Family Vacating (2020)
6 hands, 2 digital pianos, 5'04"
When my sister and I were kids, we would play singing games together with our mom on long car rides between gigs in the summer. At home, voices constantly sounded out, and there was always a piano somewhere private, where everyone sought their own refuge in relationship with it. When I attend to my childhood memories of home, their architectures are equally supported by the spatial and visual mappings of the important places, the social dynamics with the people, and the pervasive sonic presence of improvisation and song. We have stayed close emotionally and musically into adulthood, although things have changed, homes have been left and lost, practices have diverged and reconverged, as have, occasionally, characters.
As I imagine it is for many American families, the holidays have become a condensed capsule of history and intention, at once loaded with the drive to return to the refuge of a nuclear unit, and the surplus intensity of this intention in the face of its impossibility. For me, at the beginning of a family reunion, there is often a sense of having not yet arrived. Even though we are gathered together, the currents of external and internal life create drag on the intention of fully inhabiting bracketed holiday family time. Compounding this, as many families do, we have our interpersonal shit that can get in the way of really settling into hanging out. All of this is to say that there is labor involved, beyond the considerable material labor, in spending the holiday together. It is ontological labor, working toward a specific state of being. Circling around this specific Thanksgiving 2020 were the anxiety provoking realities of COVID, social isolation, and impending questions about housing. One of the moments early on in our couple days together where we started to feel ‘landed’ was when we all got excited by the prospect of looking for a new place for my mom to live. We found joy in imagining a new house where she could live and work and host students and future holidays. We found a sense of refuge in the present by orienting our attention to a possible future home that could also contain traces of past homes.
In much of the writing about music, particularly about improvisation, in place of a score as the concretizing element of the music, an abstract appreciation of coming together of the musical, and extra-musical, actors concretizes the specificity of the musical happening. This is most commonly understood as a dialogic exchange between actors who are listening to one another and responding to the sound, space, and social landscape. The perceived correlation between situational dynamics and musical gestures gives rise to the sense of relation. The perception ties the elements together. The same ambiguous goal lies at the heart of audio mixing for live performances and recorded music. This ideal is typified in the colloquial imperatives that a good mix; “gels together”, “is balanced”, and “allows every element its own space”, etc… Notions of beauty and musical inspiration commonly emerge from the concretization of previously unrelated elements. This formulation is at the root of harmony in the greek, ἁρμονία harmonia, as at once agreement, joining, and concord, itself derived from ἁρμόζω harmozō, to fit together. The scope of musical actors has expanded beyond classical definitions of performers and audiences to include fuller horizons of perception, however, the crucial alchemy of joining heterogeneous outsiders, inside a shared space or conceptual framework, is the same epistemological housing crisis typified in the greek notion of harmony. In this way Harmony and Dissonance are two sides of the same coin, conjunct and disjunct, either way, the meaning arises from relational tension. I believe that the creative process that produced Family Vacation was the construction of an imaginary space of refuge, a resonant housing, built by the labor of harmozo, socio-sonic joinery that produced integral musical scaffolding.
At about 11:40 in Family Vacating, the end of the second movement as it were, there is a drastic shift in the music. I manually bagan altering the envelope of the instrument that Lisa and I were playing on. The most important change is that the sharp attack of the keyboard synthesizer patch gets smeared out into a rounded gradual swell in response to our keytouches. The sonic effect that I hear upon reflection is a sort of performed spectral spatialization. While Raina plays repetitive sharp clusters in the upper register of her instrument they seem to harmonically excite an imaginary space whose resonance is evidenced by the new harmonic texture in our instrument. What makes the effect operative in my opinion is the way in which Lisa rhythmically voiced the upper chord extensions such that they ring out like fantastical overtones in a constructed space. The two voices, mine and Lisa’s, on the second keyboard are homogenized, their seams erased in a way that gives rise to a sonic texture that is loaded with psychoacoustic spatialization. This new dynamic of the three of us laboring on our instruments in order to excite an imaginary resonant housing, conjuring it out of will and care, I think is a sonic echo of our group psychological reorientation to the idea of future real material housing couched in nostalgic drives towards refuge.
- 00:00
- 07:10
- 14:41
When my sister and I were kids, we would play singing games together with our mom on long car rides between gigs in the summer. At home, voices constantly sounded out, and there was always a piano somewhere private, where everyone sought their own refuge in relationship with it. When I attend to my childhood memories of home, their architectures are equally supported by the spatial and visual mappings of the important places, the social dynamics with the people, and the pervasive sonic presence of improvisation and song. We have stayed close emotionally and musically into adulthood, although things have changed, homes have been left and lost, practices have diverged and reconverged, as have, occasionally, characters.
As I imagine it is for many American families, the holidays have become a condensed capsule of history and intention, at once loaded with the drive to return to the refuge of a nuclear unit, and the surplus intensity of this intention in the face of its impossibility. For me, at the beginning of a family reunion, there is often a sense of having not yet arrived. Even though we are gathered together, the currents of external and internal life create drag on the intention of fully inhabiting bracketed holiday family time. Compounding this, as many families do, we have our interpersonal shit that can get in the way of really settling into hanging out. All of this is to say that there is labor involved, beyond the considerable material labor, in spending the holiday together. It is ontological labor, working toward a specific state of being. Circling around this specific Thanksgiving 2020 were the anxiety provoking realities of COVID, social isolation, and impending questions about housing. One of the moments early on in our couple days together where we started to feel ‘landed’ was when we all got excited by the prospect of looking for a new place for my mom to live. We found joy in imagining a new house where she could live and work and host students and future holidays. We found a sense of refuge in the present by orienting our attention to a possible future home that could also contain traces of past homes.
In much of the writing about music, particularly about improvisation, in place of a score as the concretizing element of the music, an abstract appreciation of coming together of the musical, and extra-musical, actors concretizes the specificity of the musical happening. This is most commonly understood as a dialogic exchange between actors who are listening to one another and responding to the sound, space, and social landscape. The perceived correlation between situational dynamics and musical gestures gives rise to the sense of relation. The perception ties the elements together. The same ambiguous goal lies at the heart of audio mixing for live performances and recorded music. This ideal is typified in the colloquial imperatives that a good mix; “gels together”, “is balanced”, and “allows every element its own space”, etc… Notions of beauty and musical inspiration commonly emerge from the concretization of previously unrelated elements. This formulation is at the root of harmony in the greek, ἁρμονία harmonia, as at once agreement, joining, and concord, itself derived from ἁρμόζω harmozō, to fit together. The scope of musical actors has expanded beyond classical definitions of performers and audiences to include fuller horizons of perception, however, the crucial alchemy of joining heterogeneous outsiders, inside a shared space or conceptual framework, is the same epistemological housing crisis typified in the greek notion of harmony. In this way Harmony and Dissonance are two sides of the same coin, conjunct and disjunct, either way, the meaning arises from relational tension. I believe that the creative process that produced Family Vacation was the construction of an imaginary space of refuge, a resonant housing, built by the labor of harmozo, socio-sonic joinery that produced integral musical scaffolding.
At about 11:40 in Family Vacating, the end of the second movement as it were, there is a drastic shift in the music. I manually bagan altering the envelope of the instrument that Lisa and I were playing on. The most important change is that the sharp attack of the keyboard synthesizer patch gets smeared out into a rounded gradual swell in response to our keytouches. The sonic effect that I hear upon reflection is a sort of performed spectral spatialization. While Raina plays repetitive sharp clusters in the upper register of her instrument they seem to harmonically excite an imaginary space whose resonance is evidenced by the new harmonic texture in our instrument. What makes the effect operative in my opinion is the way in which Lisa rhythmically voiced the upper chord extensions such that they ring out like fantastical overtones in a constructed space. The two voices, mine and Lisa’s, on the second keyboard are homogenized, their seams erased in a way that gives rise to a sonic texture that is loaded with psychoacoustic spatialization. This new dynamic of the three of us laboring on our instruments in order to excite an imaginary resonant housing, conjuring it out of will and care, I think is a sonic echo of our group psychological reorientation to the idea of future real material housing couched in nostalgic drives towards refuge.