UC Berkeley

To Form a More Perfect Human is a work composed between 2017 and 2021 for the Eco Ensemble in Berkeley, California. The instrumentation is as follows: clarinet, piano, violin, cello, double bass, two concealed musicians – trumpet and percussion – and a stagehand who appears on stage toward the end of the piece. The two concealed musicians perform on stage, but are hidden from the audience’s view by a screen and are amplified. This piece explores issues of imperfection, identity, and the impact of withholding visual information from the listener.

The first part of the piece represents the contradictory ways in which we attempt to blend in and hide our imperfections, while simultaneously holding a deeper impulse to be genuine and honest. The amplified trumpet and percussion, hidden from view, portray this first impulse by performing fragile textures, rendering their identities unrecognizable. The rest of the ensemble eventually joins with similar cold and mechanical textures. Over time, the piece intensifies and becomes more colorful, the expressiveness attempting to emerge and make itself increasingly vulnerable. Ultimately the tension between these impulses builds to the stagehand’s climactic scream, a culmination of repressed emotion and anguish finally releasing and resigning itself.

I explored this idea in my work Behind the Forget-Me-Nots (2016), for trombone and electronics, in which the trombone player is concealed behind a screen. The inspiration for hiding instruments from view also stems from the nature of the sounds themselves: they are both so intimate as to be inaudible without amplification, and unidentifiable when knowledge of the means of production is withheld. For example, imagine hearing a trumpeter blow air into the trumpet, periodically altering valve combinations to create starkly contrasted shades of white noise. We would not likely know that the sound was produced by a trumpet unless we could see the performer and their instrument.

Hiding the instruments in this way while producing unidentifiable sounds creates mystery in the listener’s mind. This relates to Denis Smalley’s notion of source bonding, “the natural tendency to relate sounds to supposed sources and causes” in acousmatic music. Lacking visual confirmation of the source of a sound, our imaginations work to fill in the missing information. Many of the textures used in this piece – both from the hidden instruments and from the visible ones – are fragile, intimate, imperfect, lacking control, without the refined sound quality of electronics. The result is more vulnerable and flawed, better reflecting the human experience.