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Early in my second year at Stanford, I told my friend Julie Zhu that I had this dream of hosting a sort of salon-style gathering where everybody could come no matter their background or interests and share something that lit them on fire, something they loved, whether it was musical or visual or audible or edible or drinkable or something else entirely. But, I said, my little studio apartment was so small, and the grad lounge was so, well, corporate. Julie immediately said Do it!!! and so I thought, oh ok, what if the smallness was the draw, the thing that could break down inhibitions and barriers? (This, I should say, was pre-pandemic, when the idea of packing thirty people onto every available surface of a single bedroom-kitchen-workspace-studio was conceivable). So the Tiny Studio Salon was born. It was after the first of these gatherings, as I sat sprawled on my bed with cold air streaming into the room from my open window, basking in the glow of what people had brought into this space, the energy still radiating from the piles of dirty dishes, empty chip bowls, and the wreckage of shared joy—that I made a visceral connection that I had half a mind to jump up and share with everyone asleep on the hall of my graduate housing building. This energy, what I felt from sharing joy and curiosity with everyone in the gathering, was exactly the same sensation that I felt when I was in the flow of a successful musical performance, successful meaning everything connected, myself and my collaborators and my body and the sounds and the room and the people around me. [3] This feeling is also what connected me with what Haruna Lee said to me years later in the isolating context of the pandemic: that they had realized that in a Zoom-mediated world the best way they could use their artistic skills was as a cultivator of community, and that the cultivation of community was an artistic practice.

 

In one of the early Tiny Studio Salons (2018 or early 2019), I shared an improvisation with my violin in which I invited everyone gathered there to hum any sound that they heard and connected with. My hope was that our voices together could become a resonance like that in a cathedral, could transform the physical architecture of this small space into something expansive and gorgeous. The first try was promising, and one of the guests, a brilliant scholar of Italian feminism and a wonderful singer named Maria Massucco, suggested that we try it again but everyone sustain whatever they hummed for the full length of their breath. We tried this and it was magic.

 

From this came a number of iterations of what I called Living Space, a collaborative text score for (variably) solo performer and audience, groups of performers acting as their own audience, or myself and a friend or two at a party leading friends in a free-flowing humming experiment.

 

In order to provide a sound-palette that emphasized hummable pitches and that empowered me to be deeply present with the people around me, I searched for ways of playing that meandered forward, backward, and in spirals through familiar pitch-territories. One framework that worked especially well for me, as a classically trained violinist leaning hard into experimental territory, was to take familiar and beloved musical scores, such as Bach’s works for solo violin or Kurtag’s Signs, Games, and Messages, and re-imagine the notes as stars that I could re-connect in different constellations. This enabled me to metabolize the patterns of movement that I’d internalized through hours of practice while also opening up new space in them for people to connect with, respond to, and reshape through the resonances of their voices.

 

For the first ensemble versions (produced in collaboration with the fff ensemble (May 2019), Stanford New Ensemble (May 2019), Ensemble Evolution (June 2019), Ensemble Instrumental de l'ESM Bourgogne-Franche-Comté (July 2019), I expanded on this framework, asking each participant to contribute their own constellation of sounds and to listen for ways that these constellations could intersect with and open up space in others’ constellations. In conversation with Stanford New Ensemble’s director Hans Kretz who had generously brought my prompt to France for a performance with the Ensemble Instrumental de l'ESM Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, I introduced the idea of intergenerationality, a succession of overlapping groups that enabled each participant to devote time to centering their constellation as well as to finding ways to use their constellations to support other generations of participants.

 

In these early versions, I emphasized the parts of the score that felt most positive to me: the invitation of listeners as co-participants, the expansive framework that the metaphor of constellations offered to performers who might be used to moving in a single direction through a written score, the living resonance of humming participants anchored in the invitation to follow and extend whatever they liked, or whatever “resonated” with them.

 

But as I was writing and thinking and musicking about decolonization and decomposition in the company of my brilliant friends Jonathan Leal [4] and Danny Clay [5], I realized that there was a second core idea driving this idea of “Living Space.” I’d gotten the idea for “compos(t)ing” as a way of framing musical creativity from Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble [6], a way to center the ways in which composition was equally a process of decomposing and reworking received matter and ways of thinking that had long extensions through history and across the cultures in which you participate. Together with the idea of musical seeds that I’d gotten from George Lewis’s article [7], compos(t)ing offered a way of imagining collaborative musical creativity that gave space for the non-dualistic roles surrounding traditional categories of performer-composer-improvisor-theorist-archivist. This idea works against the mythology of musical genius, an idea that centers the romanticized individual creator fighting against the grains of society, godlike and separate from the petty workings of everyday life. [8]  Instead of this, compos(t)ing leaves space for the sticky and rich ecosystem of living connections that nourishes and extends from every being, artists and all.

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Wait wait wait, I told my partner Phil one afternoon, "Living Space" is about composting. It’s about making room for dying and decay as an essential part of life, and I just wasn’t willing to embrace the complexities that admitting that would entail.  

 

I offer here the latest version of this score, which I created for a performance at my D.M.A. alma mater, the University of Colorado at Boulder, followed by a video meditation that I created from that performance. It’s influenced by Danny Clay’s whimsical cartoon compositions and by the hedgehog cards that I spent hours making for all my friends when I should have been reading Adorno. Lightness, and joy, as Ross Gay says, are inseparable from the weight of sorrow. Perhaps they can make space for breath.