FOR JEN TORRENCE

for solo percussionist and Multimedia

Program Note:

The core inquiries of this piece have been circling for quite some time, tracing back to my first reading of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, which Jen prompted during our first conversation back in 2017. We met that January in Oslo, Norway, when I was there for a short-term composition study, overlapping with our joint mentor Peter Swendsen. I had the opportunity to see Jen perform Peter’s composition, What Noises Remain, and was struck not only by her virtuosity, but by her ability to bring theatricality and extra-musical drama into contemporary concert music settings. The questions and provocations that emerged after reading Cyborg Manifesto have since been an ongoing thread in my artistic practice, spawning a number of musical and non-musical creative offshoots. When Jen and I reconnected at Darmstadt in 2023, I shared with Jen just how influential our 2017 talk about Haraway’s writing had been and asked whether we might create a piece together—one that explored threads of Haraway’s Manifesto, particularly–gender, queerness, posthumanism, and the electronic extension and mediation of the body. In doing so, I was curious about how we could continue challenging binaristic thinking and further theorize the cyborg as a way to reimagine identity as fluid, partial, and constructed—not fixed or essential, and inherently mediated by the technological world.

In 2020, I created Mx.Mechanica, a solo piece for drum machine and performer that imagined the human as a quasi-automaton—mechanized by the very machine they operate. This work laid the conceptual groundwork for For Jen Torrence, a large-scale multimedia piece that expands and deepens those inquiries. Drawing on Jen’s singular practice—at the intersection of percussion, physical theater, collaborative composition, and a deep engagement with queer theory—the piece unfolds within an activated landscape where the lines between body and machine constantly blur, creating a kind of cyborgian entanglement. The sound world spans a wide spectrum of acoustic and electronic music, incorporating elements from hyperpop, early electroacoustic music, glitch aesthetics, and kitsch-infused drum machine textures. Furthermore, the drum set functions as a quasi-feedback machine, with Jen’s body acting as a live filter—shaping, distorting, and mediating the oscillations between microphones and speakers. The score presents a series of choreographic and musical challenges: limb isolation puzzles, metric modulation exercises, and virtuosic glitch-music passages that push Jen to capacity within a reactive live electronics environment. The piece ultimately explores states of overload, fragmentation, and sonic excess—demonstrating the impossibility of the human body becoming fully mechanized. For Jen Torrence is not only a meditation on Haraway’s cyborg, but also a tribute to artistic kinship and collaboration, iterative inquiry, and the potential of performance as a space to investigate identity, embodiment, and our entanglements between human and machine.

This piece is truly for Jen, and was created through a beautiful collaborative process for which I am deeply grateful. The film was created via an analog, cameraless process by my longtime friend and collaborator Lua Borges, whose artistic voice and visual language I greatly admire. 

PRESS:

https://internationales-musikinstitut.de/en/ferienkurse/reader/twinnings/

https://internationales-musikinstitut.de/en/ferienkurse/festival/programm/twinnings/

PERFORMANCES:

Premiered by Jen Torrence at the 2025 Darmstadt Festival in Darmstadt, DE (July 2025)

Danish premier at the 2025 MINU Festival, Copenhagen, DK (November 2025)

US Premier on Frequency Festival at Constellation in Chicago, IL (February 2026)