Inside Out
Last weekend, hunched at the counter over a slice of leftover pizza, an offhand reference to my long-standing familiarity with “panting sound bites” surfaced. The reference landed with a sad, unnerving thud. For a moment I considered explaining the quote and filing in the context, but the conversation carried on, and the moment passed.
This weekend, as I sat at the counter yet again, over a slice of leftover pizza, I wondered why that quote surfaced. I replayed the whole thing in my mind, first with a wince, then a kind of cosmic amusement. Some references need the glue of shared experience to have any hope of sticking the landing. Inside jokes are no fun from the outside. This isn’t even a joke, really, just another entry in the growing ledger of tiny mortifications accruing with compounding interest.
Years ago, a young singer and violinist named Caroline was visiting home. Over a cup of coffee, she sat staring out at Albemarle Sound, pondering how one cannot reach back into the past, cannot know the future, and sometimes must live in the present without being able to hold the object of desire.
She began sketching musical notation to capture this feeling, knowing only that she needed this indefinable, raw, guttural noise to emerge out of chaos that would suddenly snap into a chord. Ultimately, these first measures she wrote ended up becoming the climactic 90 seconds of the whole piece. The final sounds hang in the air, not resolving, but continuing.
“The detail of the pattern is movement.”
T.S. Eliot wrote that “the detail of the pattern is movement,” meaning that life is shaped by motion, action, choice. From a distance life looks like a pattern, but up close it is nothing but motion, and we are usually too busy moving to notice the pattern we are making. Partita for 8 Voices is built on this idea and uses it like a mantra. The piece became a four-movement vocal work set to Baroque dance forms, performed using only the human voice as instrument, exploring language, sound, and the strange, communal business of making meaning together.
Now, I can only imagine, but after she completed the Partita I daresay she felt a kind of bodily release, almost a weakness, as if the notes siphoned something from her. I bet her attention almost immediately rerouted back to the particulars of work, bills, little cares that fill up the hours before again filled with manic compulsion, demanding to be exorcised through some medium.
I imagine she thought the piece would recede into the background noise of creative history. It was probably quite a shock when the phone call came. She was informed that she was nominated for a Pulitzer prize and won. She won the Pulitzer for music. She was thirty years old.
Thirty.
The youngest ever to win this award.
Incredible.
My family, bless their sense of adventure, had not escaped the inevitable: Of course I subjected them to the piece in full. I had not listened to it myself, not in its entirety, not without the protective abstraction of earbuds and public background noise.
Unfortunately, the Courante movement features a chorus of eight voices producing what can only be described as rhythmic, primal panting. Sharp inhalations and exhalations build in intensity until they are apparently too uncomfortable for some to hear in a group setting or shared experience. Only my sibling, my kindred spirit in this realm of artistry, showed appreciation for the avant-garde. The panting is now yet another thing I can’t seem to live down.
Anyway, not so much a recommendation as a clarifying statement. The turning of an inside joke out, and now it is yours, too. I’d turn it all inside out. I suppose here is as good a place to start as any.