second body
“second body” is an original composition for solo performer and two harps with fixed media and acoustic feedback. In exploring ways to amplify the resonance of the inner cavity of the harp, I designed and built a pedestal loudspeaker on which the harp sits. The loudspeaker fires upward and directly into the body of the harp which has been sealed around the bottom to force all of the sound out of the openings in the back of the soundboard, creating a reverberant feedback loop. The live harp part blurs the boundary between performer and instrument by focusing on acousmatic sounds and evocative timbral effects. It is a sonic exploration of the underworld of the instrument’s body, a constellation of sounds usually avoided in conventional performance that exposes the ways in which the physical self in music-making simultaneously conceals and reveals a secondary presence through instrument interface.
In imagining the harp as corporeal with its own secrets, desires, and vulnerabilities, I wanted to compose a work that reflected on how performer and instrument mirror one another and the intimacy of that relationship. Curious about dissolving the boundary between body and instrument, I chose to directly emphasizing the artifacts that traditional performance techniques treat as taboo and aim to hide. The inner soundboard cavity of the harp is mysterious, a cavernous void from which the harp’s unique sound emanates but structurally is designed to be hidden from view. Resonance is one of the harp’s defining idiosyncrasies yet because of its development alongside the contrapuntal repertoire for keyboard of the 18th century, the muffling and stopping of resonance quickly became a primary concern in writing for the instrument. In experiments where I intentionally allowed the resonance of the harp to build up over time, I found certain combinations of tones resulted in different textures. These textures formed the basis of the fixed media part, which I then recorded as a single track of unaltered, acoustic sounds to project through the pedestal loudspeaker to activate additional resonance from the harp. Extended techniques that appear as electronic sounds were used to accentuate the illusory nature of the piece and my voice is the only non-harp sound in the entire work, sung and hummed directly into a sound hole on the back of the harp.
A convergence of sounds, both clear and indistinct, is magnified by adding a second harp which is played live and amplified through a contact mic inside the soundboard, creating an environment where it is difficult to decipher their origin. In live performance, the performer moves back and forth between the two harps: activating feedback on the resonating harp and creating non-pitched sounds on the other. The dynamism of the feedback part was created through subtle directional movements in the microphone as I open and close soundboard holes on the back of the harp using the same closed-cell foam that sealed the bottom of the harp. This unusual performer interfacing coupled with a complete avoidance of conventional harp technique provokes interesting questions about the expectations surrounding performance and the second body of the performer.