FOR ENSEMBLE AND ELECTRONICS
We Petrify (2023) for ensemble and electronics1 takes on the pigeon-holing that often defines how musical labor is parsed, taking as its basis the notion of petrification from the Scottish psychoanalyst R.D. Laing. Petrification is the process of being “depersonalized” by another person; dimensionally-reduced, no longer a sentient individual capable of feeling but an “it,” a representative of a group, class, or race; in one way or another, the object of someone else’s experience. “One is threatened with the possibility of becoming no more than a thing in the world of the other, without any life for oneself, without any being for oneself.” (The Divided Self, 1960). Experiences of this sort may happen on a daily basis, though we may not necessarily notice them. It is arguable whether we can escape being petrified and petrifying others.
As an extension of conventional notions of petrification in the environment, natural processes of decay are used to illustrate a system of depersonalization at the heart of our musical interactions. In this setting, recorded sounds of glaciers cracking under the surface of water are used as a stand-in for the more gradual process of organic matter turning to stone, where 5,000-10,000 years of recorded data is simply unavailable. Unlike the force of a glacier calving above the surface, a sudden and impressive event, the use of hydrophone field recording techniques reveals a much more gradual and constant process of decay under the surface, defined by miniscule high frequency streams of resonant pops, clicks, and cracks that have been converted into an instrumental language using a variety of pitched and unpitched playing modes.
1instrumentation: [1,0,1(bcl),0/1010/perc/strings(1,1,1,1),electronics]
Louis Goldford // composer 