While the main point of interacting with these different compositional practices is, generally, the integration of all elements, it’s worth acknowledging that this is not always feasible for the timeline of every given artistic work. When presented with an opportunity attached to a quick turnaround and hard deadline, it can be obstructive for one to approach the research necessary for the serious and thoughtful pursuit of an analysis-based work. However, both the benefit and the necessity of working towards the development of an integrated artistic practice is the opportunity to use its individual components as fuel for artistic works. This is of particular importance in relation to the use of repetition in my compositional practice. While the methods of analysis and sonification I engage in are somewhat less common and are almost always used in conjunction with some sort of extra-musical connection in the music, repetition is of course a huge element in the work of a wide variety of artists’ works, making it of key importance that repetition in my practice is considered for both aesthetic reasons and my own conceptual reasons.
One such example of this is the piece (almost always is nearly enough) [2022], scored for one flute player (doubling C flute and bass flute) and string trio (violin, viola, and cello) and written for the Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente.1 This project presented me with two challenges to the goal of my artistic practice: First, I was given less than four weeks from the time of commission to the date of score delivery (two weeks of which would coincide with another residency), and second, I was not given the opportunity to collaborate with the ensemble. This, of course, is the reality of much of the composition world, and the strength of developing an artistic approach is to be able to explore and grow in its many facets. Instead of being a comprehensive integration of this research, the piece became a study on developing a recursive structure as a compositional framework. Of course, it isn’t fair to say that the piece is devoid of an extramusical connection outside of form and structure. Its title is borrowed from “Almost Always is Nearly Enough,” a song near the end of American band Tortoise’s 1998 record TNT.2 The last songs of TNT contain a pattern in which the last sample of each song immediately is used as the main musical element to begin the next, creating a simple recursive pattern, with the referenced track being a particularly clear example of its usage. In the same way, each major section of (almost always is nearly enough) takes an element from the preceding section and uses the chosen element as its entire basis, creating a recursive framework to be used as the entire structure of the piece.
Repetition in (almost always is nearly enough) is not about what repeats so much as it is about what doesn’t repeat, what is left behind, and what is passed by as the music progresses — a singularly-focused example of how repetition can aid the process of depiction and finding alternate perspective in a piece of sonic placemaking. With the opening of the piece used as the main springboard of musical material for the following sections, it also serves as a direct introduction to this process of recursion and the addition of decay as a main structural element, constantly moving the piece’s states of “rootedness” towards its states of “uprootedness.” For example, the opening three pages operate under a simple process of decay: 12 measures open the piece, which is then repeated verbatim twice afterward — except with one-third of the material removed the first time and two-thirds of the material removed the second time. No material is added, only subtracted, creating a constant sense of uprooting amidst what is still conceptually rooted material.
Rootedness and uprootedness thus exist together in the same moment, and this push-and-pull between types of repetition becomes a main concern of the piece. For example, in a later section, single gestures repeat constantly with slightly different configurations and variations, threatening to descend into entropic patterns of either decay or surges of growth, only to then be balanced by significant periods of strict literal repetition. All the while, the end of each section spurs the next into its own repetitive structure, leaving change and stasis formally intertwined throughout. This process provides a space for (almost always is nearly enough) to exist wholly as a product of its own recursive structure, in which nearly every period of stasis is rooted up and recast once again as a new period of stasis. In considering the relation of this repetition to placemaking, It’s important to return again to Lamoureux-St-Hilaire and Macrae’s comments on periods of stasis and movement, specifically focusing on the idea that stasis is unsustainable and is always in danger of being disrupted (“It is rootedness in place that creates the…experience of uprooting from place”). Setting up recursive patterns that are marked by instability in their stasis mirrors this conceptually and appeals to a very human part of existence, priming listeners to essentially treat the piece’s recursive structure as a placemaking act, fluid and subject to change at any moment.
