The trauma you keep safe is the pain you pass along/Pendant (2018)
bass flute/piccolo, performer, video projections
written for Stacey Pelinka
The trauma you keep safe is the pain you pass along, is a visual diptych for performer and flutist. If read biographically, the piece is a psychological study of how trauma lives in one’s body and how it’s possible for it to be passed along to another’s. Like a visual diptych, it is presented in two panels where the physical and sonic energy is shared and passed between the two. An uncanny relationship emerges and the observer is forced to reckon with its unfolding.
Written as a coda to The trauma you keep…, Pendant modulates the urgency and anxiety from the depths of the diaphragm to the claustrophobic aperture of the piccolo. The heavy music is thinned out in a kind of instrumental filter – by giving this music to the piccolo, it is emptied out and all that is preserved of the old music is a threadbare, frantic cycle that threatens to wipe itself out into silence. Of course it eventually does.
