EDIFICES HOST SPECTERS

Abstract

This dissertation brings together eight musical works composed during my seven years of doctoral studies at Harvard, from 2016 to 2023. Displayed chronologically, they trace a kind of submergence and resurgence: In the pieces written between 2016 and 2018, an occasionally swerving yet consistent dive into a sonic world made up exclusively of straight lines and solid blocks reaches its nadir in MAM, which now feels as perhaps the most necessary work in this collection. stars from the earth stars from the stars and schemes that offer us a sense of futurity, the two pieces that followed in 2019 and 2021, respectively, grew out of MAM’s scarcities. In them, these newly consummated formal geometries move beyond their function as framework designed to enclose abstract musical material and, often sacrificing some of their stainlessness, they dare to carry the weight of sounds loaded with histories —personal and otherwise. Forced to dilate and bend from this weight, sometimes to a point of breakage, by 2021 musical form becomes highly tangible texture and magnitude, treatable almost as a physical object by itself. In the last three pieces, written as a sort of informal triptych between 2021 and 2022, this material is constantly and intentionally imbued in semantics, thus inducing it to wallow in auras. In A THOUSAND BRIGHTER ATMOSPHERES, a sonic world is quite literally hand molded from scratch, culminating in the animation of sonic matter. In BRIGHTER SUNS, what in previous pieces had always remained merely suggested becomes transparently referential when a block of brown and pink noise morphs into a field recording of ocean waves. And in FALLEN SKIES, the body of a piano with its lid open transforms into the open mouth of a toad-like deity who imparts divine knowledge to a choir of frogs. A large part of the work presented here is concerned with meaning and representation, extremity of formal change as teleportation, and my own search for a musical language that can encompass these preoccupations in a way that feels clear, constructive, and personal. It is my hope that, by organizing these pieces chronologically, a through line in this direction can be discerned.