In almost all aspects of my life, I am deeply troubled by and averse to change, especially when it comes to my personal life and the people and environments that I hold close to me. With this in mind, it struck me as deeply funny that slowing down changes is something I’ve had to consciously and deliberately work on in my music and performance over the last year. You would think that if the thought of moving addresses or adjusting my social environment is enough to keep me up at night, that I could apply that same anxiety usefully to delaying a chord change. Alas, life is not always so kind or intuitively coherent.
Speaking to this, after a particularly chaotic duo performance I played at the now defunct Pioneer one night in July, my friend John McCormick said to me, “You know, you could always not play.” And despite the immediate feeling of wanting to slug him in the arm, I ended up thinking about that comment for weeks afterwards. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard a similar sentiment, but it hit me as a hard reminder of patience needed in music (and life for that matter).
I performed Music for a Public Square a couple months later, having taken some time to build in ways to really slow down and let ideas live without immediately trying to manipulate them. Being a solo performer using electronics, there is a compulsion to always be doing something on stage, to at least make a good faith effort at performance as a physical act, but time feels different to the one performing than it does for the audience. A short silence can feel like an eternity, and, by the same token, letting something repeat without adding a layer or changing it in some way can feel like a long time to stay passive in front of people.
In terms of this piece, rather than embrace silence as a literal way of not playing, I chose to work with some drones as a sort of safety net that could continue indefinitely without my intervention. Doing so allowed me the room to take stock of the arc of the piece in real time without having to actually take any action, and allowed me to find my normal baseline perception of time passing that can slip away during the excitement of improvising. Emotionally, this piece was directly tied to the time slot and venue in which I was performing, namely on my lunch break, in the middle of downtown, in a quiet corner of Lugar Plaza, which I had helped to start activating with arts events earlier in 2019. There is a sense of yearning in the pacing and timbral aspects of the piece that I think reflect the sense of undiscovered possibilities I have when thinking about that space. I also have to believe that the tone of the piece reflects some of the hopefulness I was feeling as the warm months were winding down. (This performance was in October, but it was still well over 70 degrees here at the time.)
I got a message today from my friend Jordan in California, and apparently I have won a rare endorsement from Nora the dog. You can see her testimonial below and find Music for a Public Square at the bottom of this page.