Open Ocean, Forever

Listen to the work here!
 
Open Ocean, Forever is a work for solo tam-tam that uses graphic notation and a puzzle-like system of moving throughout a space of musical gestures to convey the imagery of being lost in an infinite ocean. The specific mental image conveyed is a completely subsuming blue expanse, that tints the viewer’s sight of their own body as the water around them refracts light. However, apart from their own body, there is nothing else besides the ocean, hardly even gravity. While seemingly a relaxing feeling, there is a certain resignation to loneliness that accompanies this thought, and the wet timbres of the tam-tam (sometimes played with actual water) paint the picture of that lonely ocean. This mental image, and the piece that corresponds with it, began their life as a planned piece for the first installment in my intermedia performance art recital series The Concentric Universes Project, entitled Voices Heard Through Water. As the program changed shape into its final form, this planned composition was removed from the program, and that freeing allowed the piece to take shape into the open duration graphic score form which it currently occupies. In the piece, the performer moves through gestures in a square grid: the gestures are determined by the color and letter of each square (as detailed in the performance instructions) and the motion between them is determined by colored borders. The performer traces a path that takes them toward all four corners of the metaphorical infinite sea, and only by returning to where they began are they allowed to escape their isolation.
 
This work and four other solo percussion works constitute The Empathy Cycle,
connected by their themes of love, understanding, and the resilience of human
kindness.