the world may be on fire, but at least it’s warm

the setting:

This piece was commissioned by cellist Jamie Clark, for a project called “Hear Her Voice” at Stetson University. It brought together a collective of seven female composers - Eliza Brown, Brittany J. Green, Polina Nazaykinskaya, Anne Wang, Binna Kim, Liliya Ugay and myself - united by a prompt to each write a solo for Jamie reflecting on our personal pandemic perspectives in isolation, with our common thread of womanhood.

the story:

When I think of the female presences in my life that helped me get through the pandemic and all the consequent traumas - my mother, friends, collaborators, mentors, etc. - one of them was my closest childhood friend, Lindsey. We would have tea on our porches, talk on the phone about life late at night, call each other during the day in tears. During one particularly reflective phone chat, we were trying to find words for what the year has been. She said: “the world may be on fire, but at least it’s warm.” The world may be crumbling, exploding, imploding…but we have each other through the flames.

A significant life event for me that was inflamed, enhanced and colored by the pandemic was the ending of a partnership a few months into COVID. With so much lost in so little time, I tried to hold on, for I felt I couldn’t lose that, of all things, on top of everything else. But for many reasons, it had to end, and unexpectedly transitioned to working together. Life gave a flood of these unexpected turns, with “lessons” I fought with, and eventually learned. Between this and everything else the pandemic “took”, I underwent an incredibly raw and honest healing process, like being cut open in slow motion, that abrasively challenged my perfectionist modus operandi. I remember wishing more than anything it would all fast-forward. But even though it involved these throbbing growing pains I had to face head-on and accept in real time, it led me to where I am now both personally and in my artistic practice, which I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. I think of a poem by Mary Oliver I once came upon on Instagram, called The Uses of Sorrow:

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

There are so many more words to say about the days of peak COVID…a novel couldn’t do it justice…so throughout the year, I tried to convey all these experiences in sound, through compositions, sound diaries, field recordings, etc. I also starting journaling what I was thinking, feeling, experiencing. This piece is based on 8 diary entries - 1 per month from March 2020 to October 2020 - that provide emotional and psychological context for the sonic content. 

Though the cello is physically and literally playing in isolation, it interacts with these mental memories, the person in them, trying to access those times through them by embodying the emotions and experiences in them. In the accompanying electronics track, I use only 8 notes, each representing an entry’s month. I permeate and manipulate these notes such that it seems time has no structure…no linear beginning, middle and end. It represents in sound how I thought about these months and what happened in them; it didn’t seem to go from one to the other, and there was no direct course of progress. The months swirled like soup, with a frustrating cycle of steps forward and back. The beating between tones in the electronics expresses this strain of containing so much torment within one body and mind in isolation during the pandemic…the constant rethinking of thoughts circulating within stagnation.

The electronics serve as the constant of time, as warped as it may have felt yet continually pushing forward, sometimes with those “hits to the gut” shifting the sonic context amidst the fragile and drone-y textures. The “bell toll” tones passed between the electronics and cello briefly reset and return us back to linear time like clock ticks, before the emotions distort them again. I made a list of 8 emotions that emanate thoughts and phrases from the entries, all treated as action verbs to color the sounds. Each emotion represents a month, strewn throughout the score (not in consecutive month-order), contributing to a sense of non-linear time:

Crumble - March 2020

Distance - April 2020

Tangled Love - May 2020

Heal - June 2020

Touch - July 2020

Replay - August 2020

Sedation - September 2020

Hold Onto Moments Ending while they Happen - October 2020