand-year period, I approached each section of the book as its own musical "world", splitting the album into three "suites" and constructing themes for characters and situations. Also, a synthesized theme plays in all three sections of the soundtrack to represent the technology that is slowly being rediscovered; this theme becomes more prominent as the soundtrack moves forward, eventually becoming the predominant motif of the first track of the final suite.

As the book opens society is in a new dark age, and the music for the first section of the book reflects a low-tech, "primitive" aesthetic: real organic percussion sounds sampled from my own drum performances as well as objects like rocks and sticks mingle with simple synthesizer lines and field recordings of wind, steam and static. As the second section of the book approaches, more sophisticated sounds are incorporated, such as piano and strings; the novel's society progresses from a primarily nomadic culture to that of nation-states and warrior princes, so the music reflects a slightly more refined, complicated array of sounds. The final section of the book leaps ahead to a sophisticated global culture where spaceships, computers and self-guided motor cars reveal a society even more advanced than the one before the first nuclear holocaust, and the music shifts almost entirely to synthesized sounds. As another nuclear war breaks out near the soundtrack's end, the music begins to reflect back on the earlier dark age culture, returning to the sounds of organic percussion and sampled strings. The final track mixes elements from all three suites as the monks abandon the Earth, taking their library with them in an attempt to start over on a new world.

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©2012 John Kannenberg / email: john [a] stasisfield.com