6 players: mixed sextet - Family Machine

Ensemble: flute, clarinet in Bb, violin, viola, percussion, piano

Duration: 5 minutes

Commissioned by: Emily Anderson for Eighth Blackbird at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture

Premiered: Eighth Blackbird at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture

Note:

There are some themes that take up long-term residence in your work, popping out their heads Caddyshack-style when you think you’ve finished with them; preoccupations to be dealt with again and again. One obvious one, for me, is family: my music is full of prodigal daughters, restless sons, telepathic sisters and mercurial cousins, monolithic parents.

Another theme, more amorphous but constant, is an unshakeable anxious energy–a need to stay in motion, to fill the space, perhaps to distract myself (or others) from a more daunting reality just offstage.

Suspecting these themes might be related, I sent a note to my friend Emma Healey, a writer whose work shares similar fixations. I asked her for a bit of text linking the two ideas: a family in motion. Her reply:

How family draws itself through you: uncaring, expansive and tracked to its own time as tide. There were times when the three of us - my mother, grandmother, and me - would remember a story together, and all that it took was the telling to make us a single machine pulling time back and forth through each other. Forever? Free will? Incantation? It freaked me right out. There was something about it I loved, being more than myself, and then something I hated. That was part of it too: call, release and response and relapse, a repeating the pattern repeating. There are some types of music you learn and some kinds you receive and some times you’re a channel. You don’t get to choose. They are not what you are and they made you.

I loved the idea of family as a machine: a process in perpetual motion, barreling towards an unfixed destination, pulling in everchanging and sometimes contradictory directions.

Family Machine is an attempt to translate this idea– and Emma’s text– into a new work for the excellent chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird. Like many of my recent pieces, it is in moto perpetuo from the first note to the final barline, although in this case I have made an explicit effort not to allow a single moment of rest: anytime a sense of balance is nearly achieved, the material gets drawn back through the “machine”. The piano functions as a peacekeeper, a voice of reason at a heated dinner table, introducing more relaxed rhythms in the face of a relentless blaze of sixteenth notes. As the argument burns itself out, a melody emerges, simple and direct, in ascending canon. Agitated elements of earlier music are reintroduced, but now they are woven into a shared fabric, providing support and counterpoint for this new, more integrated upward motion.

I suspect this will not be the last time this restless family finds itself in my work. But as Emma says: there are some types of music you learn and some kinds you receive and some times you’re a channel. You don’t get to choose.