Tearable Music: Handholds

I began the Tearable Music Project during the Pandemic searching for a creative outlet while live performances were on hold, and to explore some compositional ideas I had been kicking around for a while: how to write music like tearing it off a roll like it was tape or raffle tickets: generating as much as needed to fill a given span of time based on random inputs without the end result being… well, terrible. Taking inspiration from Cage’s work with the I Ching as a compositional tool and many other , I developed a variety of schemes for composing with a standard deck of 52 playing cards. Every day I would shuffle and draw a hand of cards and then look at different ways of mapping each card’s suit and value to a variety of parameters: pitch, duration, orchestration, instrumentation, etc. to see how they could be arranged in more and less musical ways

This short piece titled Handhold is meant (and likewise the whole experiment was) to be a bit cheeky: it feels like walking out of step while holding hands; still enjoying the uneven journey with your partner. Jaunty, and deeply unserious, but having a ball the whole way. The project forced me to separate the compositional process from a piece of text or some phenomenological association: I had some raw data, so how to shape it into something that evokes a response, regardless of the end result?