string figures

project for electric guitar, environment, un/trained musicians (2018)

Premiere: Arrow Fitzgibbon, Colin Tucker, and participants, Null Point, Artpark, Lewiston, NY. August 19, 2018.

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About:

This piece is a short text score which codifies strategies for activating an electric guitar with materials found in an outdoor environment. Materials found in an this environment are brought into contact with the guitar strings by multiple musicians (with any or no training). This positions the instrument not as a vehicle for monologic masculinist display (as in the Guitar Hero) but rather as a catalyst for a performance situation characterized by non-hierarchical interactions between musicians, and by the location’s intrinsic role in the performance.

I offer gratitude to performers Zane Merritt and Magnus Andersson, with whom I collaborated on my first piece for electric guitar, to performers Arrow Fitzgibbon, Megan Kyle, Ethan Hayden, and Lena Nietfeld, and audience participants, with whom I collaborated on the present piece—and Sonia Clark at Artpark, who commissioned it.