WHY LIE? – 100+ flexible little pieces

Back in 2010 I put down a bunch of modular little musical ideas.  100 seemed like a nice number, so I made 100.  I made a few more in 2012 because these little music modules were a lot of fun to work with.  They’re flexible little scores.  Maybe you’ll find them interesting or useful.  Click on each number to see an enlarged version of the score.  The idea is that they can be read in any way, but I’ve laid out a few suggestions of good places to start based on the experiences of rehearsing these pieces in 2011 with seven stellar co-pilots (Zara Acosta, Michael Hurder, Chris Kedzie, Ian Munro, Ellen O’Meara, Paul Pinto, & Aliza Simons). For more thoughts on what all of this is/might be, please see below.

¡TO VIEW THE SCORE FOR EACH PIECE, CLICK THE NUMBER IN THE LEFT COLUMN!

The initial series of WHY LIE? pieces was capped at 100, but since completing the first batch, I’ve written a few more in late 2011 and early 2012. Here they are:

History of presenting WHY LIE? in public:

performance 5/22/11, in and around Prospect Park

performance 6/11 as part of FIGMENT NYC on Governor’s Island

performance 6/21 as part of Make Music NY

presentation as part of Panoply Lab’s Conference of Works at Grace Space, 12/12/11

performance 5/25/13 with thingNY, some pieces rehearsed, some ad hoc, as well as many guest musicians and dancers at fidget space, Philadelphia, PA

…in addition to numerous other performances of single pieces by Sweat Lodge, thingNY, and Why Lie? (the band)

Some background from 2011, when these piece were first collected:
I don’t really hear new sounds in my head. I used to think that there was something wrong with me. I thought notation was part of the problem – the system I inherited wasn’t well suited to what I wanted to say with sound, and so I couldn’t properly bring the ideas from my brain to the outside world. Turns out I’ve been overlooking the ideas that have been coming out all along – I’ve stopped blaming my tools and decided to make the most of them. This project comes from a desire to see notation, and more generally the communication between composer and performer, as a broader vehicle for generating musical interactions than I had previously allowed myself to see. As such, it basks in multivalence, which leads to overflowing solutions, inconsistency, and murkiness (all positives here). Notation is used not as a concise way to move the ideas in my head to the physical gestures of performers, but as a generative medium in and of itself – the place where happy accidents turn into art. Clarity is never an end goal – the ability to show formal ideas through vastly divergent approaches, and in the process derive the most stimulating sounds and the most responsive group possible, are the goals.

When I have written notes in this piece, they are not tied to specific timbres, pitch classes, or harmonies per se. They are merely relative place markers within the language of whoever is playing the piece at that moment. Certainly there are solutions I would tend towards, but here I am making a case for openness and flexibility. I am in no way abdicating responsibility or asking the performer to do everything herself. I am positing that the pieces enclosed are sturdy enough that they can be stimulating, that they can be useful, in a huge variety of contexts – not that they will always be interesting, but that it’s worth reinvestigating them until an interesting solution is reached.

Some thoughts on how to approach this material:
Each of these pieces was written to function independently. Each has its own internal logic and can stand up to a variety of different interpretations. Alongside these internal logics is the imbrication of each piece into the larger framework of all the other pieces; concepts introduced in earlier pieces play out in later pieces (the numbering represents chronological order of creation to make this clearer). In other words, this is a series of 100 individual pieces, but each piece becomes much more interesting when played in the context of the other 99 pieces. The ebb and flow of concepts, forms, groupings, harmonic and melodic languages, etc. become apparent over the course of the 100 pieces. For example, there are several loop-form pieces in the set (#7, #58, #92). Each one functions differently. I could have standardized the loop piece form between them, but for the sake of the larger project, I left each piece with a different operational framework, because each loop’s function points towards other non-looping pieces (e.g. #7 more resembles the quartet form common throughout wherein each staff corresponds to a single player while #92 requries physical relocation in the space, linking it to another family of pieces). These pieces can be interpreted by any instrument, reading any clef and/or any transposition (notated with the diamond clef, a concept I am lovingly borrowing). However, there exist pieces that specify that players should be sounding the same tone or that all material is in concert pitch. Pieces can be interpreted by any number or group of instruments, although some pieces lend themselves to certain specific groupings more than others.

Performances of this material will not likely consist of each piece being played discretely from beginning to end and then the next piece; it is no coincidence that there are eight players in the group working on this material. Since each piece has fours staves, four is in many ways the ideal number of players to play these pieces, and eight allows for two simultaneous quartets. At the same time, four simultaneous duos is certainly a possibility, or even eight solos. A continuous flow of activity is prioritized over the clarity of hearing any given piece. Some pieces are great transitional pieces, for example #57 nicely splits a quartet into two duos, and the two duos may then move forward as such. #57 can also bring together two distinct duos as a unified quartet. I’ve often argued that at some point all songs start blending into one collective ur-song, and part of the experience of composing, reading, or performing these pieces is realizing a similar trend: for all the individual logic and unique perspective each piece provides, the combination of all these pieces suggests a larger framework of interactions, and that is the bottom line of WHY LIE?