I'm very excited to present Disparate Voices with Bonnie Lander for San Diego New Music. Considering the concept of this season's concerts- The Stories We Tell- I knew I wanted to focus on the voice: on the idea of aural history and narrative, and the capacity voices have to convey meaning in both literal and abstract ways. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for Bonnie and I to share the work we do. 

For years now Bonnie and I have benefited from a musical collaboration that spans our dual abilities in voice and violin. While we first connected over the Kurtág, we have also performed in other permutations of voice and violin (both singing, both playing violin). As an accomplished improviser with a wide pallet of vocal sounds, I knew that Bonnie's intense and communicative performance style would make a perfect addition to this concert.

The solo works she is presenting tonight are very representative of this talent: Scelsi and Schwitters  both utilize abstracted language, the former in abstracted Italian language focusing on vowel and resonance, the second in absurd, nonsense German. One could view each piece as sonic explorations of meaning and feeling despite how different they are to experience. 

In Scelsi's Hô, resonance is explored through a constantly shifting sea of vowels. As the vowels change, different colors of the voice are revealed to be the main communicative vehicle for this piece. Scelsi's works are unique in that they are transcribed improvisations that resulted from collaborations between Scelsi and trusted performers. The music therefor takes on a uniquely spontaneous and expressive quality that, despite its meditative and abstract sonic landscape, invites an intimate relationship between performer and audience.

Kurt Schwitters' Ur Sonata was written over ten years between World War I and World War II and exemplifies the Dada aesthetic that he is famous for. A composer, performer, artist, and author, Schwitters worked heavily with collage: taking trash objects and juxtaposing them into new works of art that are destabilizing in their oddity and humorous in their delivery. The text from Ur Sonata stems from a font test on a type-writer "FBWTZU" that became the nonsense poem "Fumms bo wo ta zaa Uu," a central theme in Ur Sonata. From there, Schwitters created and uses four nonsense themes as foundational exploration for this work that is in true sonata form. 

My own journey as a vocalist began as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. Playing the violin has always felt like a form of singing to me and much of my musical influences have been singers. It felt natural to vocalize with the violin- so I began to experiment, working with composers to develop music for speaking and singing while playing. This has been a special project of mine for the past bunch of years, allowing me to explore the physicalities of singing and playing, the timbrel overlap between the two mediums, the challenge of bringing two distinct musical lines into play at once, and the general search for my own musical identity.

While planning some concerts in the Midwest this past summer, I approached Carolyn Chen about the possibility of collaborating on a voice/violin piece together. We began discussing text sources and discovered our mutual fondness for the writing of Rebecca Solnit, who developed a philosophical essay from the sentence "moths drink the tears of sleeping birds". Because the piece was commissioned for a solo tour/adventure that took me across the country, we agreed that personal discovery, female stories and perspectives, and exploration were themes to work with. Thus Some Dragons was born. 

Carolyn's writing is beautifully intimate, delicate and direct. The spaces she creates allows the poetry inherent in each text to be revealed, whether as an invocation (Two dragons), a dark, quirky lullaby (Moths drink) or a meditation on the process of scientific discovery (Helix). Some Dragons is still being fleshed out, as I have yet to learn one movement and Carolyn is working on completing another. This current form will be the piece's San Diego premier and I'm thrilled to share it tonight.

Bonnie and I have been working on György Kurtág's massive Kafka Fragments for the past five years. Organized into four books, the piece consists of 40 short movements which examine the world of Franz Kafka through his journal entries and personal letters. From fragment to fragment, the tone moves from humorous, to contemplative, to surreal, the musical writing sometimes nearly impossible to execute. Kurtág goads us performers into the most extreme conditions, commenting on or trying to simulate Kafka's neurotic perspective. He is unafraid of the darkness within Kafka's writing. His own compositional voice embraces the wide scope of emotions that Kafka's text contains, pushing technical limits with technicolor expression. There is no possibility of playing this music "halfway". It is a full throttle experience.

Narrative here feels simultaneously disconnected and fluid: the many facets of one personality. The briefness of each movement demands that we stay present, focused on the here and now in order to take in the material before it breezes by. Kurtág's use of Eastern European folk rhythms and tonalities draws upon Kafka's Bohemian roots and his own Hungarian origins. In this way the piece highlights not just the inner world of Kafka but his external realities, the sounds around him, as well. We encounter a portrait Kafka's time and place: Central Europe of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

This past September I was fortunate enough to travel to Prague, Kafka's hometown, and visit the Franz Kafka museum. Being in that space provided me with a better understanding of his character and the environment that shaped him: a repressive father and a society gearing up for the first World War, with deep roots of anti-semitism. "My prison-cell, my fortress" provides a visceral description of his house, his inner world, the city of Prague itself. Kurtág challenges us to consider all of Kafka's history, his life and work, through the interpretation of these fragments.

In Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, he points out that aural communication was the first way to share experiences, before the alphabet turned culture onto the visual. Stories are told in countless different ways; but the art of story-telling, of taking an audience through a narrative, is a particular kind of imperative. Story-telling is a uniquely human activity. At this point in time, we recognize the non-linear aspects of reality, the dialectic between cohesion and disparity. And through this vein of differentiation, we connect with one another, in order to survive.

Many thanks to Eric Starr, Chris Adler, and all of San Diego New Music for the opportunity to do this program. Special thanks to Päivikki Nykter for the use of her violin and to Phil and Katie Friedel, for making Some Dragons a reality!