A Lesser Privacy (2022)
Ensemble Contretemps commissioned and premiered A Lesser Privacy in 2022. In 2023, I had the opportunity to combine the work My Body, originally commissioned and premiered by Yarn/Wire Ensemble in New York in 2019 (see My body), with A lesser privacy to make an overlapping, simultaneous single 60-minute performance, for Musica festival (Strasbourg), and Le Bâti Festival (Geneva).
From the festival book: “My Body (2019) orients the actions of an ensemble around a suite of custom dub plates, the acetate-coated LPs that have been a longstanding material and form in my practice. The plates house seven bands of pre-composed sound materials—mostly short ‘utterances’ made via synthesizer—that are the basis for a set of 8 variations. Each variation is both a social and musical occasion, requiring a distinct, intensive mode of listening and collaborating amongst the ensemble that is based in some way on the distinctive material and tactile features of the dub plates that I have made for some 25 years. As objects, the dubs represent a quasi-improvisational, quasi-compositional register of music-making, defined by singularity and fragility. The third and fifth variations require players to work out an intimate physical choreography that brings their bodies into contact with each other. The eighth variation sees the ensemble recreating the acoustic signature of the plate itself by rubbing small stones together in imitation of LP surface noise.
In A lesser privacy, commissioned by Ensemble Contrechamps and premiered by them in 2022, I wanted to revisit some of the ideas in My body to make a companion work, but it was necessary to consider a
new set of conditions. I wrote the piece at the moment the US supreme court struck down the right to abortion in the US, effectively removing a safeguard of their bodily autonomy that millions of women in the US thought or hoped was secure. The phrase A lesser privacy comes from a somewhat older text by Andrea Dworkin. Under the conditions of A lesser privacy, the matrix of delays and distortions, returns and doublings produced by the network of microphones and loudspeakers surrounding the players, makes their work more difficult, more unstable, more contingent on the actions of other people. The body is still the model for the shape and form of the music, but now both works are caught in a recursive and disorienting complex of signals just outside of their control.”
—Marina Rosenfeld
