IF I TOLD HIM (2019)
Thumbnail image: Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso.
For flute, clarinet, viola, cello, percussion, and live electronics.
Commissioned by Tura New Music for the Decibel New Music Ensemble as part of the Young and Emerging Composers Commission Program. The work was premiered at the Gender Diversity in Music and Art Conference at the University of Western Australia, Perth, on July 18th, 2019.
Full duration: 8 minutes.
If I Told Him samples audio of Gertrude Stein reading her poem If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Pablo Picasso. The text is fragmented in realtime by the electronic musician, and instrumentalists respond to the vocal texture with a semi-improvised rhetoric of their own. The work is an experiment in cubism and its potential relationship to musical form – gestures are inverted, mirrored, and fractured. If I Told Him is a subtle exploration of the gendered politics of the 20th century French avant-garde.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.