Spoken language is a medium overflowing with sonic variety and nuance. The billions of people on the planet who speak every day of their lives are regularly engaging in a practice that, if it were framed as music, would defy all norms of technical virtuosity and explode the normative categories that enact a hygienic partitioning of sounds into “musical” and “non-musical.” Language’s capacities for sense-making rely on subtle variations of timbre in noise and tone, and on minute inflections of pitch. Yet, because speech is cognitively encountered merely as a vehicle for the meaning it conveys, we so often disregard both its sonic richness and the physical dynamics of its embodied articulation.
Written for my colleagues at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, The Earliest Seduction is an attempt to recuperate this richness. The piece’s generative material is derived from a detailed transcription of text from Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie as spoken by Stephanie Loveless: “The earliest seduction is a thorn planted in the somatic field of the mind, around which the subject develops like a callosity.” Time-stretched by a factor of 60, this text becomes a terrain upon which the improvisers can play.
This piece was developed collaboratively with the members of the ensemble over a period of months, and I want to gratefully acknowledge their contributions and their support throughout the process.
Matthew Goodheart, piano and gong tech
Stephanie Loveless, gong consonants
Robert Whalen, percussion
Rob Hamilton, electronics
The Earliest Seduction was premiered by the EOS Ensemble at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Chapel & Cultural Center on October 18, 2023.