Poetics as Practice

Written in 2020 for solo piano (12 minutes)

Original Program Note:

There’s a lot going on in the world right now. On some level, I think this all has a lot to do with empathy and how we work with one another in a social context. I find it really difficult to know where to go with this artistically. I want to make a statement, I want to contribute, but to what end I’m not sure. My resolution for 2020 was to read more poetry. A poet friend Matt Morton told me that the value he gets out of reading poetry is that words on the page do not simply mean what they say: there’s something deeper there that we, as readers can discover and need to dig into to get value out of. Poetry teaches us empathy.

I love Webern’s music, the thing I love most about it is how much there is to talk about within every single nugget of musical information. Still, this is deeply emotive music, rich in the complexities of our own emotional burdens and joys. We never feel a single way; we always have highly complex thoughts and feelings that go beyond just what others can gleam by looking at us, or even in an hour’s conversation. The music rewards critical thought and a high degree of empathy; if you drift off you’ll miss the entire thing and the more you return to it, the more you’ll get from it! Inside Webern’s Op. 7 no IV there are several little gems of beautiful expressivity. I need not dig into the weeds of the theoretical/historical context of this, but I took these bits and worked with them within our own interests and contexts.

Now, I don’t really think the world really needs me to rehash Webern, but this is what has spoken to me now. I hope it will help me understand that we can look into, investigate, work with, struggle with and explore new ways of finding meaning within the complicated and perhaps ugly. I hope this teaches me to think critically about the complex and difficult situations we’re in now. I don’t know what to do with myself right now, but hopefully this is a step in the right direction.

Written for the 2022 Composers Conference, Contemporary Performance Institute, and Chamber Music Workshop. Kurt Rohde, Artistic Director.

On Friday, March 6, 2020 I played a show at MOXSonic, where we were speculating if SEAMUS 2020 (occurring the next week) would be canceled because of “that virus thing.” March 8, I received my acceptance to the 2020 Composers’ Conference; March 9 SEAMUS was called off; My Grandfather passed away March 10. March 11, I began this piece; March 12, while driving to Nebraska for my Grandfather’s funeral, the University of North Texas sent out their emails “extending spring break a week” in order to effectively allow for a transition into online instruction, which was then officially announced the next day. The 2020 Composers Conference became virtual early in May: by this point, a significant portion of the piece that would become All Things Seem Mention of Themselves was already completed, but it was no longer a question if the COVID-19 pandemic would be a thing for [quite a while]. In retrospect, working on All Things between March and May might have been optimistic; more an act of compartmentalizing a vast array of emotions than purposeful composition work.

The in-real-life version of the 2020 Composers Conference was canceled due to COVID, but they instead asked us to compose solos for the performers of the Contemporary Performance Institute (the performance wing of the conference). I wrote Poetics as Practice for my friend Jack Yarbrough as part of that new “virtual” conference collaboration.