What Pain Calls to Witness for Mezzo-soprano, Clarinet, Piano, and Fixed Media
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What Pain Calls to Witness is an extended song cycle for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, piano, and fixed media, that contemplates aspects of disability. The work sets seven poems from Travis Chi Wing Lau’s Vagaries, which explores chronic physical pain through a cripistemelogical lens. Rather than presenting a narrative of overcoming, this composition invites performers and listeners to exercise patience and enter a complex emotional space. Like music, physical pain is a sensory experience often captured with abstract language; but the two can inform each other. The fixed media component of this work is comprised of predominantly vocal samples, joined in a “pain congress.” This concept is inspired by a line in Lau’s poem, “The Body in Pain,” which reads: “Pain can be the congress of bodies.” The recorded voices belong to me, two fellow vocalists, and the poet, all of whom experience chronic pain. This gathering of our voices in the recorded medium takes the incommunicable nature of our individual pain and transforms it into a collective, “mutual landscape.” Beyond concept and lyrical content, the experience of chronic pain is woven into the work, as my coexistence with pain impacts my compositional process. Like Lau, who uses form, line breaks, and visual components to express his real-time encounter with pain in the poems, I use musical form and deformation, varied harmonic motion, timbral morphology, and extended vocal techniques to express my pain.
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M.M. (Master of Music)