Obsolete Music by Juri Seo, Latitude 49

“In [Seo’s music], the old and the new mingle, creating familiar-yet-unknown forms, establishing a fluidity that is relatively rare in the world of attempting to bridge apparent opposites.” — A Closer Listen

“Ersatz, folky, rustic, and modernist of its own unique devising.”
— Santa Barbara Independent

Obsolete Music by the composer Juri Seo is an intricate, driving, and surprising set of 6 compositions that reimagine traditional classical music ideals with Seo’s fascination with modernist musical developments. Obsolete Music is brilliantly executed by the energetic chamber sextet, Latitude 49, who is known for blending the finesse of a classical ensemble with the drive and precision of a finely tuned rock band. Obsolete Music is out on June 13th, 2025, via New Amsterdam Records.

Throughout the 6 tracks on Obsolete Music, Seo juxtaposes traditional musical forms with her lush harmonic language, exciting rhythmic ideas, expanded timbral palette, and unorthodox musical structures. Seo imbues humor, warmth, and emotional depth into her pieces while reflecting on past and present, cycles, and the nature of obsolescence.

Obsolete Music is an exploration of form as a living, breathing being, and through these explorations, Seo takes us to the extremes of her musical imagination by pushing the boundaries of traditional forms. “I think of form as something that's very alive. As a composer, you can control the form to some extent, but you always have to let it grow in its own unexpected ways. Sometimes you can try to break it completely, but even the way it breaks is not entirely within your control. . Through this process of finding reciprocity between your intentions and music, you can give new life to these archaic musical forms.”

“It's impossible to call anything obsolete, since when you say something is obsolete, you're bringing it back to relevance,” says Seo. “I’m always thinking about this kind of cyclicity, of things always coming back—I think this is a very modern phenomenon—since now we can access whatever, whenever we want. Now everything in human history is available to us, and I like being able to be inspired by all of those things, all at once..”

“I fell in love with music through counterpoint. For a lot of contemporary composers, this is a kind of exercise that they do in class, but for me, it's how I started music, you know, playing Bach fugues,” explains Seo. “I came to think of
counterpoint as a musical device that enables the unlikely interaction between complexity and warmth. It’s difficult to play or compose a fugue—they’re very complex—but once you embody it, with your fingers and ears, it becomes a simple, playful, and warm experience. I'm always looking for that combination of warmth, of this simple, radiant feeling, and intricacy. That's something I strive for no matter what styles I write.”

Evoking the spirit of medieval party music, Rondeau sets a harpsichord as the central focus of the piece against flowing winds, glistening strings, and sparsely placed bursts of energetic drums. The music itself oscillates between singable melodic structure and elongating moments of dissonance. Seo explains “the piece is cast in the form of a medieval poetic structure called the rondeau simple, a repetitive ABAAABAB verse-refrain form. I was inspired by the drawings of party scenes from the medieval era, with their odd combination of lifeless eyes and cacophony.”

The harpsichord keeps center stage during Fantasia, a piece that blurs the lines between composition and improvisation with a “solo harpsichord unfolding in a formless, improvisatory style, marked by sudden, mercurial interruptions in otherwise serene texture.” Seo’s sense of organic music is felt here as the longing and patient harpsichord solo is shaken out of its dreamy texture by an energetic fugue. Winds and strings take the foreground with their driving rhythms until Seo pulls the breaks and the excitement dissipates into a meditative state colored by droning woodwinds, pulsing vibraphones and yearning strings. The melodies from the fugue return in contrast to a deep drone.

On making composed music feel improvised, Seo says: “I think it's mostly about sudden changes, veering into a less logical territory. So even with the fugue in the middle, it's like ‘why is that even happening?’ It was supposed to be a quiet piece, but then there's something that just kind of doesn't make much sense. It just breaks.”

Calling back to the fugue texture embedded into Fantasia, Seo’s Fugue plays with a meta-stylistic dissonance between 18th-century harmony and jazz harmony. Voices chase each other across multiple sets of instruments. “Writing a fugue seems like a mathematical process, but at the end of the day, I am looking for something that comes across quite playful, despite its complexity. Counterpoint is like magic because it’s intricate and spontaneous at once.”

The droning and spiritual Cantus Firmus is a setting of “O rubor sanguinis” by Hildegard von Bingen. “It is built on the popular Medieval-Renaissance formal device of the same name—counterpoint unfolding along with a greatly elongated melody. Quarter tones feature prominently, initially as cadential embellishments and later as the harmonic foundation, taking the contrapuntal universe to a microscopic scale.” Cantus Firmus slowly shows its shades of microtonality until a rising melody in the strings dovetails into a quarter tone heavy organ cadenza with shimmering drones blending out of organ pads, high winds, and strings holding long tones in their extreme ranges.

Seo’s humor can be heard after the cadenza. “When the music locks back in, there's still something that's ‘a little bit off.’ There are quarter tones everywhere, obnoxiously out of tune with the surrounding music, and I think that's what makes it a bit comical. It seems like it's a serious piece, but it's quite hilarious in the disastrous way it ends.”

Obsolete Music closes with Canon, a piece centering percussion in the crucial role of binding the rowdy mixture of echoed phrases. It recalls the lighthearted spirit of dance music from Rondeau. Pastoral melodies in the winds and strings are set against a mixture of wood and metallic percussion elements. The energy rises and falls as Seo crafts a series of “voices in imitation, progressing through various intervals in the manner of the Goldberg Variations.”

Juri Seo, a professor of Music at Princeton University, is a Korean-American composer and pianist. Her compositions merge many of the fascinating discoveries from the past century—in particular the expanded timbral palette and unorthodox structure—with functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. She is a Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress. Her previous portrait albums include Mostly Piano, Respiri, and Toy Store.

Juri Seo, a Guggenheim fellow and lover of Beethoven, Funk, and extended just intonation, is a composer and professor at Princeton.

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