Sonata for the Body in Three-Part Time
Essays (Prelude & Fugue in Words)
Scores, Coda, Acknowledgements
This is the story of this body, my body, in three-part time.
A past, present, and future told through abstraction and theory and structure
to make this finite body make sense to my infinite soul.
–
Past. RANDOM WALK
What is the past? A series of memories, thought of in the present.
Memories as they happened, remembered in a certain order.
What is the past? Memories chopped up, reordered, formed into a new understanding.
The past is a story of memories you tell yourself to make sense of your present moment.
This story I’m telling myself is a story of performance.
Performance of gender, performance of race, performance of music.
Performance through the body.
Performance through the hands.
–
Present. Asterisms
What is the present moment?
The present is the only tangible reality we’ll ever experience.
The present is forever in motion.
The present is process and action in the midst of happening.
My process and action happens between the sky and the ground
between male and female
between Chinese and American
between tradition and modernity
between religion and science.
The story of my present is a story of dualities, motions, cycles.
The cycles of this body against the cycles of the sun and moon
against the cycles of stars in ancient Chinese constellations.
–
Future. Modal Mixture
What is the future?
The future is ephemeral and hangs in the air.
The future is distance in time.
Distance in time is the same as distance in space.
A name is a container for the body, across space.
A name is a container for the body, across time.
When I think of the future, I think of names.
The story of my future is a story of names and promises and exchanges.
Like this body, music has many names, serving different points in time and space.
I invite you to give me a container, to choose a name, a body, a self.
In exchange, I promise to give it back to you across time and space.
I promise to compose this future from the present moment, your present moment.
–
