FOR TWO PIANOS, TWO PERCUSSION, AND TRANSDUCED ELECTRONIC SOUND

Audiendum Extimate grew out of a topology of listening taught by the philosopher, musicologist, and librettist Peter Szendy, to whom the piece is dedicated. An audiendum is a subject of listening, that “which is given for listening.” Extimate plays on the neologism “extimacy” (i.e. exterior + intimacy) and is how the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan identified the otherness of language — an otherness whose radical exteriority may reveal itself only in moments of intimate solitude. This “noise of intimacy” is barely audible; for example, it may only reveal itself in the quiet safety of home — when one is alone with oneself. 

Juxtaposed, these concepts suggest a correspondence between the sonic object of fascination given for listening and its possibility to reveal a split within the listener; that is, between the listener and their very otherness. The result of a meticulous process of transcribing sounds from the environment and orchestrating them for instruments, the capacity to harness acoustic characteristics beyond the concert hall renders these sounds as objects of intense fascination.