The Response Project

PROGRAM NOTES

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something, shimmering by Forrest Pierce

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"Though we strongly associate the knowing and experience of the body, the mind, and the heart with our identity, the taste of our unique inner experience is mostly hidden from fellow humans. I’ve come to think of art as a gate through which the big country of our interior life can enter into the shared spaces we inhabit with others. Nothing in here is transferrable, but it may be translatable. For me, music is uniquely effective as a carrier of the emotional, numinous, imaginal, and kinesthetic knowing of our lives.

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something, shimmering is an incantation for translating some experienced, inner wisdom to the listener through imagination, emotion, and physical being. It attempts some unusual things that are absolutely usual to this pianist or this composer, and sometimes, both: it makes the tremor of a suspended hand and wrist audible, visible, and beautiful; It colors a Sufi zikr chant with the tang of tinnitus, and marks the passage of time with the clicking and popping of a leaking and damaged spine; it shakes and flutters with the heart’s exquisite longing for reunion, through microtonal inflection, stabbing thunder, and the immense breathing of a silent, unseen companion. Somewhere in an imagined prairie of cottonwood leaves, trembling, it could be that something, shimmering affirms the inherent multiplicity of human experience through the fundamental unity of human existence." - Forrest Pierce

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Where Was I? by Hanna Benn

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This piece is a reflective journey through memories, meditating on the emergence and morphing of one's own self-concept and self-confidence. The composer wrote the following poem as an inscription for the piece:

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At the heart
In the center
There is a mind
A body
An instrument ofLOVE
Where Was I?

                     — HERE

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Affection by Molly Joyce

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"Affection is about holding grace for a disorder or disability rather than resenting it, and allowing those affections to move one in a progressive direction. Additionally, I tried to involve the feeling of trying to catch phantom movements within physical disability, and the push and pull of involuntary movement within one's body, through the push and pull of the right and left hand interaction throughout." - Molly Joyce

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Sunflower by Stephanie Ann Boyd

 

"When Brianna Matzke asked if I might be interested in joining her Tremor Response Project, my reaction was visceral. See, I too am a citizen of the land of invisible disabilities and have been for almost two decades. I don't tell many people about it, but to myself I say "my chronic pain is my kryptonite" and at this point in my life I constantly am made aware of ways in which becoming a familiar of agony and all that comes with it has made me a better human, a more thoughtful collaborator, and a kinder caretaker to my own corners of the planet–which thankfully now more fully includes my body.

 

Brianna said "what flower should our piece be about?" and I said "I think the flower will come to you" and sure enough, in an hour or two after our initial conversation, Brianna texted me a link to an article talking about how the sunflower had been made an international symbol for hidden disabilities. I choked up. My own pain journey has been such an incredibly solitary one–and here it felt like someone at some point had noticed me and understood me and decided to do something nice: setting aside a flower just for all of us. And as I walked past the sunflowers in my neighborhood later that evening, their tall, tall bodies—so much taller than me—felt like their own kind of warm protection from the most difficult parts of my life's story.

 

In this new era where hidden disabilities are being brought into the mainstream of consciousness as we one by one feel safe enough to disclose our various kryptonite assignments–this new feeling of belonging hushes away a good bit of the difficulty we face, replacing that solitude, on increasing occasion, with community.

 

Thanks to their heliotropic nature, young sunflowers move their heads to face the sun as it rises in the east and arcs throughout the day to the west. When it’s cloudy? I’ve heard that they turn their heads to face each other.

 

So here we have Sunflower from Flower Catalog: a short sojourn that begins in the warm, solid hug of the sunflower’s gargantuan body and ends in a fast-moving blazing brilliance of sunlight and sparkle.

 

Sunflower is *also* an ode to the process of the continual conscious work and striving and trying and learning and all these bits of forward momentum that our kryptonites– in their baffling magic–somehow end up teaching us." - Stephanie Ann Boyd

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pneuma by Matthew Evan Taylor

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This piece emerges from Taylor's breath-centered musical practice, a framework he calls “AfroPneumaism.” This practice is centered in Black liberation, accessibility, and radical rest. He writes, "pneuma is the 7th of my AfroPneumaism pieces. As such the central instruction is simple: stay silent and listen on the inhale; express make noise on the exhale. The breath is loosely defined as “normal”: not a fast athletic breath nor the anticipatory inhale musicians often use, but neither is it meant to be the breathing found in mindfulness practice. All gestures are connected to the breath."

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From the beginning to… by Adeliia Faizullina

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"Writing music for Brianna Matzke has been an inspiring journey, and I'm grateful for the experience. Last summer, during my residency with Longleash Ensemble in Kentucky, I found solace in my long walks amidst the rural landscape, surrounded by the sonic vibrations of nature and thinking about my project for Brianna and her neurological tremor condition. I came to the sudden realization that everything around us tremors and vibrates in our world. I also couldn’t help but think of this in connection to string theory, a concept I had learned through astrophysics podcasts.
 

"From the beginning to..." reflects my fascination with string theory and its connection to music. The piece explores the idea of the world's inception, represented in the piece by vibrations of the fundamental harmonic in the strings, and echoed in the piano. As the keys resonate and pulse, the composition invites contemplation of our collective journey and the uncertainty of the future. Brianna Matzke’s neurological tremor condition is seen as a source of inspiration for the composition, serving as an important reminder of the intrinsic link between the vibrational tremors of music and the vibrational nature of our existence." - Adeliia Faizullina