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Solo
2021
Electronics
Viola
- Program Notes
- I worked with Aditi Prakash to create this piece as a way for us both to explore the ancestries and cultural allegiances we each navigate personally as well as those that we share. The inspiration for the sound of the piece comes from my relationship to the drone and the intricate melodic inflections heard in Karnatak vocal performance, which is my original musical training. I often feel that drone has an intense gravity, always pulling the subtle digressions in pitch toward it. In “Voice and Variance,” I ask for the viola strings to be retuned so they create beatings around a central pitch G. The sound of the retuned open strings, along with subtle deviations from a central pitch, partially captures my personal relationship to some of the sounds of diasporic South Indian music. That only partial capturing, however, is crucial, because throughout the composing process (during which Aditi and I exchanged recordings of ourselves playing), I heard multiple different aesthetic impulses that are allied to different geo-political boundaries (like India, Europe, and the US, to name a few). Like any musician, neither one of us can clearly match our various aesthetic attachments to any one geographic locale without also tracing them back to all the others. I have no Indian influence that is not also American and European. I have no European influence that is not also Indian and American. So, I used this opportunity to express, musically, the capacity for a single body to differ from itself, but still be whole.
- Recording Notes
- Aditi Prakash and I worked together to record “Voice and Variance” multiple times in its entirety. In the final recording, some of those recordings are heard superimposed on each other while Aditi simultaneously plays the piece live. The notation for this piece is something of a time grid; it shows approximately when certain gestures should be played but does not give exact timings or rhythms. As the recording plays back, Aditi tries to play the piece as in unison with it as possible. However, because timing in the piece is intentionally imprecise, the live playing and the recorded playing will always be slightly (or sometimes significantly) offset from each other. I hear these reflexive offsets as moments of difference, difference that emerges from and through the same body, the same person. A single body always contradicting and deviating from itself, but also always pulling with intense gravity back to a central sense of self.
- Performer Credits
- Aditi Prakash
- Publisher
- ASCAP