When I’d gotten the snapshot the day before, the image had made me feel a simultaneous inward pull and outward fling—the whirlpool felt like a gathering, a holding; while the splash let go, released.

 

Ambika pointed out that the seed of this friction was in the name I’d chosen, Reservoirs, and the installation’s tension between flowing water and dry containers; and I was suddenly glad that when I’d gotten cold feet about this title I’d been too late in writing to the printer to get it changed to my alternate title, Invisible Rivers. The friction I felt in the word "reservoirs," my discomfort with the image I called up of the artificial containing and parceling of waterflow, was the point.

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I want to explore this sensation, this in-between of holding and flowing. 

 

Early on in my PhD curriculum, I was assigned an article by musicologist Carolyn Abbate, a deep-thinking writer whose foundational work centers on European opera music, and the essay lit me on fire. It’s called “Music: Drastic or Gnostic?” [2], terms that Abbate used to try to parse out the significance of the hot, slippery experience of performed music (something that at the time of her writing was more of an afterthought in musicological studies, which historically has been based in the ideas that might be parsed out of the Eurological and abstract concept of a musical "work") [3].  This hit me hard as a recent DMA-graduate in the middle of my first year at Stanford, because it seemed to me like here was someone who really got it: who loved and wanted to touch the “ineffable” core of what it felt like to make and listen to music as a lived experience and not as a cryogenically preserved abstract shell of itself delivered in the Eurological frame of a musical "work." But her imagery, linked with the ideas of French philosopher-musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch, left me frustrated: she spoke of music as something wild whose gift of freedom was repaid by hypothetical scholars by putting it in a cage of mystical symbolism, as if there were no other way to know music without the constrictions of a theoretical box. [4] Why the binary of cage vs. freedom, I wondered? Why not be more of a musical ecologist, I wondered, perhaps tagging and releasing the metaphorical bird, observing it move in its natural habitat? [5]

 

At the time, and in the place where I found myself (introductory coursework in a conservative musicology program), these feelings I had— of situating my work in a conjoined in-between-space of theory-praxis— felt distinctly marginal, radical even. Now I see them joining a huge body of work that has long been sustained by people working by choice or by necessity outside institutionalized Western colonial canons.

 

I avoided traditional musicology articles for several years, a response to the closing down I felt in my body early on in my studies. Part of my work in this dissertation has been learning to care for that closing down, to notice it, and to stay attentive to the soft tendrils that draw me back into curiosity.  In rereading Abbate’s article today, I find myself connecting with her even more than I did at first. I’d like to return to this article, which was a part of my introductory musicology curriculum at Stanford, because for me, in the midst of the theoretical texts that were centered in my required curriculum, and in the midst of my own journey as a performer trained in Western art music traditions, this was something that reached into a densely knotted theoretical space and opened up something like a possibility for breath.

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In "Music: Drastic or Gnostic?", Abbate comes to the powerful and vulnerable (in)conclusion that there is no mystical, symbolic truth to be uncovered within the experience of a musical performance, however much she’s tempted into the search (both by the historical traditions of her discipline, musicology, and by the mythology and mystique of the music around which this discipline arose). “A performance does not conceal a cryptic truth to be laid bare,” she writes. “But accepting its mortality, refusing to look away, may nevertheless be some form of wisdom.” [6][7]

 

In this refusal, there is a bright flashing opening into the words and works of other luminaries. Pema Chodron’s steady hand guiding into “the places that scare us” offers the traditional Buddhist practice of Tonglen as a way into the difficult practice of compassion [8]. Donna Haraway offers the more wiggly, hot-and-steamy imagery of a compost heap in all its creative glory, asking us to “stay with the trouble,” and reminding us that the smelly mess of decomposing is evidence of an active process of re-imagining and reclaiming nutrients as the fuel for new forms of life [9]. Both Chodron and Haraway are asking us to witness what is present, to refuse to look away, as Abbate writes of the experience of soundmaking.

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I follow these connections back to the spark that led me to propose the project that became Reservoirs, which was learning how the inhabitants of the materially rich and racially exclusionary city of Boulder, myself among them, were responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions through the purchase of goods manufactured elsewhere— electronics, building materials, food, packaging – than all other sources of emissions combined. In other words, the trappings of the materialist culture that made Boulder look so wealthy and manicured had invisible strings trailing across the earth around it and eventually leading into the warming air. 

 

In the particular context of the Boulder Public Library, which like many public libraries has become a sort of de facto welfare service for people shut out of the expensive housing and consumer culture of the city, I found myself thinking of inheritances: inherited houses and land, in particular, which felt especially charged in what Christina Sharpe would call the ongoing wake of the genocidal violence through which white settlers claimed both the land and the gold that they found on it. [10] What if I asked people in the area to share objects that they’d inherited, but not the traditionally (capitalistically ?) valuable heirlooms, just the boxes they’d been kept in, and perhaps the stories that were intertwined with these containers? [11] What if I used transducers to play the sound of Boulder creek through these containers, to allow the materials to speak their own stories through the ways they filtered the water’s resonances? Could this be a way to open conversation around disposability, intergenerational connections, embodied emissions, and complex inheritance, without shutting it down immediately through feelings of guilt and defensiveness? [12]

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I want to gather all these words— about holding and flowing, about climate change, theory and practice, homes and being unhoused— and place them beside the sounds and materials that grew from my Reservoirs collaborations.

 

A drawer, from my friend Iddo Aharoney:

 

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A rolodex, from a community member who responded to my invitation:

 

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The trunk that my Japanese Canadian grandfather carried with him when he was finally allowed to enlist in the Canadian army as a Japanese language interpreter:

 

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A cylinder of mosquito incense sticks:

 

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Laid next to one another, in proximity to one another, these ideas and sounds and forms suggest constellations and meanings. My mind sketches words: about the way witnessing creates meaning [13]; about theories and boxes and flowing; about why I’m hovering between thoughts about climate change and about musical methodologies. But something else interrupts these patterns. It’s a feeling, something in my gut, that moves as I listen to the water flowing through the material and structural contours of each empty box.

 

This feeling leads me back to a violin lesson with Harumi Rhodes.

 

I’m struggling to hit a high note in the Berg violin concerto, and getting more and more focused on my left hand hitting the exact spot on the fingerboard where that high E-flat lived, and it’s not working. Harumi suggests that I shift my focus: instead of trying to find the spot on the fingerboard with my left hand, what would happen if I paid attention to how my right arm was moving, to the speed and the feeling of my right arm in motion as I channeled the expressive arc of that phrase, and then attach the motion of my left hand to the motion of my right arm? What if I actually pick a point of time in my bowstroke and feel my left hand land as I moved through that point of friction?

 

If I step back from this, I could draw a picture of the structure like a series of interlinked arrows:

 

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But this isn’t actually how I experience it. What I feel is the sensation of motion, linked with the way the phrase feels, the people I’m playing with, the space I’m playing in, and all coming together as a structural guide for where I am in relation to this whole, one part of which happens to include that high E-flat at the moment where it falls in the moving swinging relational dance.

 

This is a way of orienting, or orientating, to use the (more commonly British English) word that Sara Ahmed develops in her brilliant Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others. Orientations, Ahmed writes, “involve different ways of registering the proximity of objects and others”  [14], and just as Donna Haraway writes that “it matters what matters we use to think other matters with” [15], Ahmed shows how important it is what “orientation devices” we use.

 

If we start with Husserl’s first volume of Ideas, for instance, then we start with the writing table. The table appears, we could say, because the table is the object nearest the body of the philosopher. [16]

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What happens if we think, with Harumi’s guidance, from the bow arm in motion? Movement, according to phenomenologist and dancer Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, is our mother tongue [17], and kinesthetic experiences have a quality beyond the fact of the changes in position that accompany them. [18]  The quality of experiencing motion isn’t merely one of registering rapidly changing coordinates in an abstract plane; it’s an experience. And that experience is fundamentally relational.

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Orienting in motion is a way of thinking relationally and of staying in touch with one's intentions through complex and unstable contexts. 

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs uncovers some relevant wisdom from her marine mammalian teachers in Undrowned. [19] She describes the ways that pantropical spotted dolphins move in synchronized collectives: “Knowing who they’re with helps them know where they’re at and where they want to be.” [20] As a guide for relational knowing, Gumbs describes marine mammals' use of echolocation. It's not mind-reading, she writes: "Some of this magic is just the complexity of being a mammal alive in sound," using reflected sound to create a living world of relational resonance. [21] Being a mammal alive in sound! I'm drawn viscerally into the sensation of being present with others through my instrument and body, in Matana Roberts’s Ethos ensemble, in string quartets and unconducted chamber groups, with the fff ensemble and Treebird.

 

In “Beneath Improvisation,” Vijay Iyer sums this dynamic up with the key addition of the element of power (most often missed or unacknowledged by those in possession of it):

 

“Improvisation could be [. . .] accurately described as movement in relation to power, or since power is omnipresent, we could just call it ‘movement in relation’ ” [22]

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The element of power brings home to me why the method Harumi shared with me, that I’ve described as “orienting in motion” [23], felt so liberating to me at the time (besides the fact that it very much increased my odds of hitting the note I wanted). Prior to working with Harumi, I’d often found myself trying to fit into what I assumed and was repeatedly told were the models of violinistic greatness. My favorites of these (invariably white male) violinists were David Oistrakh and Arthur Grumiaux, and I spent hours trying to fit my body into the pattern of their solidity, which seemed to me to pick notes out of the thin air of absolute space, and trying to mimic their stance and balance. When I (always) came up short, more interested in the fulcrum of movement between myself and my collaborators than in a secure stance (I once tried mimicking the ways I’d seen older male teachers sitting, letting my back rest against my chair while in a rehearsal, and felt audaciously egotistical and distanced), I felt this as a shortcoming in myself rather than a difference of positionality, embodiment, intention, and relationship.

 

Harumi’s guidance (which echoed and related to lessons I’d also had with one of her teachers, Donald Weilerstein, as well as with Mark Steinberg, who has been a guiding musical light since my undergraduate years) unlocked the possibility of moving from a position that wasn’t fixed and that didn’t depend on conforming to a standardized body type. It empowered me to orient myself from a position that could be characterized variously as unstable, shifting, precarious, responsive, and alive.

 

I became obsessed with The Mushroom at the End of the World, a text by anthropologist and magician of noticing Anna Tsing, at around the same time that COVID-19 was shutting down the world around me. [24] In it, Tsing follows the ungovernable matsutake mushroom into spaces devastated by colonial and capitalist forces, suggesting that these “unruly edges” are spaces where we can learn strategies for survival amidst capitalist and state violence.

 

We hear about precarity in the news every day. People lose their jobs or get angry because they never had them. Gorillas and river porpoises hover at the edge of extinction. Rising seas swamp whole Pacific islands. But most of the time we imagine such precarity to be an exception to how the world works. It’s what ‘drops out’ from the system. What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our time—or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek? [25]

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Tsing is centering a margin, like bell hooks in her 1989 article "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness" [26], and paying attention to the ways that instability shapes ways of living. Orienting in motion offers a way to find oneself in relation to these shifting, difficult spaces, and it returns me to the methods of engaging complexity that I was drawn to in the guidance of Petra Kuppers, Matana Roberts, and Claire Chase (and also helps me to become closer to the power of Harumi’s performance of the Janacek sonata).

 

Collective energy and the cultivation of community is just as much a process of orienting in motion as finding a pitch on a moving fingerboard. It depends on continuous and relational listening, attention not only to oneself in motion but to the ways one’s collaborators move with and against you, to the opportunities that arise in friction as well as in concordance.

 

Likewise, Petra Kuppers’s unflinching warmth makes space for the reality of the human body experiencing the tumult of motion, for the places of momentary balance that allow one to rest and dream and recover in the midst of the complex stimuli of motion.

 

Orienting in motion enables one to follow the directive of one's values and ideals (what Hannah Arendt calls the “principles” that distinguish freedom  [27]) while embedded in relational complexity. Put another way, it enables intentional movement outside of the stability provided by the boundaries of fixed categories. In other words, it is a practice that enables collective freedom: a liberatory practice.

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This practice depends on the unity of mind and body that Sylvia Wynter exposed as fundamental to a pre- and de-colonial worldview. [28]

 

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What if holding and flowing doesn’t need to be parsed? I used the word contradiction to describe what pulled me to the idea of this box filled with the sound of water, but a closer word to what I felt in the way the surface transducers allowed the sound of flowing water to bring me closer to the material qualities and structures of the boxes is wonder. [29] Katherine McKittrick describes the role of wonder in Black studies and anticolonial thought:

 

Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive. [30]

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Similarly, Anna Tsing follows the patchy upwellings of matsutake mushrooms as a guide to “the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times.” [31]

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Curiosity and wonder are ways of being with contradiction, of engaging with what refuses to be flattened. It opens space for witnessing, for staying in the uncollapsed moment (with Abbate, with my fellow Boulderites). I follow it into the gorgeous invitation offered by my friend Ambika [32] for the opening and closing ceremonies of Reservoirs.