My Mother Made Many Blankets

Written in 2023 for flute, clarinet in B-flat, vibraphone, harp, piano, violin, viola, 'cello (15 minutes)

I have grown up around crochet. While legally blind, my mother has made crochet blankets not only for myself and my family, but for countless friends as well as volunteering to make blankets for the local hospital in my hometown. Quilting, crochet and other “craft” arts are often presented as “domestic” arts – a not-so-subtle sexist euphemism for “feminine work.” This is often seen in the ways that museums and universities prioritize the mediums with more technology or the arts with a higher perception of prestige. However, the textile arts ought not need defending: as a rich historical praxis across cultures and borders, every culture has a tradition of fabric and textiles, each unique and significant to their respective contexts. In a way, this piece is a celebration of the textile arts, and a meditation on the work my mother has done – not only as a role model to me, but as an active member of her community.

The metaphor of tapestries is not limited to just one homogenous texture; I wanted to write a piece that explores different textures, fabrics, and approaches to the medium in a way that is non-hierarchical and allows each instrument to vitally interact with one another. In her Composing a Theory, Linda Catlin Smith describes the influence of the theory of evolution and feminist theory respectively as “the understanding of evolution not as progress towards a goal, but as an adaptation to a changing environment. I think of my works as having an overall sense of transformation – they evolve” and “aspects of non-hierarchical forms, the understanding that works don’t have to build to a climax, nor do they have to have important moments. The sense that the mundane has as much to tell us as the extraordinary.”

It should be noted that, while much of this description may give the impression that the piece is intended to be a mimetic exercise; it is never my intention to reduce these ideas to replication alone. I have very little interest in plugging in pitches and rhythms into a system and letting it ride. Rather, I have a strong attachment to the intuition of my ear and my draw to a particular harmonic palette. Much of my work can be described by – sometimes sentimental – floating tones in a slow kaleidoscope of diffuse clouds of pitches, but recent work has focused more and more on rhythmic units – however, I maintain my interest in music that is aperiodic – how can one have strong rhythmic values while maintaining a lost sense of time. How can you have pulse without having hierarchy. The result is then a “web,” an extended tapestry, a blanket of pulses overlapping, many threads coming and going and each of them rather mundane, but that form a larger body of something much more meaningful.