Their voice is always higher - Solo Violin (PDF Edition)

Performance Note:

“Their voice is always higher” was written in conversation with the Bach A Minor Sonata, crafted in a composer lab led by Jennifer Koh at The New School.

The piece concerns two ideas: expectation, and voice. How we expect a voice to sound, how it actually sounds, and how those two things compare. This could be about the human voice, an artistic voice, compositional voice, a voice in power. I initially thought of this in regard to both the masculinity and vulnerability of men. In other words, what vocal tessitura do we expect from men (or any gender identity)? How does that compare to the tessitura’s actual placement?

The piece starts with a voice, trying to figure out what it’s saying. Somewhere in the distance, there is an expectation of how that voice should sound. What the expectation is specifically is unclear-- we just know that it is there. This drives the voice under pressure, ricocheting off into different functional directions, and eventually trying to weave back and do what it was doing before. No concrete expectation is ever found, or met; the piece solely concerns the process of dealing with it. 

So much of working with the Bach concerns how the voices in that piece work. There are up to four  voices being played simultaneously on the same instrument, and we’re always refining how they behave, how they’re expected to behave, how they’re behaving at this moment in our performance practice, and how they should be to be refined to meet an expectation.

 I hope this piece asks the listener how they themselves deal with expectation, how it influences their behavior, and how it is serving their own "voice." What is there to learn, and what is there to unlearn?