Mythologies and Sound: A Composition Portfolio

Abstract

Before starting my doctoral studies at Harvard, I was primarily focused on both the improvisatory nature of music making and conceptualisations of sound as image. Over the six years I spent at Harvard developing my musical thinking, the improvisatory approach toward music making remained at my core, while the mystery of sound-as-image was the focus of my conceptual development. A leap was made in my music when I began combining my drawings with my music in the form of experimental stop animation. This approach, first attempted in Animal (2022), developed significantly, both technically and aesthetically, through the works Fabric of Sorrow (2023), Mom (2023), root (2023) and most recently in bluer womb (2025) where a complex polyphony between sound and image is explored. Yet, while literal images found a place in my music in 2022, for me, sound itself has always been an image –– sound can be experienced as a landscape, as a color, or simply as a line. While in the past this was wholly conceptual or personally experiential, in recent works, this musical thinking has emerged as a tangible quality of my music. While there is the literal image on a screen in many of my recent works, my conceptualisation of sound-as-image drove my compositional language in a new direction during this degree –– wide polyphonies of musical material exist in my recent works; compositional systems of material interrelation in which the form of the work is ‘opened’ as a space and this space can become a landscape which the materials themselves sustain and move through. This can be seen in my works with animation, but also in the instrumental works without visuals included in this portfolio: children's games (2023), flocks of birds flying out of her belly (2024), 10am is when you come to me (2025). Working on these pieces, at some point it occurred to me that my works have always been an expression of my nostalgic relationship with childhood. This nostalgia exists as sensory fragmentations: stories, memories, spaces, people, landscapes, sounds. As a child I would create stories, fantasies as a way to escape. Now, as an adult I create images of nostalgia to reconnect with what I was trying to escape from. In this way, the music I make is nostalgic. It is a translation of childhood nostalgias, a sonification of these sensory fragments, these images, these flashes of feeling. For me, my nostalgia runs deeper than a simple melancholy for ‘what was before’. Nostalgia is in a sense mystical. While being deeply personal, my nostalgia is also beyond me. It is a feeling that connects us to something larger than ourselves; it is a connection to a shared, generational, foundational something. It’s in this way that I believe nostalgia is mythological in a true sense –– nostalgia is a foundational, somehow shared story that we appeal to for our sense of identity, and, in my work, nostalgia presents itself as a work of art. By engaging with the individual and their myth, the personal and shared, my works become political –– as a myth and as a space, it’s my hope that my music is something an audience could take refuge in and in which their nostalgia (their myths) can be reactivated and, potentially, reshaped.