Shut Your Eyes and See

Written in 2023 for winds, strings, guitar, percussion, live electronics, and fixed media (180 minutes)

Shut Your Eyes and See was written for Hannah Baskin, Aliyah Scobey, and Ryan Semegran as the musical accompaniment for their “cooperative conundrum” project. The development of this piece was extremely hectic: I received an e-mail from my friend J. Andrew Smith forwarding a message asking for musicians to play on a three-hour long performance art/dance piece that was going to be done at Dallas Contemporary in three weeks. I have a lot of interest in extended durations, I have a lot of interest in performance art, and I have a lot of interest in doing weird, almost radically naive ideas - the wilder the better - so of course I was interested in taking on this project. I immediately texted the core group of people I play with here in Denton to see who was available the night of the show (and who was willing to do this project on such short notice), knowing we wouldn't have time to do a rehearsal, but having a lot of faith and trust in the people that I've been playing with for the last five years. Several them replied, so I had a band together and I have enough arrogance to know I could do it and turn around a project of that scale on that timeline.

The next day I had a zoom meeting with Hannah, Aliyah, and Ryan to learn about the concept of the piece and about what would be happening during the music, and to get a sense of what they were looking for. They sent me materials, I sent them materials, we both liked what we were trying to do and I felt confident that this is something that I would be able to pull off quickly. If you take a look at the score, you can see that it's written in something of a shorthand, not quite a typical score. This method has been part of my compositional output for some time, but I've never taken it to such a scale as something like this, or something nearly as ambitious. Only having three weeks to put the piece together, I had to go with my gut, go with my ear, and really trust myself to allow an outpouring of creativity to make something interesting.

An important thing they told me they wanted in the music: landmarks so that the dance ensemble would know where they were, and so they would have an understanding of where they were in time. You can hear this in the field recordings that occur approximately every 30 minutes or so. Also wanting to give my musicians are break for doing something as crazy as this on extremely short notice, I also included a 20 minute section where the robot sinewave synthesizer from my if the thought evaporates (check out the release on Full Spectrum Records, January 2024) just run itself for 20 minutes. I told everybody in the band they could use this time to stretch or go to the bathroom, but nobody did; we sat there listening to it while the dance continued.

 Part of the performance included the dancers being sewn together in sweaters creating a large nebulous chain where they would pull and throw each other around. To blend the ensemble with this we were all wrapped in yarn that would be occasionally pulled off us as part of the part of the dance routine. See the pictures below.

 I'm sure this piece was a one off, and it will probably never be performed again. But it was extremely fun, and a rare opportunity to take my technique, take my ear and take my ideas and  blow them up as large as I possibly could, with full intuition with basically no editing, no rehearsals, and no time to change. This was a way of diving in to the deep and trusting myself and my friends. I don't know if every part of this is good, I don't know if all of the sections work, and I'm not always convinced by the sounds that I chose for my synthesizer set up, but damn it was a good time.