Evening Drawings

Written in 2024 for violin, bass clarinet, bass viola da gamba, contrabass (25 minutes)

Evening Drawings takes its name and is inspired by Kristina Láníková’s “Večerní kresby při odličování” - a textile object made from wipes Láníková used to remove eye makeup.

Reading through Láníková’s website, there were so many ideas that resonated with my artistic practice, especially the ways in which Láníková’s occupies spaces between visual art and literary creation. Láníková states that she deals with tension between intimacy and depersonalization; the physical body; a process of observing oneself; transformations of emotional surfaces. Láníková’s work asks questions: maybe it’s more about decisions than problems - producing documents of concern for one’s own body and the desire for expression, an exploration of things left over.

As an interpreter of Láníková’s work, I see these leftovers as fragments of a life in-process. According to Susan Howe, for Proust, a fragment is a morsel of time in its pure state: it hovers between a present that is immediate and a past that once had been present. So much of my work is made in an effort to transcend purely musical states and to explore the spaces between narrative development while maintaining an immediacy found in visual art; to find a space of abstract expression in music. There is a reconciliation process here where influences from a multiplicity of interests present themselves in the moment of creating a new work: it is a process of abstraction and figuration.

You may notice in this note that there are many references to binary states: two ideas, two objects, two conceptualizations occupying the same space. This is not a state of binary opposition, but of juxtaposition. There are two black smudges on each panel making up 323 squares in a matrix grid: two ideas per square or two gestures per moment occupying the same space. With Evening Drawings, I have taken this same idea and placed it within my musical language. The piece is in two movements with very different notation and performance strategies; two-note gestures occur again and again; two-performers occupy the same pitch; the emotional state is abstracted into process and movement. It is at once a reflection on what my work has been and where it is going, while at the same time occupying the relationship of visual art with music and performance.