a door has no inside (2024)

for harp, bass clarinet, percussionist with transducers and violoncello

This piece was derived from a miniature composed for harpist Maaria Pulakka at the 2023 Darmstadt Harp Composition workshop with mentors Sarah Nemstov and Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir. This expanded, transformed version of the piece gets its name from a quote in the opening of Anne Carson’s translation of Antigone where Carson muses about the concept of a doorway as a non-place or an in-between. This led me to consider how doorways function as portals in our acoustic ecosystem, transporting us between different reverberant spaces, both between indoor spaces and between the indoors and outdoors.

Given that this piece was composed with a particular focus around controlled resonance, I was drawn to the concept of doorways when thinking about accessing and moving between different kinds of resonant spaces in the context of a chamber ensemble. This concept felt meaningful in my attempt to reimagine this piece as not just a little harp solo, but as a chamber piece with the harp embedded in a broader ecosystem. Many core aspects of the original concept - exploring expanded and augmented resonance and playing with the noise inherent to the harp’s pedal mechanism - evolved to transform these ideas into something very different. The transducers function as a counterpart to the harp pedals, activating various surfaces with resonant frequencies and playing back fragments of the original piece. The embedded recording of the premier speaks to the doorway as a portal, tying this transformed iteration of the piece to its first version, and in doing so, creating a sort of time crunch that is simultaneously both past and forward facing.

This version of the piece was commissioned by Ensemble Dal Niente and for premier on the Frequency Series at Constellation on February 24th, 2024 in Chicago, IL.