Shelf Life for SATB Saxophone Quartet and Tape
Program Note:
“Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.”
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
A meditation on relationality and, as Butler aptly describes it, modes of dispossession, Shelf Life explores sonic transformations, playing between different iterations of core materials and examining how they falter, transform, and speak differently in relation to one another. The title, a play on the concept of expiration, echoes Butler’s sentiment of inevitable undoing, pushing on the idea that everything spoils and, in turn, reaches for a strange beauty in fermented transformation. This piece examines this concept of sonic expiration on a micro and macro level, from the fleeting emergence and decay of a single multiphonic to the precarity inherent to a texture constructed from a collection of these careful sounds. Sometimes turning volatile, the piece exploits the polyphonic capabilities of the instrument, juxtaposing noise, polyphony, and line in a set of slowly eroding chorales. The tape part plays between real and imagined, playing with the uncanny and pushing us to further question these precarious sounds as they weave, collide, and dissolve.
This piece was commissioned by the ~Nois Saxophone Quartet for the sixth installment of their Curiosity Series at Constellation in Chicago, IL.