Preparing the Audience
Preparing an audience to listen to a new composition is a daunting task. I never want to be too prescriptive - or, really, prescriptive at all - but at the same time, context matters; throwing people into the deep end of a challenging work without any idea of what they will be hearing also seems ill-advised. So, what is the right amount of information to give and what is the most compelling way to deliver it?
In our many pre-concert conversations, Toby, Imogen, and I discussed this matter and decided that we were going to stay away from written program notes in favor of a few choice words spoken directly to the audience. While this is by no means the right choice for all concerts, for us, for today, it felt right: it was personal, it engaged the ears, and it allowed us to time the delivery to suit the flow of the night.
While this is familiar territory for me, I decided to take an unfamiliar approach to this introduction and deliver a prepared (as opposed to an improvised) statement. To be clear, this is a level of formality I typically take great pains to avoid. That said, I felt like it was appropriate here both in terms of tone and in terms of content, which I felt had to be delivered precisely to give the right context at the right time - and do so without telling the audience what to think. I sincerely do hope I got it right.
The concert program, along with the text from my prepared words, is below.
The meaning of pieces is something which I don't like to discuss. To make a long story short, I don't want my experiences to dictate yours. Still, I can't help but wonder if sometimes telling a bit about what went in - not technically, but emotionally - might be of some use.
For this piece, this project, I think it makes sense to share a bit because of just how much this piece really is about something. That something is hard to explain. The simple - though wholly inaccurate - description would be to say it's about 'loss' and 'mourning.' A more appropriate place to start would be to say that it's about connections, ones that are lost and ones that sustain us through that loss.
Something I realized in my mid-20s was that grieving was really a process of rewiring. Our conscious lives, our identities, our memories (all the same thing as far as I'm concerned) are really just a giant network of connections, strands woven into one unimaginably complex tapestry that breathes and grows as we do. The pain of loss, then, is not the pain of a missing string (it's not there; it cannot be felt); it is the pain of the frayed remains, reaching for what is no longer there, for a 'something' whose absence not only affects the aesthetics but compromises the structural integrity of the whole.
That is what this piece is about: that loss, those frayed ends, and the new threads that slowly but surely stitch us back together.
