The Silenced is a meditation on those who are muted, by force or by political, economic, or social circumstances, yet still struggle to be heard. While composing the work, I was concerned with the ideas of trauma and self expression during and after a traumatic experience. This is manifested musically by gagged, stifled sounds that are perpetually in transition towards a clearer articulation that is never fully reached. Significantly, it is the flute, not the voice, that comes closest to realizing a kind of expressive "purity," free of the noise and interference that typify so much of multilayered sound strata in the piece.
The Silenced is dedicated with great love and admiration to Claire Chase for her Density 2036 project.
— Jason Eckardt
The Silenced (2015), a monodrama for solo flute
![DENSITY2036: Jason Eckardt - The Silenced [2015] | International Contemporary Ensemble](https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/553971213-dfe5e0e1a53a0cffe841337961ab109fa3a4982f1007ecf1c7f62161a3e6d604-d_1920x1080)
Jason Eckardt (b. 1971) played guitar in jazz and metal bands until, upon first hearing the music of Webern, he immediately devoted himself to composition. Since then, his music has been influenced by his interests in perceptual complexity, the physical and psychological dimensions of performance, political activism, and self-organizing processes in the natural world. He has been recognized through commissions from Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, the Koussevitzky Foundation (2000, 2011), the Guggenheim Museum, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (1996, 2008), New Music USA, Chamber Music America, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago, the New York State Music Fund, Meet the Composer, the Oberlin Conservatory, and percussionist Evelyn Glennie; awards from the League of Composers/ISCM (National Prize), Deutschen Musikrat-Stadt Wesel (Symposium NRW Prize), the Aaron Copland Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, ASCAP, the University of Illinois (Martirano Prize), the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and Columbia University (Rapoport Prize); and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fondation Royaumont, the MacDowell and Millay Colonies, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, the Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, the Composers Conference at Wellesley, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music.
Eckardt received a doctorate in composition from Columbia University as a Presidential Fellow. In 1992, Eckardt graduated cum laude from Berklee College of Music where he was awarded the Richard Levy Scholarship. He has attended masterclasses with Milton Babbitt, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has taught at Columbia, Illinois, New York, Northwestern, and Rutgers Universities, the Oberlin and Peabody Conservatories, and is currently on the faculties of the Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.