desire lines (2024) for TAK Ensemble
desire lines, for ensemble and electronics, is a collaboration with writer and librettist Lucy McKeon exploring issues of collectivity, community, solitude, intimacy, and queerness. Based on Lucy’s forthcoming book project, Longing & Belonging, this piece extends the books core questions around “the difficulties and discoveries born of the tension between our human need for independence, striving, and newness, and our equally important imperative toward community, relationality, and security.” (McKeon)
Consisting of six attacca movements with fluid boundaries, this piece places the ensemble in a permeable structure, where each player traverses their own temporal stream while simultaneously balancing periods of attunement and mirroring with other members of the ensemble. Embedded in the ensemble is a drum-turned-speaker through which text is spoken and sung in counterpoint with the soprano. Distorted and disembodied, the voices in the drum function like window into the subconscious, acting as a source of interiority.
desire lines was written for members of the TAK Ensemble as part of a collaboration through the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago.
Movements (all attacca)
I Molting
II Twinning
III A Coming Into
IV Desire Lines
V Be Longing
VI Ecstatic Flux
Mixed and recorded by David Bird at UChicago on April 21, 2024.