Limn (2015)

Program note

In this duo for Stacey Pelinka and Leighton Fong, I continue to explore ideas about musical time that have been a thread of my recent work. The moment of the musical “now,” a chord being brought into existence, is not an instant, but rather a small window, the width of which varies continuously throughout the performance. In this new work, I create a performance context in which that window may be enlarged to the point that its contents become promoted to the level of musical material. It represents a new type of counterpoint with its own compositional and performance practice.

The electronics consist of realtime manipulations of audio collected from electronic stethoscopes. The recordings were made during a performance of a collaboration between MacCallum and choreographer Teoma Naccarato entitled III: Synchronism, which consists of intimate one-on-one performances in which issues of mutual trust, consent, and play are negotiated nonverbally, as the pair transgresses boundaries of internal versus external, and self, other, and environment. In this work, the duo goes through the process of limning—illuminating—the auditory traces left behind by bodies as they engaged in an intimate experience with a stranger.