this kind of unmasking
the setting:
This piece was written for The Rhythm Method as part of NYU’s graduate string quartet class.
the story:
It's so fascinating to me why certain people come into our lives, why they enter at the moments they do, why certain ones leave lasting imprints. Related to this, bell hooks’ all about love is a book I resonate with deeply, bringing love to light; how we experience it in our private lives, but rarely discuss so openly and fearlessly in the world we face as soon as we walk out the door. Among the countless noteworthy quotes hooks includes, I was particularly struck by the one opening Chapter 3, “Honesty: Be True To Love”:
“When we reveal ourselves to our partner and find that this brings healing rather than harm, we make an important discovery—that intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are…This kind of unmasking—speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles, and revealing our raw edges—is sacred activity, which allows two souls to meet and touch more deeply.” -John Welwood
In this piece, the strings constantly strive and reach for this touch; they pass it between one another in developmental re-contextualization, but moving both forward and back, as development is not always linear. There are four movements fluidly connected; they bleed, build, breathe and find new meaning in each other:
Reaching - Imagining
Heartracing - Beginning
Embracing - Depths
Reaching - Self
Though the movements seem linear - progressing from imagining love, beginning it, experiencing the depths of it, and revisiting that first imagining in the context of self-love - they operate in an oscillating cycle. The piece predominantly rests in a Feldman-like stasis, but there is much activity embedded within incessant displacement of musical elements, including register, voicing, bow speed and pressure, dynamics, trills, timbre, vibrato, glissandi and harmonics. In exploring how to embody text in sound, I aimed to italicize sound on a scale from frailty to warmth, using these various elements of sonic manipulation to convey that lean, that stressed emphasis, of spoken words. Though the movements convey the heart at its fullest, they also trace the threads of heartbreak that shape and reveal us in that underlying sonic bed of fragility, breakage, and realness.
There are many different kinds of love…partnered, familial, friend, self...and the development of what those mean over time and life lived. This piece is inspired by various stages of partnered love: newness and exploration, transition phases and milestones, the depths of all that love truly embodies and every moment in between, as well as self-love, which is just as much of a development with oneself. The first movement expresses that initial reaching, trying to imagine who you will love in life while those people are usually beyond imagination until you meet them. The second movement is more physically active, presenting a sharp contrast to the surrounding glassy blurriness with heart-racing intensity. The third movement is sonically wed to the first and fourth, but explodes out of the glassy blurry confines into concentrated, steadfast warmth and shimmer. The final movement is essentially an echo of the first - both being titled “Reaching” - but coalescing the self with how others color it; the lifelong shift between our initial untouched palette and where we come to be after having mixed our palettes with another.
I. Reaching - Imagining
Who are you? Where are you? When are you?
It can feel like a version of square one;
Trying to envision it in the ether, or starting over.
If the latter, there’s that feeling of rewind;
the demolition of two interwoven webs strung by billions of moments,
like spending years composing an opera and watching it be deleted measure by measure.
Then there’s a day - a person - when you realize nothing was a rewind,
but rather the step in the right direction.
I’d rather risk the web unstrung, the opera deleted,
instead of never forming one at all.
II. Heart-beating, Heart-racing - Beginning
We start as white paint on a palette.
Colors find their way in, either by our own brush or someone else’s.
Thereafter our words, thoughts, actions are newly colored by mixing our palettes with another.
Once the colors coalesce, they can never be undone or return to white.
Love can somehow be as much about heartbreaking pain as elated happiness,
but I’d rather be colorful, instead of blank.
Feel everything, instead of nothing.
III. Embracing - Depths
Opening one’s eyes to being held…
within laughs and smiles or tears and heartache,
(or just because,)
squeezing so hard the rest of the world becomes out of focus.
Only the sound of shimmery sunlight, adjusted sheets and intersecting arcs of inhale, exhale.
The world has never felt so far away…the moment has never felt more present.
It takes everything to leave.
Times I wish I could carry that feeling in a bottle.
IV. Reaching - Self-Love
The feeling of defeat after sobbing so hard that you feel your insides may burst. The most isolating sensation - acutely aware no one can cross the confines of your body and feel your unbearable pain. Curled up in a ball, all you can do is exist in the silence after the storm as an emotionally-gutted body filling space. Your puffy eyes blur the world, coated with a thick film of 24+ hours of tears; from a relentless flood to single droplets held back, and everything in between. Your body would give anything to fast-forward in time, yearning for a different day…
Sitting in a quiet room wrapped in the embrace of the snug afternoon sun,
cozied in a corner chair with a cup of toasty tea,
hugging yourself the tiniest bit with your arms slightly crossed,
briefly elevated above the everyday flow into a fluid plane of self-awareness.
Living in the same body as all those years ago,
with an irreplicable lineup of people who molded it,
and a personal anthology of invisible battle scars only you have the black light to,
embedded into every thought, word and action.
Silently acknowledging the greatest accomplishment anyone can achieve in life is still standing.
Far away from younger you, yet still living with them.
Soft inhales and exhales serve as a subtle reminder those days are buried in passed time,
living only in thought and people part of that version of you.
Sip of tea, sigh. Distant siren.