This piece was commissioned by cellist Jamie Clark, for a project called “Hear Her Voice” at Stetson University. It brought together a collective of seven female composers - Eliza Brown, Brittany J. Green, Polina Nazaykinskaya, Anne Wang, Binna Kim, Liliya Ugay and myself - united by a prompt to each write a solo for Jamie reflecting on our personal pandemic perspectives in isolation, with our common thread of womanhood. The title comes from a significant female presence during this time - my closest friend from childhood, Lindsey. During one particularly reflective phone chat, we were trying to find words for what the year has been. She said: “the world may be on fire, but at least it’s warm.” The world may be crumbling, exploding, imploding…but we have each other through the flames.
A significant element to my personal pandemic experience that defined this period and filled much of my diary entries was the ending of a partnership during COVID, though experiencing its beginnings together. I wrote diary entries in 2020 about the excruciating pain I had experienced, and this piece is based on those 8 diary entries: 1 per month from March 2020 - October 2020. They are not included here, but the emotions behind them are expressed through 8 emotions dispersed throughout the piece:
Crumble - March 2020
Distance - April 2020
Tangled Love - May 2020
Heal - June 2020
Touch - July 2020
Replay - August 2020
Sedation - September 2020
Hold Onto Moments Ending while they Happen - October 2020
Though the cello is physically and literally playing in isolation, it interacts with these mental memories, the person in them, trying to access those times through them by embodying the emotions and experiences in them. In the accompanying electronics track, I use only 8 notes, each representing an entry’s month and the 8 emotions. I permeate and manipulate these notes such that it seems time has no structure…no linear beginning, middle and end. It represents in sound how I thought about these months and what happened in them; it didn’t seem to go from one to the other, and there was no direct course of progress. The months swirled like soup, with a frustrating cycle of steps forward and back.