Somewhere, Some Place Else
Written in 2018, for alto saxophone and trombone, at least 7 minutes (see notes)
This was the last piece I wrote in Ohio; written in the summer of 2018 at Caiman’s Mom’s dining room table, between shifts working for a construction contractor, commissioned by The Wind Collision duo (Jonathan Kierspe, saxophone; Samuel Anderson bass trombone).
The original program note reads: “It is my goal with this piece to explore the phenomenon of beating frequencies, not so much as a statement of acoustical circumstance but as an expression of beauty and subtlety. I feel that relinquishing my compositional ego and passing it to the sensitivities of those performing and experiencing the piece became essential while attempting to mold the specific soundscape I had in mind. Still, I have tried to establish clear relationships within the structure, attempting to present a landscape that is not clearly defined. An attentive, imaginary acoustic ecology of a place that is only defined by the performers and listeners and that I have only attempted to drawn the map to. Perhaps another way of looking at it might be extracted from Salomé Voegelin’s approach to radiophonic silence. The non-place of radio is its site-specificity: in my living room, your bedroom, his car; it is every space embedded and reflected by the serendipitous silence of its medium highlighted by the specificity of [our personal and discrete] listening to it.”
While the passivity of my voice and the heightened register that I wrote this note is are both rather embarrassing, the nugget of truth here is that I wanted to write a piece that tapped into something different; something that I couldn’t and still can’t really grasp: the idea of space (or place) as the core of a piece. How can music permeate your mind and how can you take it everywhere? Later, in my dissertation, I wrote about the idea that memory is a way of experiencing music, and if it is a way to experience music then it must be a way of creating music. This piece does not accomplish the goal of “memory music” or anything like that, but it scratches the surface of an idea that has been with me for years: how can your mind take you somewhere else, and how can you put that down?
I use the term “aura” to refer to this aspect of a piece; the thing that stays with you as a listener after the music has stopped.
The ideas of painter and visual philosopher Leigh J. McCloskey, perhaps best known for his work on Flying Lotus’ Cosmograma (2010), a record I purchased on release and to this day love dearly, really hit me again in 2018. Leading up to the release, McCloskey commented in a promotional video for Warp Records that his technique is “about asking questions of the nature of creation [...] a creative feeling emerges [...] and as soon as you put it into words it dissipates [...] how do you create a technique where you allow that desire to connect and in a sense to write, but not to form it into something intellectual.” Returning to this several years later, I found McCloskey’s ideas not only stimulating in themselves, but closely related to asemic writing: a wordless, semantically open form of expression that does not attempt to communicate any message other than its nature as writing. Asemic writing owes much to automatic writing and intuitive creative processes, as well as later developments of Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, and Cy Twombly. What is seen in many examples of asemic writing is an evocative, non-specific, mimetic visual art in which the act of writing and reading is abstracted into an intuitive process.
I had no clear idea how to get this stuff into my music, but this piece was the first steps into a process that would lead all the way to my dissertation. Much of everything else in my catalog comes from here, even if the goofy layout and the clear influence from Cat Lamb et al. has faded into the background a bit more. Ya gotta start somewhere, and I had no idea that I would follow this all the way to the end.
Somewhere, Some Place Else was released on my first record, Love Songs/Duets (2019, Edition Wandelweiser Records). You can purchase a copy of the album from teh EWR site or from my personal Bandcamp.