Anyplace Else (2012)
for ten players (flute, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, electric guitar, piano, violin, viola, cello, bass) [12:30]

Anyplace Else is a piece about restlessness: a rejection of stasis, a chronic uneasiness with standing still, a compulsive need for distraction and stimulation — the urge to always keep moving onward to something new. Over the preceding years I’d written several pieces about specific places, and thought (while composing in New York for a concert in Darmstadt, two problematic places themselves) I might attempt the opposite: a work about some elusive non-place just out of reach.

The idea came to me after obsessively loading up my iPod with recently-digitized old 78s and field recordings. The soundtrack to spring 2012 was an unpredictable mix of hissy old vinyl captures of xylophones from Mozambique, fiddlers from Carolina cotton mills, West African Calypso: Exoticism on shuffle…

The music of Anyplace Else oscillates between three poles. The first is line — linear motion, often heard as a duet between two closely linked voices — sometimes nearly superimposed, like the muted piano and guitar at the outset, or sometime at a larger imitative distance, like the bass flute and viola with practice mute about two-thirds of the way through the piece. Often the timbre of these solo voices is altered; almost every instrument plays with some sort of mute at some point, adding a coloristic buzz, a non-harmonic shading to these passages.

A second primary element is texture: moments of stasis where forward motion momentarily collapses into a wash of static (often microtonal) sound. Inspired by the pervasive layer of noise on old records or the distortion of a guitar amp, there is often an effort to “dirty” up these lush moments, mixing some stable harmonic sounds with certain prepared sounds (in the piano or guitar) or other extended techniques — which brings us to the third pillar of the piece: noise.

It seemed somehow important to engage with this parameter more substantially than ever before in my work — or as one friend put it: “It’s like you said ‘Hey, I’m going to Darmstadt! Which shirt should I wear?'” From the opening of the piece — where lines are intercut with washes of white noise before gradually melting into a stable solid harmony — to the end — where flashes of consonance are interrupted by noise before coalescing into a final ascending chorale — the interplay between these three parameters is the thread that guides the listener through a ceaselessly shifting landscape.