UC San Diego

I am Its will. It does not will. is a piece that I composed for amplified voice, clarinet, tuba, piano/ accordion, drum-set/vibraphone, electric guitar, and violin, electronic playback, and a choir of automated thundersheets. The following text will discuss this composition as a musical interrogation of the place of "voice" in everyday constructions of reality. We all speak, listen to, and channel physical, metaphysical, political, ethical, past, future, and self-referential voices as a process of understanding the place of the self in the world. This composition treats this process, through music, as simultaneously magical and malignant. From this conceptual ground, it uses the musical ritual to push the listener to both feel and intuit the untenability of subjectivity as self-presence. I will elucidate this further below by revealing some of my extra-musical inspirations and how these relate to specific details in the music itself