F U T U R E S E V E N S N U M B E R O N E TWO THREE FOUR FIVE
The night I found out you were coming/My job is to water the garden
Notes
This pair of pieces turns to idiosyncratic "domestic concerns"--childproofing and gardening--but hopefully does so in a way that's legible to those without children or gardens. My father said the first one reminded him of Barry White, which I wasn't sure how to take. The second owes a great debt of gratitude to Mike Williams; his insight into what it needed inspired major changes (organs, singing) that, in my view, now define the piece. Mike, this is your "producer credit."
Text
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The night I found out you were coming
The night I found out you were coming I walked across the street for groceries, then fried eggs on the narrow stove in the apartment where we planned to live until you could crawl over to the drawers or the air conditioner, find a pair of scissors, or press a button and dissolve the oppressive radiator heat to draw us together under blankets in our sleep. Better that than finding a pair of scissors or some powder under the sink designed to break another nest apart and, like a good worker, carry it back on your body to the place where we sleep and bury us all. I seal kitchen cabinets with elaborate straps and adhesives, your grandfather builds a staircase gate with the cat in mind, but today at the doctor a boy who hit his head was throwing up in a plastic bag, and I wonder when our barriers against sharps and poisons will give out. My job is to water the garden My job is to water the garden. I root for the underdogs, the transplants we probably shocked with cold and rain when we moved them out of the guest room, hopeful that they could thrive in the yard. |
It's not that they're dying exactly,
except for the parsley, which is definitely dying. More that they're frozen in time snapshots of what they were on their last day indoors. There's a metaphor in this, I suppose, and I remember my father choking up in my dorm room and down the hall as he rushed away from me on that first day of my own transplanting. For his sake I hope I've taken root, that I tower over the child he left in haste one end of summer. My body in decline, technically, scientifically, I try otherwise to grow and hope he can see it as he takes stock in his own backyard. His mother controls their garden these days, lording over the flowers and herbs with an old watering can, while I take to the yard with a hose or measuring cup, envisioning late summer salads tomatoes in jars, to feed my budding family from the small plot of earth in my charge, hoping we didn't misread the frost charts, or sever roots while thinning out the sprouts we grew from seed. |
"What's your medium?"
Granted, no one really asks in that way. But still the question hangs in the air at parties and during moments of intense self-scrutiny, which coincidentally often strike at parties. Are you a _____er, a ______er, or a ____er? asks someone at the punch bowl, real or in my head. The short answer is that I've stopped caring, the longer answer is that I've stopped knowing. (Maybe vice-versa.)
This is mostly the fault of the faculty at Princeton, who never seemed to sympathize with the writer vs composer question framed as identity crisis. There Is No Problem Here, their bewilderment seemed to say. Work at the intersection of word and sound, or work with word as sound, or don't. No boxes for what you do. Boxes shut the process down.
I love imagining a post-compartmentalized creative life for myself. Write the words, write the music. That's nothing new in popular music but in "Art Music," more often than not, we "set text" because composers and writers are specialists and you have to pick a thing to do or you won't get good enough at it to survive bla bla bla. My work straddles a divide between "pop" and "art," (and by that I don't know what I mean,) so the approach to text feels particularly vulnerable to contestation and its attendant anxiety. Especially when you start speaking it instead of singing it. It's weird enough to sing your own song if you're a capital-C Composer, weirder still if your voice is dull-sounding and your intonation questionable, but what is going on with this speech, this talking? Further, what about this "accompaniment," which is how we often describe the not-text: it's…pop-y?
I started down this road in what we might think of as a "safe space": I read the texts and then messed with them, made them sound brutal or fractured, played with legibility, thought of institutionally acceptable ways to think of the project, like "using speech-rhythm to generate musical events," or "mapping text fragments to samples to reconstruct narrative through performance." But I'm not doing that in these pieces. I wrote some lines. Poems (I'll say it). And then I read them, and under and around the reading there is song. The result is that I don't know what these things are, I don't know how to describe them in a tweet or on a job application. But they exist, and you could listen to them if you wanted to. Thanks.
Andrea Mazzariello
10.16.13
This is mostly the fault of the faculty at Princeton, who never seemed to sympathize with the writer vs composer question framed as identity crisis. There Is No Problem Here, their bewilderment seemed to say. Work at the intersection of word and sound, or work with word as sound, or don't. No boxes for what you do. Boxes shut the process down.
I love imagining a post-compartmentalized creative life for myself. Write the words, write the music. That's nothing new in popular music but in "Art Music," more often than not, we "set text" because composers and writers are specialists and you have to pick a thing to do or you won't get good enough at it to survive bla bla bla. My work straddles a divide between "pop" and "art," (and by that I don't know what I mean,) so the approach to text feels particularly vulnerable to contestation and its attendant anxiety. Especially when you start speaking it instead of singing it. It's weird enough to sing your own song if you're a capital-C Composer, weirder still if your voice is dull-sounding and your intonation questionable, but what is going on with this speech, this talking? Further, what about this "accompaniment," which is how we often describe the not-text: it's…pop-y?
I started down this road in what we might think of as a "safe space": I read the texts and then messed with them, made them sound brutal or fractured, played with legibility, thought of institutionally acceptable ways to think of the project, like "using speech-rhythm to generate musical events," or "mapping text fragments to samples to reconstruct narrative through performance." But I'm not doing that in these pieces. I wrote some lines. Poems (I'll say it). And then I read them, and under and around the reading there is song. The result is that I don't know what these things are, I don't know how to describe them in a tweet or on a job application. But they exist, and you could listen to them if you wanted to. Thanks.
Andrea Mazzariello
10.16.13