Ever since the first Pulitzer Prize for music was awarded in 1943, the pieces under consideration were almost all conceived inside the mind of a composer who then sat down at a piano with a notebook and started writing down the notes that were in their heads. You wouldn’t have heard anything about stems and MIDIs.
But those are the electronic building blocks for the compositions of Jerrilynn Patton, who produces and performs under the name of Jlin (pronounced JAY-linn). The 38-year-old from Indiana was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer for a piece called “Perspective,” a seven-part work that she wrote for the Chicago-based group, Third Coast Percussion.
Over the past decade, Jlin has evolved from a solo artist who spliced her music together in her home studio to a favored collaborator for choreographers, new music ensembles and even fashion designers.
“Rick Owens started it, when I did things for Fashion Week,” Patton said recently from her home in Merrillville, Ind.
The designer was taken with the track “Erotic Heat” and asked her to rework it for a 2014 reveal of his latest clothing collection. That and her albums, “Dark Energy” and “Black Origami,” soon led to invitations to create new works with choreographers Wayne McGregor and Kyle Abraham, the Kronos Quartet and the Third Coast Percussion project that underlined her newfound status as a classical composer.
You can get a sense of what an artistic polymath she’s become when Jlin presents an evening of her work at the Walker Art Center on Thursday, joined by violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, percussive dancer Leonardo Sandoval and members of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The former Purdue math major has dubbed the program, “n! = 3! (Permutation of Three),” based on the idea that these three collaborations offer infinite possibilities.
“This presentation will demonstrate her range as an artist,” said Kate Nordstrum, the head of Liquid Music, which is co-presenting it with Northrop and the Walker. “She’s still so young and eager and is poised for a long career of highly creative output. This is just a taste.”
So how does an electronic music artist who grabs snippets and sounds from everywhere — “Music, sound, anything vibrational, really,” she said — rechannel her muse from the dance clubs of Chicago to the world of contemporary classical music?
