IMY/ILY (2018-19)
percussionist, or performer
commissioned by and written for Andy Meyerson (The Living Earth Show)
When Andy asked me to develop a piece with/for him, the first thing I did was ask “how far” he was willing to go…physically. His seemingly cavalier answer was “as far as you want.” I knew Andy mainly though his work in The Living Earth Show (at that point I knew Travis – the band’s guitarist – more, though only through professional engagements which is to say I didn’t know Andy at all really). Though I didn’t know him that well, I knew him to be a committed player and even more committed advocate for new work. I wanted to respect that but also push Andy into a liminal space where the music making process was new and extremely challenging — for me as well. I wanted to create a piece for him that reflected my interests in bringing together movement and music but was singularly rooted in the body and visceral relationship between the three.
As a percussionist myself (if formerly), the bass drum was always the instrument that spoke most to me, personally. It was a body unto itself; skin, stretched across a frame, the bowels of the orchestra, resonating at the depths of any instrumental group, mysteriously grounding a musical texture with its spectral rumbling, sometimes unheard but rarely unfelt. But whose presence is also violent and immediate when struck.
In this piece, I treat the drum as Andy’s “partner,” an Other, that is gazed upon and caressed but it’s also a surrogate for Andy’s body and vice versa. Bringing together two different bodies in this sensual and physical way always implies a sexual dimension but not always so. There is a lot of gestural and material symbolism in the piece but I hesitate to say that it all has to do with sex. It has to do with power. With dominance and who has the agency to inflict and receive pain. Within the context of the composition, one might point out that the bass drum doesn’t have this agency. Yet to me, the musical instrument and its sounds are not innocent. The instrument, how it’s played, and how it sounds is couched in history and in a musical “Tradition,” one which colonizes and punishes its practitioners and one which I am complicit in and a victim of. I don’t really want to go into the ins and outs of being a Filipino-American composer trained in a Western European tradition and who participates in its community…the intricacies are implicit in that sentence. The deed is done. What I want to do with my training is to continually tease out the generative aspects of the problems inherent in that cross-cultural morass, I want to find out what I can mine for impactful creative work.
In the same way that the composition deals with power, I had to reckon with my own power as a composer with Andy as a performer. The composer/performer paradigm as it had become (it’s shifting now) in the late-20th century almost made the performer a slave to the music, and indirectly or directly, to the composer. This was always weird for me. Some strands of virtuosic contemporary music of the recent past is masochism, straight up. I wanted to make this blatant in IMY/ILY, yet I wanted the process to involve something that is often absent in contemporary music performance-practice yet is so foundational to physical relationships – consent. “As far as I want[ed]” wasn’t carte blanche for me to inflict untold harm onto Andy. When he strikes himself and hyperventilates or holds his breath to sing to the point of exhaustion, I ask him to do it because we’ve both agreed that it adds something of artistic or aesthetic merit to the piece. I was always ready to change something if we didn’t both commit. Why I chose the “musical” actions I did are because of my tastes and my background. Andy got to know those things as the piece was written, as we got to know each other over the course of many breakfasts and many rehearsals, traveling together, and working closely. In essence, developing trust. My personal, cultural, and musical background and my tastes are all very physical and very violent. That is my inheritance. I needed Andy’s consent before that became his inheritance also – as the performer of a piece of music from a composer. Andy asked me an interesting question recently when I wondered what to write here – “what does it mean that you, the audience, then are participating in the inheritance.” You were not a part of this long conversation about consent. I confess, I don’t have the answer. So at this point, you have my permission to leave.
When I speak of violence, I also speak of trauma – that subterranean current of dread that passes from one to another by sheer force over time, sometimes generations. I don’t know what to say about it other than I don’t think I can ever get rid of mine. There are a lot of psychotherapeutic ways to deal with it, some more accepted than others, but they all seem a little inept at teaching me how to get rid of it. But some are more helpful than others in helping me deal with it. Repetition is a common and useful rhetorical and musical device in terms of memory and defining form. It’s also incredible at cementing a difficult memory into our bodies. If we relive something terrible, repeatedly, it’s unclear whether it remains more securely or whether it will eventually leave us. Lately, I’ve just been trying to find healthiER ways of integrating it (or at least try to). One of these ways is to ritualize the repetition in musical form. I’m never after catharsis or transformation in my music but I often try to find some kind of release. Both in the score, measure to measure, and in the process of making music.
Part of that process is meeting new performers, simpatico with my musical desires and experiments. By witnessing this performance and reading about its creation here, you’ve also watched the development of friendship. Now, Andy and I play on the same ultimate frisbee team. This piece is for him.
