enclosures (2024)

Program Note:

enclosures, for chamber ensemble and electronics, explores a combination of reverberant spaces via custom reverbs that echo, mimic and allude to different sections of Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. The tape brings together a collection of convolution reverbs containing impulse responses I have collected from my home, environment, and most intimately, from my body. The piece is made up of three movements with live electronics that act as scaffolding for the ensemble to inhabit. The score unfolds in loose time, asking performers to activate each of these three environments using their own directory of flexible, composed materials. The three main movements are separated by two miniature acoustic “doorway” movements that act as portals, moving the ensemble between intimate and expansive spaces, from corners to cavities. Tracing the path from nests and corners to intimate immensity, I combine reverbs to transport and transpose the ensemble through a number of spaces, from that of my chest cavity, to that of hybrid in/ outdoor environments, grasping at both real and imaginary spaces.

Burial’s 2013 track “Come Down to Us” ends with an audio sample from a speech Lana Wachowski gave when she received the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award. When receiving the award, Wachowski speaks to her experience coming out as transgender through the metaphor of space and access. The sample ends with Wachowski stating, “this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, other worlds, previously unimaginable.” This piece is about inhabiting a space between, the queer middle, eliding the imaginable and unimaginable, possible and impossible.

Guiding quotes from Bachelard are listed under each movement.

i house and universe

[ i follow the line of the moldings Which follow that of the ceilings ]

[but there are angles from which one cannot escape]

[when the peaks of our sky come together my house will have a roof.]

ii intimate immensity

“Immensity in the intimate domain is intensity, an intensity of being, the intensity of a being evolving in a vast perspective of intimate immensity of the world, which they transform into intensity of our intimate being.”

“Grandeur progresses in the world in proportion to the deepening of intimacy”

iii: the dialectics of outside and inside

[...Silently the birds
Fly through us. O, I, who long to grow,

I look outside myself, and the tree inside me grows.]