WILD

“Commissioned by Lorelei and Manchester Collective to write a piece in response to, or to exist beside, Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, I set about reflecting on Woolf’s words, filtering them out bit by bit until distilled collection of textual building blocks emerged, resulting in a page with only a word or two visible on each page. It bears a resemblance in my mind to the black triptychs that hang in Rothko’s Chapel — mostly monochromatic, with textural ripples.

“I’d like to think that there is an essence of the meaning of Woolf’s words contained in my filtering process, but now there is space for music to breathe between and give new life to the words. My piece for Lorelei sets six of these black-out texts, one for each chapter in Woolf’s essay. I wonder how Woolf, who died of suicide just shy of 30 years prior to Rothko’s own self-inflicted death, would have felt sitting in Rothko’s Chapel, or hearing Feldman’s response. Would she have wondered about the resources and support that helped to ferry these canonic works into the world? Would Rothko’s Chapel be the room of one’s own, the sanctuary of creative reflection she advocated for, or a reminder of the exclusiveness of time and space to think to certain societal echelons? Would their shared struggle with depression be a source of connection or estrangement? I perceive both as artists who endeavored to carve out vast spaces (with language, with color) where impossible things could become possible. Would they feel a resonance between their works as I do? I don’t endeavor to answer these questions in my piece for Lorelei, but to let them gently shape my musical response.”

I met Khadijah Queen a few years ago at the Civitella Ranieri residency in the Umbrian region of Italy, where we spent a month in close exchange, learning one another’s practices and diving deeply into our own work. Since then, I have dreamed of setting her words to music, and I am excited for this long held collaboration to finally come to life.

The composition will move between raw, visceral sonorities and more fragile, intimate vocal gestures, layered with electronic textures drawn from processed micro samples of voice and body percussion. The piece aims to create a cathartic and enveloping sound world, grounded in radical honesty and the physical presence of sound.

Description AI-powered voice synthesis has become incredibly ubiquitous in recent years, putting into question the inalienable relationship of the voice to the body, as well as our abilities to appraise authenticity, intention, and humanity in mediated voices. While many early AI voice synthesis technologies were developed with the goal of increasing accessibility, they have also been coopted for nefarious means, allowing for deceit, exploitation, and control.

broad band will incorporate custom AI-powered voice synthesis technology to probe the limitations of these tools, exploring what it means to have and to use a voice in modern society. Through close collaboration with the singers, we will record hours of source material and create custom models of each of their voices using open-source AI voice synthesis architectures. During the performance, the singers will engage with these models in real time, weaving a sonic tapestry that blurs the lines between the singers’ voices and their synthesized counterparts. But more importantly, the piece will be composed to specifically probe the failure points of these models, examining how the underlying assumptions that have influenced their training and development fail to capture the breadth and depth of human vocal expression.

The text will be constructed from a variety of sources, including reactions the singers have while creating, experimenting, and engaging with their models. This iterative and collaborative process is in itself a testament to the power of human artistry, and a refutation of the notion that art-making and cultural production can simply be automated away through the use of generative AI.

By pushing the limits of these models, we can shed light on not only how they function, but also how we distinguish human from machine and fact from fiction.

Using a signature approach of my compositional practice, I will incorporate speech fragments – taken from interviews with the artists of Lorelei and others, who I will question about their thoughts on what it means to be wild, as well as field recordings of non-human sounds. The language and sounds that emerge from the interviews and recordings will be sculpted into a fixed media part, and will also generate pitched and rhythmic motifs that will be woven into the vocal score.