what it is...
Shortly after returning from my first residency at the Banff Centre (May 2005), I became more than a little obsessed with the idea of the human being as an individual voice in music. How little music can I 'write' and still have it sound like me? How much can I write without losing the sounds of the individual performers? What happens if I take the same set of scores and set them, without any adjustments to the parts, in front of radically different ensembles? In other words, just how far can the music stretch before it breaks?
In a fit of self-anthropology I set out to answer these questions and the resulting music has taken my hands and ears far beyond the motions they originally conceived. The result has been a collection of music performed in three-fold: by my working quintet, theSuiteUnraveling; by an ongoing integrated media project called hall.of.mirrors (...music for double quintet and improvised film); and by an electroacoustic chamber ensemble featuring such angular combinations of instruments as laptop, banjo and the human voice.
What is it that makes the music what it is? It is a commonly used maxim that in music the sum of the performers transcends the weight and merits of each player on their own. I had a teacher in college who took this a step further, maintaining that the only way to understand one Charlie Parker solo is to see it as part of an ongoing stream of performances of the same solo over the course of Parker's life, that the solo itself was alive independently of its creator, stretching forward and backward from the point of its performance to meet its brethern on either end. That separating individual performances from the lineage of the whole is like taking snapshots of a dancer and trying, after the fact, to recreate the dance.
I believe each composition is an empty husk waiting to be filled by the people it encounters, a child waiting to be reared by those with time and patience enough to give it love. That the real meaning of the music is revealed, over the years, in a life cycle not that different from our own: conception, inception, development, inevitable decay and dissolution into the ether from which it was first conceived.
...So what I'm saying is, the real music isn't in the electronic whisperings of the chamber group, isn't in the clatter and yell of the free-jazz-meets-art-rockishness of theSuiteUnraveling, isn't in the film artists' response to the density of the double quintet. It's the invisible stuff, the spaces between the sounds, the way a tune sounds a certain way in one ensemble completely different way in the hands of another. My hope is that the points of change, undefinable yet tangible as they are, will make the points of distinction in the music all the more elusive yet concrete.
My music is not a vehicle for improvisiation, a showcase for the prowess of its performers, a means to an end. I believe the means of the music is the end. As composers we are all storytellers, science fiction writers, creaters of space unique to--yet somehow far beyond--ourselves.
Right now this music happens in and around New York City, takes little jaunts from Montreal to the American Southwest, but spends most of its time hanging around in my apartment, patient but eager, waiting to be written and revealed.