Program note

Writing Vécu comme un accompagnement à l’orgasme was a difficult and important endeavor for me, and honestly it is very difficult to write about. It was the first time I had an opportunity to grapple with how I understood the relationship between my own body and sound, the way that I really experience music, and in-turn, my essential intentions when I write it. —It is, for better or worse, a fact that we are trapped, captives, in our own bodies, our inner selves. The perception of sensations comes from outside of us but we only experience these sensations within ourselves. We experience sound in many ways, or through many different boundaries: through our skin, our eyes, and (obviously) our ears. All of this, whether through vibration felt, gesture seen, or sonic waves heard, this is listening. When we listen, we ineradicably shape and relate ideas about the world and ourselves. In listening, we are not only hearing the sensations from outside of us, encroaching on our senses, but also to the associations triggered by those sounds. The automatic function of associative listening makes us remarkably sensitive and it was this sensitivity, and the intimate, private way, in which we are sensitive in our associations, being trapped in our heads and bodies, that interested me. I was drawn to consider what sounds would have the same level of intimate effect, but without being overt. I selected, in turn, a pornographic scene as the basis for material. The pitches and rhythms from that scene were transcribed into a single line. As I worked through Vécu the aim became not to recreate the scene, but rather to evoke a semblance of it, its resonance. And so the piece is not meant to transmit the experience of an orgasm in any literal way, but rather it is to arouse the subconscious associations of the creeks and cracks that underpin the experience of sound itself and hopefully provide a wholefully new and bizarre musical experience.