Poetics of the Fragment Conference
The Poetics of the Fragment conference was hosted by the Centre of Expanded Poetics at Concordia University, June 12 – 13, 2021.
The goal of the conference was “to consider the legacy and reinvention of the fragment as a form of writing over the past two centuries and into the present” and to answer these central questions:
What is the relevance of the romantic fragment to contemporary poetry and poetics? And how has the form and function of the romantic fragment been transformed by the centrality of fragmentation to modernism?
For my panel, I presented the piece Anywhere Everywhere and gave some remarks. Questions from the cohort allowed me to elaborate further on my compositional method and the purpose behind constructing its particular access points for interpretation: lyrical, textual, visual.
Below are my introductory remarks with accompanying slides.
Art, Like Life, In Looping Fragments
In 2019, I started working on the piece that I'll play for you today, which was commissioned by the ensemble Loop38 based in Houston, Texas. The ensemble’s name is a reference to the 38-mile loop of highway that encircles the city proper. What began as a play on this name, a piece of 38 musical loops, took shape as Anywhere Everywhere— a work for voice and chamber ensemble comprised of independent musical fragments that deliver a loose narrative based around the 3 years I lived in the city.
A musical loop is just a fragment of sound material that can repeat endlessly, most often associated with hip hop genres. When devising a large-scale form comprised of these fragments, I looked for analogous structures in our lives that also play out like this. Routines and schedules are persistent, regular, repeating. Even our relationships— to others, ourselves, and to larger structures of time— though they are more vague still remain ultimately cyclical, moving toward clarity and closeness then dissolving back into vagueness and obscurity.
Toward this end, social media, particularly Instagram, suggested a framework for the piece. The way it follows and also guides the rhythms of our lives contrasts the conventional teleology of a musical work. The piece here operates by its own technology of fragments to assemble a narrative in the same emergent way we fill in stories about those we follow online from bits and pieces we see of their lives. In practical ways too, the piece was informed by the layout and limitations of Instagram. The score was designed to the dimensions of the feed: a 4x5 layout rather than the conventional 8.5x11 page.
Each of the 38 movements is presented in a single frame, whether written for a solo performer or for the larger ensemble, which required some novel approaches to truncating the musical notation. You can see this in loop #6, which is additive at each iteration.
The music itself being modular and repeatable seemed appropriately aligned to the video duration constraints and the looping playback functionality of the platform.
The lyrical content and movement titles, like "Holding Onto Things Too Long" and "We Are Both Indecisive and End Up Going Too Long Without Eating," employ a confessional language to achieve a casual vulnerability.
The process by which I wrote the text for Anywhere Everywhere blended the economy of poetry with the subjective authenticity of prose.
The cyclical nature of the loops meant that every phrase required in essence a loophole, something that would necessitate its repetition. The text of the opening movement, "losing ourselves for while" dwells on itself superficially, like a mantra. The text of the closing movement— based on a fragment of Rilke that Cy Twombly scribbled into the massive painting that hangs in his gallery in Houston—constantly reveals itself, unfolding like a fractal. That full line is "it's strange, every fleeting thing needs us, the most fleeting." I modified the original quote to condense its message into three separate acts that reignite into new iterations with “it’s strange.”