Bocca chiusa (2025)

after Marion Brown

voice alone with electronic playback

written for Elaine Mitchener

Bocca chiusa is an attempt at expression and the struggle to perform it and perhaps the reality of its impossibility. Inspired by a quote by the composer and instrumentalist Marion Brown—"I don't play words..."—the vocal music is under strain and sound under pressure. The electronic part paints a disturbing collage, a distorted bucolicism, another iteration of impossibility: that of the idyl, its mythology, and the pollution of a romanticized pre-urban world. Musical citations of Brown's Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, Filipino folk music, and recordings of the composer's upstate New York environment play against samples of labored and stylized breathing and hyperventilation to create a grotesque environment for Elaine's voice to navigate. As a born and raised Californian living now in quiet upstate New York, I was inspired to take dislocation of place, the tension between home and away, and sonify it, creating an excess of interiority that matched well with the intense vocal writing for Elaine. My deepest gratitude to Elaine Mitchener for her inspiration as an artist and human and for this opportunity.

Written for Elaine Mitchener on the occasion of Wigmore Hall’s 125th anniversary in London, England.

Read a review of the performance in The Guardian HERE.