If I had to pick one piece of mine that I wish more folks knew about, I’d choose loss, found (commissioned and premiered by Daniel Heagney). It’s an especially relevant time to share some of the story behind its creation, given the recent election. I’ll tell this as two narratives, one based in technical elements and the other in moral ones. These narratives are loose and they aren’t mutually exclusive—we should understand them as starting points rather than complete stories.
Narrative 1: mechanics of craft
Over the past several years, I’ve been exploring different ways to realize elements of electronic dance music within a purely acoustic realm. Trying to create acoustic analogues for side-chaining in murmur, for example, has pushed me to reconsider how I think about instruments, sound production, and composition. I tend to prioritize musical elements like groove, timbre, texture, pulse over harmonic motion, and acoustic dance music is the result.
Delay
In loss, found, I emulated delay effects that are so prevalent in electronic music, creating an obsessive focus on cross rhythms that drive the piece. The rhythmic complexities make loss, found a departure from much of the solo vibraphone literature and a stylistic departure for me as well.
As we can see in the score, the follower is delayed by a beat at the start. The rate at which it repeats gradually increases over time, rhythms growing more complex as the piece unfolds. Like most delay effects, the follower has a softer dynamic, which creates some idiosyncratic challenges for the performer.
Timbre
Much electronic dance music involves manipulating timbre as a way to create musical narrative. In this piece, I used specific mallets to coax forth nuances in color instead of using extended techniques. The performer starts with medium mallets and eventually ends with a bass drum mallet. Dan was incredibly helpful and open to experimentation when we workshopped the piece, and it’s much better because of that.
Register
You can be the worst DJ in the world in terms of selecting and mixing but still have success if you strip out the kick, wait a little bit, then drop it back in. I use this trick in a number of pieces—clearing the lower register so that its eventual reemergence can become a truly dramatic event.
Narrative 2: when they go low
loss, found is structured as a large and rough A B A’ form. When I conceived of the piece, I planned for it to consist only of the A material. However, when I woke up the morning after the 2016 election and saw the results, I sat down and began writing the B section.
This section (starting at 5:20 in the video) begins as a lament before eventually undergoing a redemption of sorts, rising up and leading resolutely back to A material. There’s no extra-musical narrative or text painting buried deep within the pitches and the patterns—this section is me trying to capture my own feelings of loss and my resolution to fight back through a deeper social engagement. I put the quotation in as a reminder to myself and an invitation for performs to reflect on its meaning for them.
It’s true that Michelle Obama spoke these words before the 2016 election results, and it’s true that triumph narratives are common enough in music. Still, it’s also true that Obama’s words and the 2016 election had a profound influence on my thinking about this material and my shaping of the piece. My own experience of loss, found is inextricably linked with this event.
Now, these narratives and their usefulness are limited, and there’s an artificiality imposed in trying to draw clean breaks between the musical and the moral—they both contributed to this piece.
This does bring up a larger question for me though, and that is how can I engage as an artist with what is happening politically in this country. And the short answer is that I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure this out. What is the role of art in situations like this?
A few months into my first semester as a full-time assistant professor, Trump won the election, and I responded on the fly by incorporating social justice initiatives into my teaching, research, writing, and composing. Thankfully, Trump’s days are finite and nearly finished. But Biden’s tenure has to be more than simply the end of Trump’s, and we won’t see the change we want and need unless we continue to fight for it.
This desire to engage with social problems, to look beyond the accumulation of knowledge as an end in itself, this desire, in short, to do good, is something I continue to think about daily and to incorporate into my life and my work. loss, found does this in a very small but very persistent way.