First Time invites the listener to boldly plunge “ears-first” into a guided, aural adventure through mysterious, mind-bending soundscapes where not everything is as it seems. As extrinsic sounds increasingly infiltrate familiar sound environments, this growing sonic incongruence calls into question where certain sounds truly “belong.” How do these trespassing, extraneous sounds alter our relationship with the environments we find ourselves listening in.
Thematically, my aim was to use this compositional opportunity to follow three distinct threads.
First, time. At the end of last year I premiered a collaborative, interdisciplinary performance which was in the works over the course of three seasons. While our development and rehearsals for the final performance were primarily conducted during the Fall, the date of the (outdoor) performance was scheduled for the beginning of the Winter. We were interested in juxtaposing the season in which the piece was developed with the season in which it was performed, and so through careful planning, recording – and preservation of foliage – we were able to reproduce elements of a Fall evening during the performance despite there being virtually no natural representations of that season left.
One of the initial mental pictures I had for this piece was that of a sunny, East Coast beach landscape. In the center of the scene was an open door, through which a snowy, Gatineau forest scene could be seen. Juxtaposing sounds strongly identified with different seasons, such as boots crunching through snow, or summer insects buzzing by the coast, was an early concept. The completed piece uses shifting seasons, alterations in time perspective and ultimately loops back in time onto itself in its final moments.
The second thread I wished to follow was the congruence-incongruence continuum. I wished to explore the idea of an embodied listener moving through several distinct spaces in which the collection of sounds experienced fell into the following categories:
- congruent, describing sounds could logically be identified as belonging to the greater whole, ie. they sound “natural” within the rest of the soundscape.
- incongruent, describing sounds that are identifiable but are clearly “trespassing,” unequivocally belonging to another soundscape that would be familiar to the listener
- abstracted, describing sounds that take either congruent or incongruent sounds and through transformational methods render them unfamiliar, difficult to place or surreal.
Over the semester we discussed on several occasions the way in which the proliferation of inexpensive, portable playback devices (phones, bluetooth speakers, etc.) have facilitated sounds from one environment being brought into another. As these extrinsic sounds increasingly infiltrate familiar sound environments, this growing sonic incongruence calls into question where certain sounds truly “belong.” I confess that I personally have an extremely low tolerance for such sounds, but am nevertheless interested in how these trespassing, extraneous sounds affect our relationship with the environments we find ourselves listening in.
Lastly, I wished to challenge myself to use my voice and narrative to bring the listener along the adventure. This choice introduced a triple vulnerability to the piece. Using the sound of my voice will indirectly introduce the audience to the composer, embedding an element of my personal, physical self within the composition. The narrative framework and speech elements are risky by simultaneously being perhaps too prescriptive in communicating the intention of the piece – not leaving enough space for the audience to experience it “freely” – or not clearly articulated or sufficiently explained, potentially failing to live up to the promise of a comprehensible narrative steering the listener through a logical, unambiguous experience. I accepted that, especially given the playful, deliberately misleading elements of the piece and the intentional blurring of the line between composer and audience, that any limitations in the narrative’s ability to resonate with the listener would be in itself an interesting, experimental development.
Over the course of 9’30”, First Time playfully explores these themes by taking the listener through three distinct scenes, after a brief introduction or prologue, and before ending the piece with a short epilogue.