The Sound of Space Between Us III

Setting:

ORCHESTRA

Premiered by The Phoenix Symphony

Story:

Reaching is the reverb of movement...one of my favorite gestures to embody in composition and choreography, as well as physicalize through breath in playing flute. Like sounds expand into space over time and live on, reaches extend far beyond the body, elasticizing the moment for everyone in its range...or in its cage. As a multidisciplinary artist in sound and movement - composer, flutist, choreographer and dancer - I explore physicality of sound as well as how the body can be a sonic agent. In writing The Sound of Space Between Us, I aimed to make the orchestra an ever-moving body, choreographing the sounds that embody physical phenomena, gestures and emotions. These could be bodily movement - i.e. the swelling motif, pushing, pulling, embracing, touching and reaching - or psychological movement resurrected from and interlaced with memories, i.e. longing, thinking, dwelling, revisiting.This piece is the third and final component of a trilogy titled The Sound of Space, all based around a 4-chord phrase that is re-contextualized, mutated and expanded over the three versions.

I wrote the first installment in 2021 as a work for multi-tracked violin, where the violinist’s live playing is surrounded by recorded tracks of their voices from different points in time. Written during the COVID-19 pandemic, I wondered how I could bridge distance between voices and memories of two people who were once connected and now separated — whether through the restrictions of the pandemic, a broken partnership, death. I aimed to “sonify” silence between them; an unspoken yet ear-splitting link “heard” by no one else but them amidst shapeshifting surroundings and passing time. Expanding to string quartet while also keeping the role of the solo violinist, I wrote the second installment in 2023, which was the thematic focal point for a program of music and dance I curated featuring BlackBox Ensemble (of which I am the flutist) presented at The Clark Art Institute and Roulette. The third installment for orchestra consists of a number of embedded duos representing those two aforementioned people: the solo violin and full orchestra, the solo flute and solo violin, the “poofs” of densely orchestrated textures suddenly cutting to more minimal, sparse textures, etc. So not only are there many layers of dialogue, but there are also many forms these two voices take in communicating with each other.

The three installments are all sonically reminiscent of one another, but evolve in instrumentation, structure, narrative and movement. This trilogy is meant to reflect the course of a person in dialogue with voices past and present; a core body, mind and heart we are given in life that grows as we live it, but also channels and challenges our pasts. This piece is like shining a black light on a body’s hidden memoir; possessing a unique DNA strand of people who molded us, we live in the same body holding events from cosmic to microscopic, invisible to the eye yet tangible to the mind in our ever-evolving personal archives. I also drew inspiration from “Composition & the Elements of Visual Design” by nature photographer Robert Berdan discussing lines, shapes and space, which to me resonated with fundamentals of choreography. He states that “A line represents a path between two points”, and closed lines form shapes, which “can be visible without lines when an artist establishes a colour area or an arrangement of objects within the camera’s viewfinder.” Space is then carved from shapes and forms. I aim to sonically embody these concepts emotionally and gesturally in traversing the sound of space, between us and beyond us.