Etude aux Bol Umami (Redux)

Program Note: This piece was created in the wake of my exposure to the ideas of Schaeffer, Smalley, Barrett, Blackburn and others about gesture and the qualification of sound. In her writing about her piece Little Animals, Natasha Barrett establishes a spectrum between representative and abstract sound. I felt that the idea of this spectrum in particular codified many of my experiences with electronic music both in the academic vein and otherwise, and I wanted to explore it in a piece of my own. Etude aux Bol Umami establishes a source bond – a connection between a sound and the notion of the object which manifests the sound – around some chopsticks and a ceramic bowl that I frequently ate with while isolated over Winter. The recordings of these objects all feature a lot of room noise which I feel firmly establishes their representative nature. As an analogue for my experience daydreaming while eating, I used the processing techniques I had studied while reading about these foundational composers to manipulate the source bond and create abstract gestures with the recorded material.