the future is finite for wind quintet and double bass
(2021-22)
Commissioned for the 75th. Anniversary of the Chamber Music Conference, dedicated to and in honor of their pursuit of communal musicking & bringing beauty to life, with special thanks to Donald Crockett.
What I do when the world stops:
Permission to really consider what was in front of me, in my future, but not too much in the future. That is too chaotic, too out of sight - over my horizon.
The way I see my future is an analogue for the way I know my past. The past is fixed, clear in some places, opaque in others, altogether invisible for much of the rest, and (like the future) totally beyond my control. My past is a metaphor for my vision of my future. In all honesty, it is not a metaphor at all. Both directions are finite.
I like to think about how I make things, to think about how others make things, especially things made by those who are not musicians - to think about how others do what they do (which is not what I do) with the hope it might provide me with new ways for making work. It is important for me to understand as much as I can and allow it to inform/guide a lot of my creative acts...and then to say "fuck it - just fuck it all!" and do it. Failure is closeby, in every step, at every turn. In many ways, my creative work is a metaphor for my lived life; trying really hard, preparing very intensively, allowing much to come to bear, and hoping.
I read Dana Spiotta's "Wayward" in the Summer 2021. It captures the experience of middle age, of being in the middle of somewhere unremarkable, of confronting the unremarkableness of one's life, the scary emptiness of one's future, and how the hope that keeps us (me) going is grounded in relationships, filled with grievances, and failure, and potential, and unforeseen joys, all things that makes what remains of our future something to look forward to.
I read Diane Seuss's "frank: sonnets" in Winter 2021. It's a deeply queer, beautiful unfiltered memoir of living in 1980s New York City during the emerging catastrophe of the AIDS crisis. The points of tenderness, of loss, of love, of rage and need intersect in ways that I never read with such piercing clarity before. Disarming from the get-go, Seuss's sonnets do what we all want the the most potent poetry to achieve: truth.
The score is adorned with the following two epigrams:
"In the morning, as her consciousness streamed in with the sun, a vision came to her, unbidden but not unwelcome: of the ends of things, the time between now and then, the world without her."
from "Wayward" by Dana Spiotta
—
"The problem with sweetness is death. The problem with everything is death."
from "frank: sonnets" by Diane Seuss
Video
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