Project: Archives of Exile

We will sing one song

In 2020, as I was beginning to think about writing a piece for duduk, string quartet, and percussion, I happened to read The Human Comedy, by Armenian-American writer William Saroyan, one of those books I’ve had on my shelf forever, but hadn’t gotten around to reading until then. There is a beautiful small scene where a young boy, four years old, named Ulysses, waves at a passing train, and no-one waves back at him until finally at the end of the train there is a black man singing a song, My Old Kentucky Home. The man and the boy wave to one another, and the boy carries the memory of the singing man waving to him, he remembers it for the rest of his life.

Given that the man is singing about returning to a much-loved place that is also the scene of many violent and difficult events for him and for people like him, I imagine the author is intimating how for people like Saroyan and me, singing about going home to, say, Van, for example, is similarly fraught. It is undeniably a beloved and longed-for home on an ancestral level, but it is at the same time a very difficult home to actually embrace.

(My grandparents were born and raised in Van, a town in what is now eastern Turkey. My father never saw the place; as he was dying, he asked me to go there. I finally visited eastern Anatolia, and Van in particular, with my friends Burak Çevik and Dil?ad Alada?, in September 2024. The photograph above gives a sense of what Van looked like before 1915, when the old city was razed as part of the Armenian Genocide.)

The music of We Will Sing One Song starts with an exploration of the melody of those five words in the Stephen Foster original, and grows into a curious, deeply un-traditional dance, which releases into a percussion solo that resolves into an Armenian version of My Old Kentucky Home.

We Will Sing One Song was composed for Apollo Chamber Players’ 20×2020 project, generously underwritten by Pamela Auburn. Many thanks to the Apollo players, Matthew Dedrick in particular; and to Arsen Petrosyan (duduk), and Pejman Hadadi (percussion), for their generous and thoughtful ideas and advice as we built the piece together.

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You can hear the premiere recording of the piece by visiting 24 June in A Book of Days.

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And you can download the performing materials by clicking below, with my thanks for supporting this informal way of publishing:

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The Island of the Sirens

The Island of the Sirens (2011) is a piece about defective transcription and the failures of translation.

I started with a recording of a warning siren I heard in Plaquemine, Louisiana, while I was traveling down the Mississippi River in the autumn of 2009. I sliced the warning siren into eight layers of partials and then asked the computer to transcribe those eight recordings into musical notation. Because the computer’s transcription algorithm was confused by the sounds, the resulting scores were quite strange. I recorded eight women singing these transcriptions, and mixed them in quasi-unison against the eight layers of electronically transformed siren. I then made three separate submixes of the electronics, which are fed into three sets of headphones for the backup performers, who can be instrumentalists or singers. The backup chorus is asked to perform in real time what they are hearing in their headphones, a task at which they will invariably fail to fulfill entirely successfully, creating yet more quasi-unison layers that deviate from the actual sound of the transformed siren.

The lead vocal, a setting of Rilke’s poem about the impossibility of describing an experience to those who haven’t shared it, is the only notated music in the piece. It also incorporates elements I heard in the siren recording, filtered through my own biases and limitations.

When his hosts would ask him late in the evening
to tell of his voyages and the perils they brought,
the words came easily enough,
but he never knew

just how to convey the fear and with what startling
language to let them perceive, as he had,
that distant island turn to gold
across the blue and sudden stillness of the sea.

The sight of it announces a menace
different from the storm and fury
which had always signaled danger.
Silently it casts its spell upon the sailors.

They know that on that golden island
there is sometimes a singing–
and they lean on their oars, like blind men,
as though imprisoned

by the stillness. That quiet contains
all that is. It enters the ear
as if it were the other side
of the singing that no one resists.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from New Poems
Joanna Macy, Anita Barrow, translators

The Island of the Sirens was written for the New York ensemble loadbang, and is dedicated to the band with vast affection. The piece is part of my ongoing project, A Book of Days. You can see a live performance by loadbang on December 10th in A Book of Days.

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In order to perform The Island of the Sirens, you need a lead singer who sings this score, along with three instrumentalists or singers, who listen to individual headphone tracks and imitate what they’re hearing as well as they can. The piece is set up already in Ableton Live, and after you click the payment button below, I’ll send you all the materials you need to perform the piece using Ableton or the DAW of your choice.

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