San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (cond. Eric Dudley)
Recorded in Herbst Theater 6/12/24 as a recipient of ARTZenter Emerging Composer Grants
Program notes:
In my experience, people tend to treat composers and artists in general with some kind of distance. "Wow, I don't understand what exactly that was or how you did that" (hopefully followed up with "but I'm glad you did")! The truth is, at least for me, I'm pretty much in the same boat. Even though I have more behind-the-scenes knowledge than any for my own work, I'm flying blind. This has previously been of great discomfort for me-the worry I can't articulate exactly what want to, that I will be misunderstood. In fact, all of this is just deference to a false communicative norm. We are hard-wired to validate truth through text, spoken and written, but just because something can't be validated doesn't make it untrue. Whether or not my experience is the same as yours isn't as important: the experience validates itself. In other words,
"The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali - it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.”
-David Foster Wallace, "Good Old Neon"