translating myself and others — for alto flute, cello, and harp (2024)
This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation. Creation and development of the work was supported in part by residencies at Casa Wabi (Oaxaca, Mexico) and the Merwin Conservancy (Haʻikū, Maui). duration 8’
translating myself and others is based on the book of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri. In asking questions such as, "who possesses a language, and why?" Lahiri's book is in many ways about belonging and unbelonging. She writes, ". . . to translate is to alter one's linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile."
Throughout the book, Lahiri poses both different ways of looking at translation: "a series of doors," (p. 13), "a forest, a bridge, a child, a lover, a sweater, a building, a triangle" (p. 11), and different ways of what it means to be a translator / engage with the act of translation, "to develop another pair of eyes, to experiment with weakness," (p. 18), "to cope with exile," (p. 75, as above).
Each movement in this musical work takes one of those perspectives and investigates it sonically: opening and closing doors, experimenting with weakness, looking for ways of relating or connecting.
Musical transcription and arrangement are forms of translation—finding the essence of a recording and hoping to translate that onto another instrument not just in a literal reproduction, but looking to capture the nuance of one sound and its meaning with the unique abilities of another instrument's sound. The last movement is a translation of one of my own works that itself is a translation of a recording I made finding the resonance of a bronze bell.
for Extended Music Collective. The commissioners currently have exclusivity of the work.