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 / to my friend Susana, for the way she listened to me noodling on my violin, eyes wide with what felt to me like wonder and love, and for saying I should use my violin to guide meditations, and when I said oh, that's a gorgeous idea, you mean with someone leading people through and into the experience with their voice?, saying no, guided by the sound of my bow, the way it flowed. /

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/ to Pema Chodron, for guiding me through my fear into this musical practice inspired by Tonglen, [1] /

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/ to George Lewis, for the article that inspired me to think about creative structure in the form of a seed, [2] an inner patterning that could unfold in dynamic relation to my relationships and surroundings. I was in a beautiful improvisation class led by composers Laura Steenberge and Danny Clay at the time, [3] and I was wrestling with how to find the expressive fluency that I had when playing notated compositions while also allowing myself improvisatory freedom. I read George Lewis’s article and my mind was blown. In the article, Lewis uses the terms “Afrological” and “Eurological” as tools to “refer metaphorically to musical belief systems and behavior which, in my view, exemplify particular kinds of musical ‘logic’” relating to the ways in which improvisative musics developed in African-American and European musical traditions. George Lewis describes the “Afrological” understanding of (improvisatory) freedom as being arrived at through “discipline, defined as technical knowledge of music theory and of one’s instrument as well as thorough attention to the background, history, and culture of one’s music.” He describes the Eurological understanding of (improvisatory) freedom as consisting either of (1) freedom from structure, “sometimes framed in terms of European music’s traditional composer-to-performer hierarchy,”  or as (2) freedom that must be “‘controlled’ or ‘structured’ in some way.” [4] It was the idea of discipline as a backbone for musical freedom, which Lewis locates as a core of Afrological improvisational traditions, that lit me on fire—here was a way that I could build eloquence without sacrificing the connective fluency that daily practice enabled me to access in through-composed compositions. This became the spark for many layers of collaborative experiments, one of which became the meditation below. /

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/ to Julie Zhu, whom I asked to compose a musical seed with which I could work with the tangles of gratitude and grief in this opening chapter/section/movement. [5] We had a conversation sometime soon after meeting, I think in 2018, in which Julie (who is an incredible visual artist as well as composer, friend, and multi-dimensional thinker) shared a frustration she was working through about the disconnect between the range of intentions in the strokes and colors in her meticulously expressive graphic scores and the range of sounds that they seemed to call forth. We were outside walking next to the busy student union, so I was unfiltered. I said I thought it was a matter of not having a full ecosystem of structure in which to work: as someone trained to find and care for the expressive dimensions of specific pitches and melodic lines, I found that the absence of any harmonic or melodic mode in which to work tended to lead me to default to a broadly textural and gestural interpretation of what was on the page, which pushed aside a whole range of pitch-based expressive spaces in favor of an expressive but distinct “noise-music” palette. I wanted to have ecosystems to practice with – etudes, fragments, seeds – and then draw gestural graphic scores to use as maps through those ecosystems. At the time I didn’t connect this with the various modal systems that guide the musical creativity that isn’t split into European categories of composition/improvisation/

performance— for instance, Turkish taksim, or the performances of Hindustani ragas [6]. I’d also not yet encountered Matana Roberts’s graphic scores, which frequently employ specific pitches or fragments of Western notation as parts of a nuanced graphic and/or textual whole (see, for example, the stunning jacket art of the LP for Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis, [7] which consists of collaged excerpts from the graphic scores for the album’s music), nor had I yet found and fallen in love with scores by Raven Chacon, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, and countless others that combine words, graphics, and traditional notation in brilliantly expressive and empowering ways [8]. I’m grateful to Julie for listening to me in my ignorance and for returning to our early conversation years later to compose this musical seed to live in the ecosystem of my dissertation, as a study in liberatory practice./

 

/ to Denise Gill, who showed me the importance of emplacement and relationality in sound, validated and pushed farther my early attempts to use artistic media as a form of critical and ethnographic engagement, and introduced me to the work of Steven Feld, whose development of acoustemology theorizes “sound as a way of knowing” (and whose field recordings exemplify the ways in which sound can be used creatively to make ideas, places, and relationships known). [9] 

 

/ to Yvette Jackson, whose compositions and whose use and theorization of "narrative soundscape composition" as a method for musical analysis blew my mind. [10]  I learned from Yvette that in the early days of recording it was a toss-up whether the “universal standard” for audio recording would involve the use of stereo microphones (two microphones placed a little bit apart from one another, so that when played back through external loudspeakers they approximate the spatial location of the sound on a single plane) or binaural microphones (two microphones placed by a person’s ears or the ears of a dummy head, so that when the recording is played back through headphones the spatialization and proximity of the sound would be audible with uncanny clarity) [11]. The catching point that made stereo recording the industry standard was not its cost or availability, but rather the ease with which it was scalable (multiple people could listen simultaneously to two speakers) and roughly standardizable (in contrast with the setup for recording with binaural microphones, which must approximate the size of the listener's head in order to achieve maximal effectiveness) [12]. Because I’m less interested in standardization than I am in proximity and relationship, I’ve recorded this meditation using a pair of binaural microphones that I’m wearing in my ears, so that the sound will reach your ears approximately as it did mine. They’re not particularly fancy microphones (I believe I paid around $100 for them), but they offer a rare opportunity for intimacy, an invitation for you to listen to what I record from inside the after-image of my own body.

 

/ and to Susana, again, for giving me the candle that lights the quiet opening of the meditation. /

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Find a position that supports your body.

 

Let this meditation be a companion for whatever is present with you.