Maybe

Written in 2017 for 3 like-voices (3 minutes)

“Maybe” was written for the 3dB Vocal Ensemble of David Breen, Daniel Baumgartner, and Daniel Bayot. The 3dB Vocal Ensemble was an ensemble of three undergrad roommates in Bowling Green, Ohio who would explore the fringes of vocal performance with a virtuosity you would expect from top-tier contemporary players. They would perform with a fire and a passion – a precision – that I’ve seen many professional players fall well short of. They were crazy, but they were a force to reckon with. Nice guys too! It’s a real shame that grad school forces us to part ways with great collaborators – but it looks like they’re all doing well.

This piece was never performed live, it could be, and the 3dB Vocal Ensemble would have been the folks to do it before they parted ways, but it never happened. Still, Daniel Bayot organized the team and we did a stellar studio recording of the piece that now just lives online. I learned a lot writing this piece, and writing this reflection for my website has made me stop and think about a lot of things that are now extremely important to me that came from this piece. The first is the “life” of a piece: I don’t know who needs to read this, but I don’t think pieces need to be played in real life to be “real” to be “complete” to be “realized” or to reach some ontological conclusion of “existing.” This shouldn’t be a radical thing to realize in the 21st century, but it was pretty important to me to figure this out and I didn’t do so for quite a while. Get a good recording, even if the piece is never played live.

I think there are 3 big-tent ways of engaging with music: documentation (scores, text, verbal instruction), live experience (playing music together, going to a show, meditating together), recorded experience (YouTube, Bandcamp, SoundCloud). To me, any of these are part of an aesthetic experience and I’m not convinced there are hierarchical categories between them. I can have a transformative aesthetic experience by looking at a score; I can be overwhelmed by a live performance; I can be moved by a piece of micro-sounds that I physically couldn’t ever hear in real life. I may never see some of my favorite pieces played in real life- maybe this is a little sad, but it’s also simply amazing that we have the resources and the tools to share work online and form niche communities around aesthetics and ideas – to share with folks we might never meet in real life as well. It is often the case that the number of people who can and will engage with a work will be much higher online anyway than anyone who would only experience a piece in a gatekept concert hall. So this piece lives online, and that’s okay.  

To me, this piece aesthetically stands out in my body of work. I tend to get annoyed by what I call “catalog pieces” – pieces that throw everything and the kitchen sink at you, pieces that demonstrate every technique (extended or otherwise) the composer can think of, often in a sequence or in a way that doesn’t serve the construction piece. Imagine a saxophone solo that has sudden keyclicks apropos of nothing: the sound is there, but for what? When a piece is just that, crossing off every idea and available technique a performer can throw down, the piece can become something of an etude on techniques, or just a sideshow work. You learn a lot writing pieces like that, but you don’t always learn a lot about from, structure, and continuity as much as you learn about the techniques when techniques themselves are the impetus for a piece. These things are all tools, and they should be used as tools, so when you make a piece that focuses just on these, you still need to think about them from a formal standpoint and how they relate to one another. That said, this whole idea can be on a spectrum: “Maybe” is somewhere on the spectrum of a “catalog piece.”

Finally, this piece is extremely self-conscious. As many of us in creative fields understand, it can be difficult to feel confident when you find yourself constantly comparing yourself and your work to the work of your friends. Now that I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve learned to channel this energy and I completely understand that life as a creative will have its ebbs and its flows, but when you’re young it can get extremely difficult when your friends are on a flow while you’re on an ebb. I think it’s good to compare yourself with others, but you can’t let that be something that beats you down- you have to let that motivate you. Our scene is way too small for toxic rivalry, and the realities of the game are way more complicated than it would be worth getting into in this essay. Still, we need to celebrate the success of our friends and use this energy to be productive. I don’t know if these are the correct words, but I think it’s okay to have envy in a way that is humbled and motivated. This piece comes from a similar place: I think it’s a balance between being highly motivated and extremely fragile.