Traces: Sarah
“Traces: Sarah” is a collaborative work with composer Tom Baker for solo harp with fixed media and live electronics using the visually oriented programming environment Max/MSP. It was premiered on February 23, 2020 in Seattle, WA at Kerry Hall and subsequently recorded in October of the same year in Los Angeles.
Exploring meaning-making through ritual oriented composition and performance
Grief is a universal experience as painful as it is common, a natural response to loss which, for most people, softens into acceptance with the passing of time. Complicated grief, however, is a debilitating form of grief in which catharsis does not arrive and the feelings of numbness, guilt, and anger are persistent and dominate everyday life. For ten years I struggled with anxiety and depression before recognizing that the source was complicated grief, brought on by the violent death of a close friend when I was eighteen years old. It was around the time of this realization that I approached composer Tom Baker about commissioning a piece for harp and electronics from him. He suggested that the work align with a series of his titled “Traces”, in which the pieces are created by exploring the imperceptible through amplification of extremely quiet sounds on acoustic instruments which are then manipulated with live and fixed media electronics. Despite my initial hesitancy of approaching this difficult subject in a work, I felt compelled to use this commission to seek some resolve and thereby invite the listener to join me in giving voice to that which is often silenced by shame and taboo. As Tom describes perfectly, “the intention of the piece is to make the inaudible audible, the invisible visible, and to show the inside to the outside…” In this way, the work is a cathartic musical artifact, a form of storytelling that leans heavily on music’s ability to describe the unspeakable. From conception to process to realization, “Traces: Sarah” exists as a haunting exercise in constructive meaning-making through music.
To achieve this, every aspect of the work was imbued with significance and ritual, whether it was gathering field recordings, sitting in conversation with the composer, or using improvisation to divine source material. In this way, I was involved in almost every aspect of the compositional process, a unique diversion that organically shifted the work from commission to collaboration and shed the stereotypical roles of composer and performer. From its nascency, the work demanded that I revisit physical places that were symbolically charged with the body memory of my eighteen-year-old self. There was one location in particular, an empty concrete well in a field that had taken on a mythic status in my mind, a totem that was emblematic of the complexity of my recollections and the ineffable nature of my grief. Field recordings that I captured from inside this well became the source of the drone which enters the latter part of the work, a churning hum that grounds the work in a sense of stoic acceptance as the melodic gestures in the harp become reanimated. In the video document of the work, the well also appears as a symbolic projection onto the harp in a completely dark room, an ocular conjuring that converges instrument, performer, and space.
The fixed media part of the work is comprised of two voices, abstracted and choppy remnants of my recorded voice in dialogue with the composer where I recalled past memories and events. Rendered incomprehensible by the digital process, the faltering vocal part gasps in a rhythmic but panicked breath as it struggles to realize these dark thoughts and further renders itself incomprehensible. Spectral chimes fade in and out of the piece, floating around specified melodic motives in the harp part like sonic phantasmagoria. The otherworldly nature of these chimes is a live effect, produced with a Max patch through a bank of pitch-shifters which produce harmonics in reaction to the notes being played, the randomness of their spectral response defining each performance as a unique and ephemeral invocation.
The utilization of acousmatic sounds, performative musical gestures unique to the anatomy of the harp, and other inventive extended techniques in “Traces: Sarah” had to serve as both compelling sound objects and meaningful narrative, an ideology exigent to my artistic practice as a whole. As an improvisor, performer, and creator working in experimental forms, I believe that extended techniques which aren’t grounded in any philosophy fail to articulate their desired effect to the listener. Through sonic explorations and improvisatory sessions, I developed three unique extended techniques inspired by and concomitant to the work. First, the sharp percussive hit of the opening; a sonic representation of pain that gives way to the dull shimmer of sympathetic resonance in the strings of the harp. This jarring sound comes from within the harp while the harpist is motionless and still at the instrument, a startling acousmatic effect achieved by placing a timpani mallet inside the soundboard of the harp, where it is retrieved out of view from the audience to hit the underside of the soundboard of the harp.
Another technique developed with the composer are the imperceptible figurations which first emerge out of the resonance of a percussive hit, appearing like apparitions in the upper octaves of the harp. These ghostly sounds, distinct but un-plucked, are attained by pressing the pad of the finger against the strings and quickly releasing, creating enough friction and resistance to produce a scintilla of pitched sound. All of these motives are improvised, the score only indicating a specific range of notes to choose from, further adding to their evanescent quality. They are the inchoate whispers of a story being told, setting the hushed tone of the piece as nearly inaudible apparitions evoking a séance where one is witnessing an unsettled spirit speak through the body of its medium. Out of the resonance of another pang of the soundboard, a new texture emerges as the fingers slowly inch and crawl down the soundboard veneer in a gesture that ends with the arms and body slumped over the against the instrument. The sound suggests a door creaking open, revealing an agonizing horror that is too much to bear, as the physical movement with its collapsing and folding inward implies.
The mystery of “Traces: Sarah” is that lingering quality, a soft sigh that is both question and answer. As the drone dies away in the final moments of the piece, the harp lingers achingly in the aura of what remains. The work is not so much about grief than it is grief itself: a moment of ritualized mourning suspended in sound and aura.