Manifesto

a manifesto in two parts excerpts from in silence

(2011) Christopher Jon Honett

Copyright 2011 Christopher Jon Honett www.honett.com

CONTENTS Time & Momentum, a Brief Personal Manifesto.……………………………………………05 Additional Explanations, Notes Regarding In Silence and the Intimacy of Composition…………15

A NOTE ABOUT THIS WORK

The two textual sections included here - which collectively present the closest thing I have ever come to a kind of manifesto - were extracted from the larger work In Silence, Sand Mandala for Trombone Solo, Percussion, and Hammond Organ Synthesizer, written in 2011. The complete version of this work consists of five complementary parts, the four textual sections informing and relating to the music in various ways.

For a number of coincident reasons, this piece and this moment in particular announced themselves as an appropriate opportunity in which to articulate a number of ongoing personal musical considerations.

The first articulation, Time & Momentum, a Brief Personal Manifesto, arose out of a more singular and all encompassing personal realization. Affecting my music as well as the way I see music in general, this personal clarity emerged as an item worth articulating independently.

The following section, Additional Explanations, strive to provide a much wider personal programmatic expurgation, regarding this specific musical work as well as salient aspects of my musical interests and techniques in general.

The second and third of the original sections, Instrumentation & Accessories and Performance Notes - excluded here, along with the written music - both serve as direct explanations and clarifications of the musical score.

Time & Momentum a brief personal manifesto

PARADIGM SHIFTING

Brevity is…wit. – The Simpsons At some point over the course of this last year, I was in the process of catching up on a podcast I enjoy (radiolab.org) when I encountered a personal realization. In the effort to make a worthwhile larger point, the show was playing excerpts from an unrecognizable piece of music. Without being informed of the work’s name, we were told that it was something we had surely heard previously, something famous. The listeners were asked to attempt to guess the work’s title, which I did to myself, until the piece was finally revealed as Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th symphony—just stretched out from its original length of circa 70+ minutes to instead last the course of a full 24-hour day.

I’ve sampled these party tricks before, like hearing Wagner’s Ring Cycle reduced to the duration of a single second. Until recently, I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on why projects like this have always been a problem for me, why they strike me as fundamentally false and disingenuous.

I believe that the composer of contemporary art music needs to push, to experiment and try new things, many of which will most likely fail in one respect or another. This is a natural and important aspect of how we learn and grow, and often, it is through the failures that we learn the most. Though a personal failure for me as a work of art (for me, this is a work of kitsch—though, to be fair, the creators haven’t made any wild artistic claims about the project of which I’m aware), this durational experiment did help me to put my finger on a notion I’d been approaching.

My personal revelation here was simply that this music—while it may indeed have been related to Beethoven’s 9th symphony—was not in fact, at least as far as I could reason, actually Beethoven’s 9th symphony. For me, this truth lies in the basic reality that the experience of listening to this hyper-prolonged “Beethoven’s 9th symphony” was an experience to which I don’t believe the composer would have ever held any sense of phenomenological or compositional relationship; he would never have recognized this rendering as within the reasonable bounds of interpreting his 9th.

I recognize, of course, that one could engage in endless arguments regarding exactly where this line could or should be drawn—at what point, exactly, is it no longer Beethoven’s music?—and that those individuals more interested in theory than musical experience (who are legion) may easily find themselves preoccupied with this point. While musical tempos often remain quite flexible, the intellectually honest must admit that there exists some abstract point (far before this) at which Beethoven would finally declare: no, no, that is no longer my music. In fact, with the noted exception of those composers making a specific point out of tempic openness (a Cagey proposition…), I would feel comfortable venturing to suggest that this basic precept would hold true for most music and most composers.

And, of course, that’s completely reasonable, because time matters, and because our relationship to time matters: the music’s relationship to time matters; the listener’s

relationship to time matters. While every composer must develop his or her own personal relationship to the flexibility of time, I have realized that for my own listening and my own music this question of respectively appropriate tempi—most specifically related to the interdependent issues of pacing, rate of event, and momentum—ranks as core to my musical experience as the parameters of pitch and timbre. I am not arguing that pitch and timbre or any other similar musical parameter should be considered as less important that they presently tend to be; simply that the relationships between these parameters and that of correct/appropriate tempo should be considered with much greater equanimity.

As mentioned above, it could be easy to get lost parsing the infinite variations of potentially “valid” or “unacceptable” versions of this or any other musical work, attempting to circumscribe exact lines across what could often be a nebulous realm of possibility. As far as I’m concerned, the definition of an acceptable tempo is simply whether or not the given performance would fall within the given composer’s definition of valid. For those composers who have already passed on, we may not always know what exactly may have been intended, or there may be disagreements. The deliberate extremity of the tempic shift in the Beethoven experiment helps demonstrate a larger principle via an example only the intellectually dishonest could dismiss; at the same time, I would quickly concede to musicologists and educated performers when attempting to circumscribe more precise tempic borders around Beethoven’s work.

Wherever an exact boundary might theoretically be drawn, I remain personally comfortable declaring that this 24-hour musical experience was not in fact Beethoven’s 9th symphony, ultimately, because the rendering being generated lacked an essential factor— it lacked an appropriate relationship to time. Consequently, this performance could not authentically realize the music’s necessary pacing, rate of events, and collective internal momentums, and, without these parameters properly realized, it was simply not the same music.

PERSONAL ARRIVALS

I believe the development of an authentic personal compositional technique is largely a process of realizing oneself. Dissatisfied with rote answers, one engages a progressive and gradual process in pursuit of fresh, personalized perspectives, a process necessitated by the music itself when allowed to parse and question beyond the present available dogmas.

While these little personal realizations regarding the fundamentality of time/tempo have helped clarify and codify certain directions within my own music, none of this should actually be a revelation; to one degree or another, musicians and listeners already behave in accordance with this basic notion about tempo and music quite naturally. At the same time, the fundamental bias against time/tempo runs deep in our musical culture— evidenced in our ideas, language, and practices surrounding art music, tempo is still effectively treated as a second-class citizen to pitch and other musical parameters.

Why is it that missing notes during a performance is so much more grievous an error than playing at a terrible tempo? While one musical parameter may appear as more “objective” than another—and may therefore rank as much easier to parse, define,

analyze, and discuss—the apparent objectivity of a given parameter in fact bears little actual impact on its significance and implication toward the total musical experience.

Time matters, whether we like it or not.

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I began writing music in part because there was a music I needed to hear that did not yet exist. For me, the right music operates something like a key against tumblers in time— aligning everything precisely and self-appropriately within the calculable, finite experience of that work—all events placed just where they need to sit along the linear path in order to successfully activate the desired continuous experience.

It has never felt phenomenologically acceptable for performers to execute my music (or really, anyone else’s) below a given work’s designated tempo. Though it remains common practice to sacrifice tempic integrity toward achieving greater accuracy in other realms, such as pitch, for me music always loses something quite significant when performed sluggishly—often more than would be the case were the pitches instead maintained a shade less rigorously. As opposed to the actual energy and force intended through the work in question, an excessively prolongated articulation instead presents itself like a museum recreation of someone else’s dance—perfectly sterile but utterly removed, diminished, and anemic.

I love music that feels deeply alive, that makes me feel more alive in its own life, and for me, a sluggish rendering of an exceptional work defeats an indispensable aspect of that music’s purpose. An obvious solution might be to try to compose in such a way that performers will never have to sacrifice any of the principal parameters, tempo or pitch or otherwise, or that performers only present works they can perform both accurately and at tempo. The reality, however, is that edge-cutting implicitly requires pushing boundaries and taking chances, and hard performance decisions will naturally arise in the execution of experimental music. Given the importance of momentum (and therefore tempo) in my own work, one personal resolution has been to try to prepare the music to endure various degrees of performative inaccuracy.

In some ways, becoming a composer is really about being able to say out loud what it is one really needs, and then to act on these truths confidently and with the craft necessary.

In my own listening and composing, at least, music simply doesn’t function well when tempo is treated as a second-class citizen. The musical experience that I need, and that I strive to induce in others, requires among other achievements the correct representation of a work’s sense of event pacing and momentum, which, ultimately, will require a faithful attention to its respective tempi.

MOMENTUM, THE PLACEMENT OF EVENTS IN TIME, & THE FUNDAMENTALITY OF TEMPO

While arriving at these personal concerns from a variety of directions, it was friend and musical theorist Andrew Moses Friedman who ultimately articulated the underlying issue for me as being one of musical momentum.

In the musical experience, like any other physical human experience, time passes as a steady, constant frame relative to any stationary point (or listener). Music operates as an energy acting over and within time, measured against time. Momentum, within this model, is the maintenance of that energy in time—whatever that may mean and require given the respective context and materials. (N.B. – Composers often speak poetically of the flexibility of time; within this paradigm, we would understand this to mean in actuality the flexibility of the experience of time. Additionally, while recognizing the ultimate primacy of Einsteinian time, clock time generally serves as a more useful frame when discussing this human listening experience – since within the concert hall the listener(s) and the soundmaker(s) will not moving at (significantly) different speeds through space.)

As the correct realizations of a work’s momentums depend upon, among other primary factors, the specific placement of its musical events in time, the faithful maintenance of a work’s tempi naturally gains significant value within this paradigm. Additionally, for me at least, it is the actual placement of the musical events within time as they occur along the linear trajectory, once the global experience has been initiated, that matters here—and not simply the ratio of their respective durations to one another.

This idea of momentum doesn’t refer to any one specific characteristic, like activity or amplitude, but instead to a collective sense of cogent and self-appropriate energy outflow and manipulation over time. Furthermore, this concept applies to the most as well as to the least patient varieties of music; it seems that in fact the available types of musical energies and ways of managing and manipulating these energies could be infinite.

Additionally, it is not the particular species of energy or force in play that leads to a given work’s success within the realm of momentum, as much as it is the respective composer’s skill at correctly identifying and managing his/her own music’s necessary energies—the inherent energies of his/her materials, environments, and self.

In this individual’s mind, some notable examples of contemporary art music composers who have masterly identified and wielded their personal approaches toward momentum include Luciano Berio, Gérard Grisey, Steve Reich, Morton Feldman, Giancinto Scelsi, George Crumb, Louis Andriessen, Conlon Nancarrow, Györgi Ligeti, and Toru Takemitsu.

-.-. .--- ....

Luigi Nono’s music served as an important initial instigator toward specifically considering the issue of time and my own music’s relationship to it. A compositional master, Nono ranks among the preeminent manipulators of time—an absolute craftsman in his personal approach to energy in time, the management of his own particular momentums.

One notable tendency within Nono’s music regards the possibilities of recontextualization naturally available through the dramatic manipulation of time—in his case, by exploiting a markedly slower musical metabolism, with prolongated stretches of subdued or seemingly-empty musical space/time (e.g., La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura).

For some time prior to my love affair with Nono’s work, my music had already been pushing toward increased tempi and faster rates of event shift. His extremes helped codify a crucial underlying idea about time and materials, encouraging me to aggressively pursue my own music’s inherent tendencies toward time, however extreme they may at first appear.

Personally, a focused approach to speed and momentum helped open a unique compositional freedom—particularly regarding experiments in something like a relentless, or near-relentless, kind of momentum—and helped permit, among other advantages, a more fluid integration of a full palate of idiosyncratic materials.

-.-. .--- ....

It’s worth at least noting that these basic ideas are applicable to time-based arts. For me, a major factor in any work’s success lies in what it’s done or not done with its own given energies—the creator’s craft, or lack thereof, toward truly possessing, understanding, and exploiting his or her own work’s particular momentum(s).

Additionally, this paradigm extends beyond the arts, into the efficiency and effectiveness of our interactions within society—anywhere the craftworthy manipulation of momentum toward the overall economy of energy can positively affect the general efficacy of a system, process, organization, etc.

The observable emergent tendency within a given organization or system toward either a more ideal or a less ideal approach to momentum relates directly to its key actors’ proficiencies in manipulating the available components toward either encouraging or obstructing, respectively, that work or system’s intrinsic energies; for instance, whether the given system will naturally tend to incentivize or to frustrate an individual’s attempts to take initiative, act more responsibly, require less supervision, waste fewer resources, and so forth.

In this direction, momentum could involve and depend upon a complex array of interdependent factors, including a properly operating and self-appropriate balance of rules, freedoms, responsibilities, intentions, systems, and perhaps most principally, management methodology. The basic working distinction between a more or less ideal momentum seems evident when comparing, for example, the typically productive, fluid, and proactive flow of energy operating within a small successful Northern California startup company against the counterproductive morass of (pick your favorite) poorly functioning federal or academic bureaucracy.

It is about the fluid propelling and manipulation of the available energy—deliberately attending to the natural flow, the inherent directionalities, and the general economy of energy within a given project toward engineering a stronger, more effective final result.

Nature seeks economy, and it seems that within the respective contexts and realities of a work or system, the Rule of Parsimony extends as much to the arts as it does to the organization of humans.

Goethe referred to architecture as frozen music. Though the discussion of momentum within the context of edifices, systems, and visual art ostensibly implies a more structural momentum rather than a temporal momentum, the reality is that all physical human experience occurs in time and depends in some way upon the flow of energy and momentum over time. While a building or organization may appear static, the experience of that edifice or operation’s given availabilities, lines, shapes, energies, and functionalities—the translation from of its potential to its kinetic energies—will always take place over time, as a notentirely-accidental linear progression of experience.

At the deepest levels, matter itself is simply a kind of temporarily crystallized momentum, a balance of energies amongst subatomic particles or strings—in fact, it seems to be the balance of tiny energies and momentums that even permits the relative stability of physicality in the first place.

THE

PHENOMENOLOGICAL & THE REASONED

The pursuit of a deeply personal music has been as much about discerning what it was that didn’t work, and that wasn’t successful, as it has been about identifying and working with the few treasures that have stood out.

Whatever the intellectual machinations that ultimately bridged to theoretical realizations, this little investigation into time and momentum has always remained rooted in, derived from, and guided by the loadstone of the phenomenological. In music, the prime value of the theoretical is to help understand, justify, refine, and ultimately to enhance and augment the purely phenomenological through further intellectual consideration.

-.-. .--- ....

I want an art that is both thoroughly considered and at the same time thoroughly visceral —a fully engrossing music—and my love of contemporary art music in large part derives from its particular potential to make available a unique, utterly extraordinary musical experience.

While much new music adeptly accomplishes either one or the other objective, works ranking as truly gutsy and successful in both realms concurrently seem unfortunately to occupy only a fairly small percentage of the total new music landscape. Instead, tendencies persist toward the prolix, the anemic, and the safe—music that dawdles, deliberately wastes time, music that forever seems to be halting and reassuring itself—the stuttering of ideas without the self-confidence to truly develop them as they deserve.

Experiencing a piece of music that doesn’t realize its ideas have now gone on too long— watching it evolve from the initially curious to the tedious and grating—is like witnessing the tangible awkwardness of a prepubescent individual who has not yet succeeded in owning the person that he or she truly is.

As my love for and attraction to contemporary art music crosses every available style and context, an attempt at articulating the overarching commonalities between successful

works has, for me, involved a reasoning-out instigated and ultimately directed by deeply phenomenological, experiential truths.

VERNACULAR INFLUENCE

Not atypical for new music composers commanding musical backgrounds in non-classical traditions, I have sought to assimilate my diverse worlds and influences into a cohesive, cogent methodology. Personally, I have too often found the approaches employed toward incorporating and emulating vernacular influences into new musical works, particularly around the genre of rock music, as relatively unconvincing.

For me, the crux of this dissatisfaction typically derives from what seems a tendency to try to “compete” with rock on its own terms, or to incorporate the trappings of rock without really getting down to its underlying fundamentals—for instance, concentrating on the ornament of a distorted guitar or drum kit rather than realizing the genre’s deep, underlying intensity—its real rambunctiousness, brutal drive, and sense of wild energy.

Rarely does contemporary music truly approach these core qualities with even moderate approximation.

When asking instead what specific logistical advantages might composers of new music naturally possess, a salient answer has been that of precision—an extreme precision that can open unique doors toward realizing wildly complex new worlds, calculated far outside of real-time: essentially, the power to realize pretty much whatever we might be able to imagine.

For me, the highest example of the transcendent integration of seemingly divergent materials remains that of Béla Bartók, who realized a new yet deeply authentic music through a rigorous, complete personal ownership and assimilation of all the diverse materials and ideas that he found interesting and musically worthwhile.

The personal desire to reconcile my own equally loved influences from across both the popular and academic traditions has, among other consequences, encouraged a focused manipulation of precision toward translating my own version of the underlying intensity intrinsic to much of my favorite rock music. The pursuit of this thoroughly alive, edge-ofyour-seat quality within the context of a highly considered music, and through mechanisms actually intrinsic to the materials themselves, has served as an additional intersecting impetus toward musical phenomena involving generally escalated momentums and gradations of the concentrated event.

TOWARD A RELENTLESS MOMENTUM

For me, these various paths have ultimately pointed toward something approaching a relentless momentum.

My music has wanted to accelerate for a long time—it has wanted to speed up, to change faster, to move beyond the available permissions—and a number of advantages have resulted from thoroughly permitting this naturally tendency to develop without pretense.

One consequence has been a more fluid, personally satisfying integration of a diverse palate of materials and influences.

These time-related developments have also helped organically engender a personal translation of another curious characteristic of, in particular, Steve Reich’s music—the sense of the perpetual, or near-perpetual “ever-arriving.” A phenomenon pointed out to me by composer Peter Gilbert, this is the aspect of Music for 18 Musicians, for instance, in which every moment is actually felt as both a point of arrival as well as a point of continuing transition—that each moment experientially serve as both being and becoming.

-.-. .--- ....

While the enclosed work pursues a relentless, or at least near-relentless, kind of momentum, this music does explicitly contain one segment in which the given space might suggest a clear break in the work’s ongoing pursuit of this “relentless momentum.”

It remains for each listener to decide for him or herself whether the event beginning at measure 719 suggests an actual experiential pause in the momentum or, like a motorcycle sailing over a canyon, the force of the momentum instead carries fluidly throughout.



Additional Explanations NOTES REGARDING IN SILENCE AND THE INTIMACY OF COMPOSITION

Some Beginnings It has taken me a long time to find this music. In some ways, this work (In Silence, Sand Mandala for Trombone Solo, Percussion, and Hammond Organ Synthesizer – please refer to the complete score with any questions) serves as the first truly comprehensive realization of notions I’ve been pursuing since I initially began engaging with music. At the same time, of course, this piece is just one more working-out along an ever-evolving continuum, a process that for me has produced a small handful of personal treasures surrounded by an abundance of embarrassments and pure learning experiences.

It wasn’t really until 2003 that I was really able to compose the first fully satisfactory realization of the sound world I’ve been pursuing, that I continue to pursue. Until then, I had found myself only frustrated in attempts to translate and explain the musical experience I was seeking, and it was a relief to finally have something tangible to which I could actually point. Among other personal breakthroughs, this 2003 piece was the first fully idiosyncratic musical work I had composed well and thoroughly, the first I truly permitted to be as extreme as it wanted. At the same time, the 2003 work was highly inefficient in certain ways, and beyond this, a variety of ongoing musical questions continued to challenge my work.

I have stumbled through this ongoing process with occasional and gradually increasing success, ultimately working out the body of my accumulated personal compositional ideas in an opera between 2006 and 2007. For a number of reasons, In Silence also serves as another personal watershed. Nonetheless, the process is never complete.

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I’ve heard numerous composers claim that they essentially start fresh with each new composition. I can absolutely appreciate how someone might work from this paradigm, and I believe the path to develop a deeply personal and authentic compositional approach requires a highly idiosyncratic pursuit that could lead pretty much anywhere. For me, however, each new work is instead another step along the same path. Though I rarely know exactly where the path will lead next, the narrative in retrospect is always cohesive and logical.

The path requires an ongoing questioning, an uncomfortable personal and external inquiry, a deep honesty regarding what you are, what you love, and what you really need.

It has been and continues to be a slow study, an accumulation, an ongoing self-discovery —trusting instincts, reaching for deeper honesties, picking out the useful treasures from the mad stream of thoughts, culture, a world of music and art—and somehow learning to work with them all. And always, with the primary objective of creating the truest personal music one possibly can.

From the beginning, I have written music in part because there is a music that I need to hear that does not yet exist. In some ways, my work is a perpetual stab at my own indigenous music: not the music of my obvious culture as much as the music deep within my own culture, the culture of myself—the music somehow intrinsic to how I became myself. Always in some way derived from the self, this music often represents the personal internal experience at both its best and its worst moments.

Hemmingway once advised: All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. I do not believe in the search for a personal style, per se, since this notion implies the quest for largely, externally-oriented validations. Instead, I believe the true artist works to find his/her most honest self while concomitantly developing his/her craft, and that, upon the attainment of artistic maturity, a refined personal style is what will have naturally developed as a result of this sincere process. In one sense, identity is the story of a singular consciousness, the story of the development and experiences of that entity over time—who s/he is, where s/he came from, the experiences s/he lived, the places and people s/he’s known and loved. Similarly, the evolution of a more personal music can seem to mirror the growth cycle of a self-actualizing individual.

Whatever one’s own rules and musical dogmas, it seems evident that the underlying precept of good art is rigorous personal authenticity.

Instrumentation The particular instrumentation for this work resulted from a number of considerations.

The elemental musical combination of voice, keyboard, and percussion seems to relate to something deep and protean in our tradition, and in its simplicity, this particular collection of instruments commands an amazing aggregate of sounds. Among a number of examples from the modern repertoire, I was markedly inspired by the wealth of possibilities suggested in Charles Wuorinen’s exceptional Trombone Trio. At the same time, this stripped-down consort naturally pays some homage to the traditional jazz trio, and it seems impossible as an American composer with an instrumentation like this to not be influenced by jazz in some way.

The instrumentation for this work was also chosen in part for its economy. The specific goal of high economy of means derived in part from our mutual desires to maintain the work’s logistical practicality, rendering it relatively convenient to stage and travel with. As most schools and venues own a symphonic bass drum, the three performers essentially need only travel with a stripped down drum kit, a keyboard and amplifier, and a tenor trombone with its mutes. In our initial conversations, we were both excited by the idea of using Hammond organ. However, for both artistic and logistical reasons, the synth. keyboard ultimately proved more ideal.

At the same time, I held more personal, theoretical motives for wanting a leaner ensemble behind this piece. Concomitant with each work’s artistic goals, I also attempt to refine my own ongoing personal compositional “research project” in some specific, deliberate,

measurable ways. With each little success, I add challenges—for example, diminishing the instruments necessary to accomplish a given goal, or dramatically prolonging the duration over which a particular energy can be maintained.

Much less importantly, I’ve noticed a general thread in new music in which a large percussion battery, ensemble, or relatively exotic instrument, for instance, can too often— whether accidentally or deliberately—act as a substitute for or distraction from a thorough dedication to craft and idea. Naturally, not all expense or exoticism de facto equals gluttony of means; at the same time, I do believe the truest craft lies partly in making the most out of one’s available means and materials.

Title, Dedication While it’s not my desire to elucidate every little potential mystery operating within this work, I have realized the value of providing context for listeners and performers who want it—some outline of the most salient considerations that went into a particular music’s construction. Among other ongoing priorities, words matter deeply to me and to my musical work.

Friend and composer Peter Gilbert once pointed out that a work’s title is among the first notations an individual takes in. Titles and names for my works are suggested by the works themselves: at a point, the words are right and together we just know it. Names and other series of words rarely carry only a single meaning, and given the nature of poetic multiplicity, I have no doubt they generally carry far more semiotic weight than even the composer consciously intends (a natural consequence of attention and time spent in the work). That said, In Silence holds a number of direct, specific meanings.

If this work’s form had a name, it would be a sand mandala. The metaphor of and process around the sand mandala speak directly both to this music’s fundamental operative nature as well as to its general human subject matter. A major ongoing theme in my work, and in this piece specifically, is that of transience; life and beauty and triumph within the context of a highly transient existence.

Sand mandalas are an intricate, remarkably transient art form engaged by some Buddhist monks. Essentially, these monks expertly manipulate variously colored sands to create intense, rich, complicated designs on open, flat surfaces. Requiring extreme investments of time, sand mandalas are gorgeous and complex while remaining incredibly fragile to the elements and easily destroyed. Their creation is, among other things, a deliberate metaphor. This idea of the sand mandala is thoroughly beautiful to me, this extreme dedication to the construction of an ultimately highly transient art object.

-.-. .--- ....

This musical work is in part dedicated to Shannon Tavarez, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 11.

When my now-wife and I first met in 2008, we were both living and working in

Manhattan. As a typical New York freelancer, my wife Rebecca occupied multiple roles; among them, she taught voice at the Harlem School of the Arts. Shannon studied with her.

Before Shannon was a Broadway star, and long before anyone knew she was sick, she was an excited, joyful, dedicated student. When I attended student performances at the Harlem School, Shannon was always thoroughly amazing—so alive, so intent, so clearly talented, so hungry to learn. She would ask questions and really listen and fully engage with you. It was impossible not to recognize that Shannon was remarkable. My wife was incredibly proud and I had grown very fond of her, too; we looked forward to witnessing her many future successes.

My wife and I had already relocated to California by the time Shannon was diagnosed with leukemia. It all seemed so utterly impossible when we heard, so incredibly horrible: she had made it Broadway at the age of 11 only to be taken by cancer. An overwhelming outpouring came from the community, but on Nov. 1, 2010 she passed away.

We couldn’t believe it then, and it still seems impossible to us. I understand that one shouldn’t consider the value of an especially gifted life as intrinsically more valuable than that of another. At the same time, I cannot help but experience the loss of such an incredibly rare individual at such a young age as particularly pointless, horrifying, and tragic. We still cannot believe she is gone; it continues to break our hearts.

Shannon was not in my mind when I began to work seriously on this music. As far as Rebecca and I knew at the time, Shannon was still a healthy, happy girl—a rising star, and a fond memory from our life in New York. Even once we learned she was sick, it did not cross my mind to include her in the work for some time; it just isn’t the kind of thing I would typically do. Nonetheless, the forces of human and musical need are deeply strange, and an authentic composition is in some way also a mysterious partnership.

Shannon’s death was such a blow that, in the end, the music could not honestly avoid explicitly acknowledging her—almost without warning, the work demanded its own version of a moment of silence.

I had been deliberately pursuing a relentless momentum, relatively ubiquitous throughout the rest of the work, and Shannon was the only thing the music was willing to pause for.

Listeners can judge for themselves whether or not the force of the surrounding force carries through the space beginning at measure 719.

One of the beautiful and truly special characteristics of art is that it can allow us to imagine and create life as we would have it, as we would choose to imagine it. We have felt so powerless and angry at Shannon’s death, in such contempt of such meaningless loss. It isn’t much, but in this work at least we can maintain a momentary fantasy and tangible memory of her resuscitation, of her amazing and inexorable spirit; in music at least, she continues live. If nothing else, this work is a declaration that, simply, we miss her.

Working Materials Music is sound that we experience musically. – Andrew Moses Friedman. Whatever the source of the sound in question, whether a listener will hear music or noise ultimately depends upon a personal act of choice-making on the part of that individual.

I am interested in making music. The influences, the schemes, the metaphors—these are all, in the end, slaves to the musical experience. The music does not ultimately need to exist to serve anything else—it does not exist for another reason but to be music for the listener who is listening.

I want music to feel paranormal, to reach deep inside, to stop time, to utterly consume me. I want a music that can approach the sense of moving into and through a Jackson Pollock painting; like some kind of strange ritual transcribed; the ache itself.

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For me, the value in contemporary art music lies principally in its pursuit of the exceptional, the remarkable—an underlying belief in the possibility of the extraordinary —and an attempt at one’s highest personal quality through a rigorous, ongoing attention to care and detail. Whatever the respective labels, music that maintains and pursues ulterior underlying values is engaged in a different project than the one in which I’m personally interested.

Whether it fails or succeeds, my music strives perpetually for a personal version of the remarkable, and every work serves as an attempt, however flawed, at something somehow potentially mind-altering.

A General Overview of Tendencies and Pursuits Among other underlying goals, this document has served as an opportunity to pause (in time) and engage a general working self-assessment. A broad personal taxonomical overview would include: Seeking and working with fundamental materials. All sounds being equal across a single cogent spectrum; the equitable treatment of materials. Scarred tonalities functioning in tandem with a wide syntax of sound masses. A tonal noise.

Elemental but complete macroscopic forms and teleologies, including direct, determined directions, progressions, narratives, numbers, processes, and patterns. The clear progress of simple, direct shapes, traditional complexities, and organic forms; the straight line, the labyrinth, the spiral. Elemental influences erupting into new forms.

Shifting drones and gravities. Centricity through adamance. Wild disparate polyphonies of both pitched and un-pitched materials guided by large arcs of simple trajectories as

they pass through localized complexities.

The primacies of momentum and tempo. A generally accelerated rhythm of events.

Relentless, driving momentums; unbalanced & evolving beats. The dense concentration of events, the concentrated event; the freedom of re-contextualization available via various extremes of temporal manipulation.

The Joycean Storm. Development as the swarm. A saturation of materials. A constant transition. Development through self-interruption. Densely overlapping developments; a density of layering. The juxtaposition of seeming extremes. Acknowledgement at the mess of the personal internal narrative and the consequent need for a creative emulation of this natural and organic experience; a creation forever impatient with itself and with its own stasis.

A general research into extremes. An ongoing exploration of instruments’ natural edges, including those of amplitudes, technical ability, and various other parameters. The ongoing search for a few things of great quality amidst a general onslaught of perpetual mediocrity.

Thickly overlapped metaphorical and programmatic threads. Intrinsic and explicit visual and literary influences. The painter J.M. Basquiat as a proto-influence toward the ongoing development and exploitation of an intensely personal iconography. The human experience; the human will. Transience & triumph. The scream & the drum, the heartbeat; the train. Water. The swarm, savagery, animals, joy, abandon, excess, sex, fire.

Violence, and elegance in violence. The first music: the scream as the first, primal animal song, and the heartbeat as the first, mysterious, internal drum. Life as exhilarating flashes in the darkness; little declarations against the great nothing.

Points of Departure I believe that music is so powerful in part because of our deep animal connection to sound. Sound is so primal, so intrinsically connected with our subconscious, so utterly direct.

I am interested in making music with anything that I can make music with. In composer Peter Gilbert’s words, Have sounds, will compose. I begin in a number of places at once, among them being simply what is available. The first materials for a work include the instruments themselves as well as specific sounds, capabilities, and preferences around that given instrument and performer.

I am not looking for fresh foundations; my favorite architects never felt the need to. I just want to write something somehow new, vital, and thoroughly beautiful. Through every aspect of my approach I have tended to pursue an ongoing interest in what can generally be described as fundamental materials; simple, deep materials, both internally as well as universally derived, roots from which to derive my own methodologies.

Listening is the first composing. Influence is constant and ubiquitous. Ideas are suggested

and proceed to develop, often on their own. A listening or experience becomes a thought that disappears and then reappears later, more evolved, to present the state of its ongoing progression.

I am a collector of intensities; I collect and proceed to work with the few treasures that stand out to me. I believe in collecting and investing over time in particular sounds, themes, symbols, fragments, images, anything. They become entities almost with lives of their own, often operating as living characters within the work. With all these materials— sounds, forms, metaphors, ways of thinking and working—it is then to develop and proceed like all committed composers, working with them all to make them our own.

At the same time, there exists a crucial distinction between fundamental approaches toward collecting and integrating seemingly dissimilar entities and influences within a cogent palate of working materials. What I am interested in cannot be accomplished through the gloved, protected hands of postmodernism or its derivatives. For me instead, the highest example of the transcendent integration of seemingly divergent materials remains that of Béla Bartók, who realized a new yet deeply authentic music through a rigorous, complete personal ownership and assimilation of all the diverse materials he found interesting and convincing: we have to get into the mud with our materials, to own them from the inside.

It’s this deliberate, ongoing act of personal curatorship—through both the accumulation and the distillation—the process of finding one’s own materials and developing one’s craft with those materials that ultimately emerges as style. We spend our lives collecting what we love and learning to work with these diverse materials, and, in turn, the details of an honest music collectively outline a unique will and personality, like carefully chosen iron flecks articulating the field of a concealed magnet.

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I always begin from a handful of key points at once, including what it is the specific performer desires from the new work, what those particular instruments and performers can do well, my own developing collection of personal tools and interests, and the ongoing influence of everything.

In 2009, I had the opportunity to hear Helmut Lachenmann speak at Miller Theater, following his Composer Portrait there, and something he put his finger on then continues to influence me. Making reference to the title of Morton Feldman’s The Viola in My Life, Lachenmann spoke about the need for each composer to find his/her viola, his/her piano —ostensibly, his or her own instrument within that entire “meta-instrument,” with all the instrument’s possibilities and historical baggage. This research into my instruments had been an ongoing thread of my work since before I heard it so well articulated, feeling organically compelled to pursue my own idiosyncratic path into each particular instrument in the manner that really makes natural sense for my music.

Within this process, questions can include: What is it that these instruments can do extremely? How can I get something spectacular from this particular mechanism, this

unique bundle of specialties, these unique, available forces? What can I do collectively with these four or three or two objects that make noise in these particular kinds of ways very, very well?

Form, Teleology, & Musical Development My music is fiercely personal. At the same time, I believe that effective art evolves from the personal to the universal and back to the personal again, so that the ultimate work can become transcendently personal in the way that someone else needs it to be.

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The arrival at a satisfactory and comprehensive personal approach to global form resulted from an intersection of little realizations. The initial underlying formal outline of a work, though merely the first of many formal precepts, needs to be simple, implicitly directed, and somehow elegant. Among other priorities, I need a music in which some deep, continuing, implicit narrative operates steadily over the entire length of the work— in which, basically, this particular section of music must somehow have occurred before this section. Consequently, a chief constant element of my work remains the concept of a global harmonic teleology or process of some kind—some simple, direct, unbroken line stretched across the entire length of a piece. That in all the localized possibilities and ostensible chaos, some single continuum, some simple underlying principle continues to guide the music’s macroscopic unfolding.

While I began working with music somewhat late, I was involved with the visual arts from a very young age; this perspective continues to influence me, and I often begin composing through rough pictures, shapes, images, and simple drawings. This visual proclivity intersected with my ongoing pursuit of a thoroughly, personally satisfactory solution to the question of large-scale form. While traditional forms had been helpful to various degrees, it became clear that my music needed something more.

The designs within Iannis Xenakis’s musical architectures suggested initial possibilities in terms of alternate directions toward a potentially satisfying global teleological approach.

However, it was ultimately Giancinto Scelsi’s Anahit—whose underlying form is essentially that of a rising tritone—that opened the door for me. For so many reasons, I was intrinsically attracted to the simplicity, purity, and immense possibility of this kind of global formal approach; I proceeded to investigate pure forms, specifically around patterns and shapes to which I was naturally attracted. Though I’ve always loved working with drones and tonal gravities in general, the notion of moving drones toward a global purpose—with lines attached to deep tonalities and various pitch directionalities— provided both the harmonic foundation and the overarching teleology. While implicitly directional and transient, these forms also carry a deep implication of the infinite (in a vein suggested by Gödel, Escher, Bach).

Having spent my time within the spectralist milieu, I thoroughly appreciate the solidity and directness of form available via interpolating a series of spectra into a single fluid trajectory. At the same time, I’ve found the dogmatic need for a “real-world” pitch guidance/validation as personally unnecessary, instead choosing to construct my own meta-chords and systems against the simple, shaped forms.

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In one sense, all my forms are the same, because they are all ultimately about transience and triumph.

In this work, two global teleologies operate simultaneously as a single cogent processexperience. The solo line follows a general trajectory leading from the F above middle C to the C a fifth above that; at the same time, the work’s general harmonic universe, the keyboard, follows a direct subterranean line from Bb down to F. Overlapping and interacting, these fundamentals act as guide-points and regions of general centricity.

Within this direct, macroscopic scaffolding, a spectrum of smaller processes proceed, interact, and unfold. At various local levels, a great deal results from the interaction engendered naturally through the engagement of diverse, evolving musical entities, like living characters developing and interacting over the course of the work. These can relate to any of the potential materials; the musical entity is my protean motive.

Locally, form operates more organically, moving like water over rocks—perpetually nonstatic and evolving. From moment to moment, all manner of processes and systems may exist and interact; the specific pitch material remains fluid; ultimately, however, it is always about music’s intrinsic needs in the given moment. The composer Jo Kondo once stated in a masterclass not to save one’s best idea when composing; instead to use it right away, as another, better idea will come along. Abstract and direct influences derive from everywhere—the long California highway as much as the formal tessellations of M.C. Escher.

Inspired in large part by writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, another major working force within this music is that of the concentrated event—the notion of a limited, rarified suggestion of much larger worlds. In this paradigm, oftenbrief presentations of a given musical entity portrait ongoing developments engaged at various levels of awareness and linearity, these events representing in some way an encapsulation of entire developments. This semiotic reduction also permits various developments to interact in a kind of meta-counterpoint against one other.

Through the accumulation of simultaneous ongoing developments, whether clearly present or operating silently, many things become possible. Against a deliberately escalated momentum, concentrated events proceed through all manner of developmental possibilities—ongoing self-interruption as much as assimilation and integration; in some ways, a music in conflict with itself. Macroscopically, development operates something like the swarm—the Joycean-Marquezian-Borgesian Swarm—an organic result of the

saturation of independent meanings, purposes, entities, counterpoints, and systems; a development akin to a congregation of underwater currents, the dynamic fluid reality— attempting to balance at the moment where what could be so seamlessly becomes what is.

Personal Iconography, Metaphor, & Programmatic Meaning I am interested in the perpetual development and exploitation of a personal iconography.

Among a number of compositional palates from which I draw, this serves as a key ongoing source.

In part, the artwork is in part a catalogue of the life and experience of its creator over the course of the artwork’s creation.

I am influenced by everything. Anything that affects me can affect the music; if there is a constant, it is me. Natural themes enter and exit of their own accord and I try to collect what I can as the pass.

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Since early on, one of the tendencies in my work has been the strong, recurring gravitation toward certain core, salient ideas, themes, motifs, images—whatever has declared itself in some way as fundamental. Though I initially resisted the tendency toward including ongoing thematic obsession in my work, this direction of influence ultimately demanded greater attention the clearer and more self-confident I became in my own composing.

It was ultimately Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work that effectively demonstrated the value of pursuing my own natural obsessions into a personal system of iconography. With great confidence, craft, and effectiveness, Basquiat’s work operates in part on a private but highly successful system of hieroglyphics—including shapes, words, references, rough imageries, and fragments of personal and cultural histories. These materials appear to have acted for him like some kind of a protean, personal alphabet—pieces of a private language available for endless combinations and degrees of inclusion, manipulation, and re-contextualization.

The influence and use of a variety of personalized, extramusical programmatic materials into my work has also been informed by Joseph Campbell’s (Jungian-related) ideas concerning metaphor and our deep and ongoing human connections to certain primary myths and symbols. Additionally, George Crumb’s relationship to the poetry of Federico García Lorca as well as the somewhat Marquezian/Borgesian-derived notion of the concentrated/dense event have also contributed significantly toward encouraging the development of my a personal system of musical iconography.

Toward a Personal Vocabulary of Sound Masses In the process of attempting to fluidly incorporate and manipulate a developing spectrum

of pitch cluster materials into my work, a number of principal salient functions regarding larger and less discrete bodies of sounds have presented themselves. This paradigm requires the recognition of a foundational relationship between materials of single pitch verses those consisting of multiple bodies of pitch.

- Within this paradigm, sound masses can act as a kind of protean material, commanding the ability to function as flexible doorways into entirely new spaces.

- Melody is contour, and within the correct contextual palate, clusters can also serve a melodic function.

- The degree of the discrete in question—ranging from the microtonal to the utterly triadic to rather sizable clusters—can itself serve as a usable continuum.

- Additionally, sound masses and pitch clusters can provide a variety of timbral functions, acting as percussion materials or enhancing other sounds and events.

A Note About Manipulating Intensities It was Bernard Rands who first pointed out to me that violence could also be elegant.

The most typical approach toward the expression of intensity within experimental music seems to be through the generally sustained expression of the same or of a consistently similar group of intensities. However, all intensities—no matter their respective natures— eventually grow boring and so cease to maintain their full effectiveness after a given (usually surprisingly limited) duration. In order for an “intense” musical object to maintain its initial intensity, it cannot remain unaltered in time: if left unchanged, a sudden barrage of TV static will quickly reduce from our full attention instead to the capacity of a mere sub-thought.

Toward a more complete visceral-intellectual experience within a personally authentic context, the successful maintenance of a relatively energetic meta-intensity at times necessitates an ongoing juggling of intensities: an evolving counterpoint of musical characteristics related to the categorical notion of intensity (amplitudinal, rhythmic, tempic, register-oriented, and so forth; by “tempic,” I refer specifically the quality of a work’s speed) – for example, the alternation of a loud, rhythmically slower passage with a quieter yet more rapid series of developments.

Influences Most especially in the realm of new music, I am ultimately interested in a pursuit of the extreme—both in terms of the quality we strive to present as well as the adventurousness of the ideas pursued. The musical experience I value most is both completely considered and at the same time thoroughly visceral in some way. For me, the most deeply successful works across all media accomplish both objectives concurrently.

At some point, I began asking myself what specific logistical advantages do composers of

new music command? Initially as an analytical exercise, where do our particular core strengths lie as a field/genre/style? For me, a salient answer to this question has been, simply, specificity—an extreme precision that opens unique doors toward realizing wildly complex new worlds, and far outside of real-time: essentially, the power to realize pretty much whatever we might be able to imagine (therefore limiting us primarily to the boundaries of our respective imaginations).

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I began studying rock and jazz guitar at the age of 16, and vernacular music continues to influence me, rock music most directly. Not atypical for new music composers possessing musical backgrounds in non-classical traditions, I sought to assimilate my diverse worlds into a cohesive methodology. Personally, I have too often found the archetypal approaches employed toward incorporating and emulating these influences into new musical works as relatively unconvincing.

For me, the crux of this dissatisfaction derives from what I see as a general tendency to incorporate the trappings of rock (or any folk or vernacular tradition) without really getting down to its underlying fundamentals—in this case, concentrating on the ornament of a distorted guitar or drum kit, for instance, rather than the genre’s deep, underlying intensity—the real rambunctiousness, the brutal drive, the sense of wild energy so readily available. Rarely does contemporary music really being to approach these core qualities with even moderate approximation.

The pursuit of this thoroughly alive, edge-of-you-seat quality within rock has served as another intersecting personal impetus toward musical solutions involving an escalated momentum, the concentrated event, and generally accelerated rates of event shift.

The “Problem” of the Beat While I enjoy and am influenced by a variety of both experimental and popular musics, the simple fact is that a large body of the music that I love operates with some kind of a beat, and I am constantly influenced by the manipulation of the beat across an array of musical forms, styles, and contexts. In addition to my own natural history with vernacular beat-oriented genres, this attraction also relates simply to the intrinsic directness, the raw drive, and the pure potential for unabashed musical energy inherent in the beat. The beat drags us forward; at the same time, true drive is more than simply a function of beat.

For some time, I struggled to find a thoroughly integrated, authentic, and satisfactory manner in which to incorporate the beat—related at its core to my relationship with vernacular music—into my composed music.

While the notion of a simply repeating beat operates very successfully in a great deal of popular music, a direct transference of approach from one musical style or genre to another can often be counterproductive, simply because it is very typically, at its core, a transference of pastiche and not of intrinsic, underlying values. Musical mechanisms don’t necessarily function the same ways as each other, nor should they. When the use of the beat is authentically and usefully transferred, in such a way as to advance the art—for

example, in the works of Steve Reich or Louis Andriessen—I believe it is due largely to a deep internalization and ownership of the fundamental “beat materials,” as opposed to a clever regurgitation of ornaments.

Mario Davidovsky once summarized an ongoing concern for many of us regarding the beat when he noted that the issue is basically one of attention. If not engineered cleverly, the extensive use of even, impersonal beat materials within contemporary art music can easily turn to a hypnotic drone, often lulling the audience away from truly attentive listening rather than inciting a hyper-attention and drawing them in to our highly intense and wonderful worlds. (N.B. – While a kind of hyper-hypno-attentiveness may indeed be available via the protracted employment of drones and beat repetition, for me at least, this is a very different experience and category of attention.)

My personal need to authentically incorporate the beat into my composed music ultimately resulted in the employment of a fundamentally evolving sense of beat—an ongoing, regularly shifting rhythmic metamorphosis. While I admire and remain influenced by much minimalism, and while I also criticize so much academic music that bothers not at all to help the listeners listen, nonetheless, in my own music I desire more than just a gradual process.

Similarly designed for an audience who seeks to actually maintain their place in the music, my approach is far more self-interruptive than obviously process-driven. Instead, the rapid evolutions, interruptions, and ongoing interpolations of a hyperactive, almost mixed-mania beat offered something much more personally appropriate, delivering a vital underlying sense of drive and intensity without the same opportunities for disappearance into inattention through predominately static patterns.

Additional/Environmental Influences Heraclitus was right—change is the only constant.

For me, nearly all things point toward expression in a new combination of sounds. New influences, new cultures require new forms. Music will naturally change as the way people listen changes; as society shifts, music evolves—not necessarily toward something universally better, but simply along a continual progression of the now, as music seeks to fit the soul of the time and the respective life and culture.

I wasn’t necessarily looking for new musical materials or foundations. I simply sought a fresh, personal way of treating the materials I most prefer.

Authentic art can’t help but to some degree reflect the realities in which it was produced, the various environments surrounding its creation. The derivations of this general work and these tendencies also stem from, in a larger sense, both a critique and a celebration of us as a culture, society, and species. In particular, the general onslaught of both positive and negative informations, invocations, experiences, and possibilities available within this modern American industrialized life has acted as an obvious influence, both naturally as well as deliberately, toward phenomena such as highly escalated momentums and

increasingly concentrated events. Humanly, I somehow find myself both in love with and yet highly critical of this present swarm—the essential nature of this relentlessness driving the modern flow as much as the struggle of the individual within all of this madness.

The Occupation of Time & The Well-Considered Note Especially within this music—which represents itself as a challenging art asking for a special, sustained attention—it seems that out of respect to the listener at the very least, the art music composer bears a responsibility to present his or her audiences with the most honestly and authentically rendered art object possible. It seems antithetical to the underlying conceit as well as an insult to the listener to present him or her with anything less than the utmost effort for the duration consumed.

It seems not only reasonable, but necessary that this music—given this genre’s particular scarcity of resources and audiences—that out of all muiscs this music at least attempt a rigorous sense of quality. This music, above all, bears a responsibility to the listener to last no longer than it truly needs.

Listening to this Music Every composer brings his/her own personal culture to a given work of music. To varying degrees and through various means, every composer fabricates and presents his/her music’s context to the audience, both in and around the work in question. The particular culture a proficient composer can imbue into his or her work is in its own way deliberate, consistent, complete, and authentic.

While my music strives for something deeply considered, I nonetheless want the context of its listening to remain as simple, straightforward, and natural as possible. I want a music in which everything one needs to begin is already within the music itself, but which simultaneously operates on an intricate methodology—paths one could continue to pursue through extensive investigation and repeated listenings.

It strikes me that too much emphasis is often placed upon the need for aesthetic understanding when listening to new music, a caveat that more often than not reeks of excuse. While understanding is wonderful and should indeed add to the appreciation of a well-considered work, for me at least, it is not what makes or breaks an initial musical experience. I don’t believe that a successful work should require a listener to feel that he or she is listening for anything specific. With the exception of a handful of individuals in the world, I certainly don’t believe most people enjoy listening to Beethoven, for instance, primarily because they truly “understand” his music. I do believe we can gain a deeper enjoyment of Beethoven’s work through a greater knowledge of it—not that understanding is a prerequisite for a powerful and worthwhile musical experience, just that it can enhance a given experience’s experiential potential.

Due to a coincidence of factors, this document has served as a particular opportunity to engage a comprehensive personal (primarily solipsistic) exegesis. At the same time, while I wanted these explanations to exist for those interested, I don’t expect that any listener or

performer could or should completely “understand,” or that understanding should rank as any requirement to gain a meaningful and enjoyable experience from my music. I’m not even sure I completely “understand” my music, or, honestly, exactly what understanding really even means in this context. What I ultimately hope is that every listener can derive something deeply special and worthwhile from the experience of listening to my music—that maybe, in some small way, it might even change the way that they think.

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BRIEF BIOGRAPHY

CHRISTOPHER JON HONETT was born in 1977. He holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University, graduating in 2007 under advisor Julian Anderson. His teachers have also included Mario Davidovsky, Bernard Rands, Chaya Czernowin, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Magnus Lindberg, Lee Hyla, Yehudi Wyner, Joshua Fineberg, William Kraft, Jeremy Haladyna, Tikey Zes, and James Heiner. In addition to his compositional work, Chris writes about music and co-authored The Listen, a book regarding new music geared for anyone despite his or her musical education. Chris’s works have been performed by a variety of groups and he has occupied administrative roles with a number of contemporary art music organizations. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Rebecca.

ADDITIONAL CREDITS

Andrew Moses Freidman, Michael Scott Cuthbert, and Rebecca Purdum Honett all provided exceptional and insightful editing acumen toward this textual work. I remain deeply appreciative of their generous contributions.

LA, Fall 2011