Media
Repetition Exercise: A Play in Three Lectures
In Repetition Exercise: A Play in Three Lectures (pianist, performance artist, orator, interactive lighting, synced video, and enclosure, 2024),I investigate how interactions between text, speech, and music comprise social relations outside (Lecture I), between, (Lecture II), and within (Lecture III) ourselves? Or, in other words, I ask how a work of art might inflect the political (Lecture I), the emotional (Lecture II), and the self-referential (Lecture III)?
A Downward Gape into Mellifluous Structures of Light
Peer into a large subwoofer cone filled with undulating whole milk dynamically lit by surrounding light sources. And, through active noise-cancelling headphones, listen to a musical soundtrack interlaced with manipulated audio segments of physicists being interviewed about light and love.
WINDOWS
WINDOWS (three-channel video installation, 2021) is a meditation on isolation and our desire for connection. A three-channel video of windows in Emerson Voss’s living room overlooking Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, PA are projected on walls of a constructed enclosure surrounding the audience. Ambient audio and non-verbal utterances from a phone conversation are blended with instrumental sounds to create an immersive soundtrack. The actor in the film performs live in a living room set between the walls of projection.
Leading to the entrance of the enclosure are two lamp displays littered with items from Pittsburgh resident Caitlin Fox Murphy’s living room. Beyond this display are paintings from Devon Tipp’s series “Emotional Cartography” which create space for viewers to superimpose their experiences of isolation.
side-scroller
side-scroller (string quartet, 2021) is inspired by “death music” in 2D platform video games (platformers). In video games, sound is often triggered by a player’s inputs. When a player loses or “dies” in a video game, most often unique music will play, indicating failure. Death music in early platformers often had upbeat descending melodic lines underlaid with triadic harmonies. In side-scroller’s opening phrases, failed jumps can be heard followed by death music. The piece chronicles a player’s progress through a game world. There’s extra health to be found. Secret passageways to be discovered. And a boss fight! Plus, a little “game over” music at the end.
whereas
whereas (alto flute, violin, bass clarinet, soprano, and snare drum, 2020) invites listeners to experience voice within a liminal space between music and speech. In whereas voice’s attributes are separated, remixed and/or dissected. What does a voice without a body look and sound like (and vice versa)? What does speech look and sound like? How does music feel different from speech? What can music say that speech can’t (and vice versa)? Within all these questions voice remains central as the linchpin of speech as well as our first music maker. My hope is that listeners will (beyond contemplating these questions) feel these questions.
Dancer: Elenaluisa Alvarez; Percussionist: Eli Helms; Editor and Director of Photography: Connor Mangold; Producer, Creator, Director: Emerson Voss
Perspectives
Perspectives (percussion, dance, and video, 2017) can quite literally be seen (and heard) as perspectives of Brahms’s Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 2 in A Major. It is an experiment testing the ability of music’s artistic expression to be translated through differing temporal arts (film and dance). To achieve this, multiple takes of a dancer interpreting Brahms’s Intermezzo were edited into a video. The audio was then stripped from the video. A percussionist (unaware of the Intermezzo’s role in the dance) was then asked to interpret the silent video. The percussionist’s interpretations of the video were then recorded in multiple takes of audio and video. These four elements (audio of the Intermezzo, audio of the percussionist, video of the percussionist, video of the dance) were then inter-referentially integrated to make one video project. For me, the interest was in discovering and highlighting the translation of the Brahms Intermezzo’s artistic expression through the dance and into the percussion music by means of video editing.
Girl Twirls Hair
Much of the inspiration for Girl Twirls Hair (violin, cello, and piano, 2017) was drawn from conversations with two important women in my life. For me, Girl Twirls Hair is an aural, tapestry portraying the excessive value society places on ideas of physical beauty, especially feminine beauty, and its effect on those assigning value and those to which value is being assigned. Prologue creates a world for the narrative. In The Hair a woman carelessly twirls her hair around her fingers while an inconspicuous observer looks on. The Girl signifies a child’s journey through sexual maturity in a world that values her for her outward appearance above all else. Ids depicts psychological extremes that might result from a societal value system based upon physical beauty. Epilogue is subtitled final breaths.
Bounce then Sparkle
A dew-covered basketball bounces on wet pavement, comes to rest and shimmers in morning sunlight. Bounce then Sparkle (string quartet, 2019) is inspired by this dissipation of kinetic energy and play of light. Decelerating pizzicati in the cello echo a bouncing basketball’s release of kinetic energy while a glissandoed viola solo emerging from thick violin textures reflects glimmers of light in beaded water droplets.
