MUSIC FOR CELL PHONES

PERFORMED BY: 
Sean Bailey (B-flat clarinet) 

NOTES ON THE PIECE:
Frame was the first piece I wrote that utilized cell phones. The idea came to me somewhat by accident while working on another piece for a different ensemble.

I was sitting in a small practice room in Manhattan, using my phone to record myself improvising on the piano so I wouldn't forget any interesting ideas that might crop up. At one point, as I was listening back, I started to play along to what I had just recorded. It occurred to me that this process itself could be a piece, and rather than just using one phone, you could have an entire audience record a performer and then play it back. 

Frame was born out of a common use for cell phones: documenting something to help you remember. Through videos and pictures, we might try to hold on to the faces of people we love, the view of a beautiful hike, a dog being weird. In a broader context, George Lipsitz writes that "remembering and forgetting are not just things that people do, but also things that are done to people. Memory is institutional as well as individual. It may be perceived personally, but it is created collectively." How do phones bear witness and document? How can they serve as both an individual and collective memory aid? 

SPECIAL THANKS: 
Gemma Baek, who premiered the piece in its current version at Peabody in 2019; Ford Fourqurean, who first tested a sketch of this piece with me at Stony Brook University in the summer of 2019; and Christopher Cerrone, with whom I studied while I was writing this piece.