to lie down in still waters of erasure (2023)

for organ and spatialized electronics

Program Note:

to lie down in still waters of erasure, for organ and spatialized electronics, sets the text of Joyelle McSweeney’s “toxic sonnet” with which it shares its name. When I first encountered this sonnet in McSweeney’s 2020 publication Toxicon and Arachne, I was struck by how aural the text was. Brimming with implied sound, the sonnet courses with sonic imagery of obsolete electronics sounding amidst a landfill of garbage, or the hollow tinnitus ringing of an electronic tone piercing a nuclear silence. This sort of hazardous sonic terrain felt both intimate and expansive, sporadic and sustaining, simultaneously engaging issues of space, absence, resonance, noise, sonic debris, and pulsating silence.

Concurrently, the text engages issues of musical drama, following a dramatic narrative arc that is both somber and relentlessly lyrical. It is with these issues in mind that I set this text for organ and spatialized electronics, engaging an instrument that is itself tied to issues of architectural space and grappling with issues of temporality and obsolescence. Singular in its ecclesiastical history and construction, the organ is uniquely tied to the religious institutions and places of worship within which it lives, thereby containing multiple kinds of spatial considerations, both acoustical and theological. Moreover, the organ’s allusions towards religious piety and classical forms further McSweeney’s nod to the two in her biblical quotation in the opening line, and her larger formal allusion to classical forms in that Toxicon takes the form of a “crown of sonnets”*.

The electronics pivot between vignettes of noise, glitch and recordings of a eurorack modular synthesizer, to lyrical peaks constructed with recordings of my voice and saxophone excerpts. These lyrical elements echo issues of space and absence, acting as bodiless voices emerging from the speakers and furthering the unsettling apocalyptic tones of McSweeney’s sonnet. The juxtaposition of distorted and acoustic organ sounds, my processed voice, the use of artificial intelligence voices, and the singing tone of the saxophone-turned-voice-turned-organ all play with a kind of sonic uncanny valley, both provoking and unsettling the listener through the ambiguity and blurring of sound source.

This piece was written for Randall Harlow and the Skinner Organ at Rockefeller Chapel as part of a collaboration through the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago. This piece is dedicated to Randall and Joyelle, two collaborators whose craft and expressivity I greatly admire. *a crown of sonnets is a classical poetic form characterized by a sequence of sonnets all addressed to one person or concerned with a single theme. 

Premiered on January 7th, 2023 in Rockefeller Chapel by Randall Harlow.

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