A general interrupter to ongoing activity [2011]

for voice [any type]

duration :: 6’

Written for ELISION

First performance :: Carl Rosman — TRANSIT Festival (Leuven, Belgium), 22 October 2011

Recording :: Carl Rosman :: Label Musikfabrik [ label | spotify ]

A general interrupter to ongoing activity is a study of the voice as an instrument that is uniquely capable of occluding itself.  This occlusion takes place on a number of levels: the noisily tongue-blocked airflow of fricative and sibilant consonants, which comprise the fundamental sonic material of the piece; the diffusion of the text’s vowels into whistles and hisses, as more or less destructive background colorations; and the fragile compromises necessitated by an overloaded structure wherein almost every physical effort partially overwrites every other. 

The result is a navigation of the boundary between audible and inaudible, communicable and private, vocal and muscular. 

The text, an anonymous Middle English versification of a passage from Augustine’s Confessions, is meant as both an evocative epigraph and a source of occlusive possibilities and repetitive structures:

                                                                        Thole [i.e., “wait”] yet, thole a litel

                                                                        But yet and yet was endeles

                                                                        And thole a litel a long wey is