UC Santa Cruz

COUNTING (2012), for large ensemble and amplified female vocal soloists, seeks to inspire critical listening through the invocation, alienation, and recombination of varied materials and techniques from contemporary concert music, popular styles (particularly funk music), and "folk" traditions. The text in COUNTING comes from Jeremy Schmidt's poem "Censuspeak" (2011), a meditation on modes of enumeration and the "flatness" of the U.S. Census Bureau's promotional language.

In an essay accompanying the full score of the piece, I discuss various "alienation techniques" at work in COUNTING, including the deployment of metrical instability, ambiguous harmonic centricity, rhythmic asymmetry, thematic fragmentation, interruptive formal patterning, and the layering of oppositional musical materials. Drawing on a theoretical framework informed by analyses of works by Igor Stravinsky, Louis Andriessen, and Prince along with critical insights gleaned from Bertolt Brecht's theories of alienation and the "Epic Theater," I examine how these and other compositional approaches create a progression of defamiliarized musical contexts that stimulate critical engagement by "alienating the familiar." In particular, I focus on ways COUNTING simultaneously cultivates and defies expectations relating to a sense of "groove." Finally, I discuss in detail the "neutral" structural role Schmidt's text ("Censuspeak") plays in the piece.