all mass is interaction

“You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa…All mass is interaction.” -Richard Feynman

The dancer/choreographer part of me was attracted to the physicality of this idea and musicalizing it, that the fundamental nature of mass arises from interactions between particles, rather than from any inherent substance. I wanted to put an aural microscope on the active relationships between these particles that are so imperceptibly minute. I aimed to make a collage-like ecosystem of sounds building on different relationships between the players, which become stronger and more dependent as the piece progresses. The duality of past and present is threaded within that as well, playing with the idea of how particles can have spatial memory, remembering their past so that they never travel the same path twice, which produces beautiful, complex patterns. I composed this as a choreographer of sound, where I spent time in the dance studio first and constructed a vocabulary of movements from silence. I took those movements and extracted from them rhythms, articulations, and dissonances in pitch collections, aiming for the sound to embody a most visceral push and pull, emotionally and physically. —Annie Nikunen

Performed live at USC Southern Exposure New Music Series, October 2024