Funktionslust

In college, I studied viola with a teacher who hewed closely to a very old-school type of classical pedagogy. All his students practiced the standard scales, finger exercises, and etudes; we learned the standard orchestral excerpts: Strauss’s Don Juan, Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony; and we cycled through the meager repertoire written or purloined for the viola: Walton, Bartok, Bach, Clarke, Brahms, and more Bach. At this time, my relationship to my instrument (a 2002 viola made by Long Island institution Charles Rufino that I still play today) was one of antagonism—its shape and substance, not to mention my body’s own physical limitation, seemed to exist primarily as vectors of resistance that had to be conquered. This notion of music-making as subjugation was one that was reinforced over and over: we all idolized our peers who could execute the notes in the score with mechanical perfection (to call someone “a machine” was the highest compliment). At one point I even remember a visiting artist describing Bach’s Chaconne as “Everest,” aptly capturing the rapaciousness of classical pedagogy with an image of heteropatriarchal imperialist conquest.

It was only by immersing myself in the music of improvisers and by studying the interventions of 20th Century experimentalists and firebrands into classical instrumental technique that I was able to finally shed the antagonistic relationship I had to my viola. I have come to embrace an approach to my instrument that values listening, exploration, and play—and it is this approach that I have tried to channel in this piece.

 “Funktionslust” is an antiquated psychological term describing the pleasure one takes in doing what one is best suited to: a fish swimming, a bird flying, a cheetah running. Its choice as the title of this piece—while a bit tongue in cheek given the virtuosity of the instrumental writing—reflects my desire to ground the musical language of the piece in the physical structure of the instruments themselves and the bodies of the performers. The adapted tablature notation is detailed and specific, but it offers the performer bodily choreographies and fluctuations of velocity and muscle tension instead of prescribing results to be achieved.

The process of composing this piece unfolded slowly and methodically starting in the Fall of 2018 and stretching through the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Because of personal and professional pressures during that period, I often could only manage to peck away at it once or twice a week. Tinkering with the minutia of a score as detailed and dense as this can come to feel like an abstract ritual of penance for an absent and unknowable transgression. But, as disconnected as such work can feel from the act of making music, it is nevertheless intensely pleasurable to me. I guess that is the other significance of the title: the perverse joy I get from sitting alone making scores—reifying imagined ideations, choreographies, and soundings.