No Such Virtue (‘There Is No Rose’ Permutation)

No Such Virtue (‘There Is No Rose’ Permutation)

for solo voice and live electronics (2023) 12:00

Premiered March 30, 2023 in an Evelyn Saylor Portrait Concert, KM28, Berlin, Germany

No Such Virtue is one of a series of pieces I’m calling “permutations”, in which I take a recording I have made which has meaning to me and algorithmically cut it up and reorder it. In a misuse of granular processing, I have re-sampled the recording in such a way that the repeating play points for each sample seem to create a loop. However, upon close listening, the “loop” slowly changes due to the play points moving backwards through the audio file. With this approach I seek to create a piece that is simultaneously fast and slow, and which simultaneously allows for both listening into the sound on a micro level as well as across a longer stretch of time on a macro level. In this case I worked with a recording of myself, my sister Lydia Saylor, and my “sister in song” Annie Gårlid singing There Is No Rose from Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, a piece which we all grew up singing. I perform the piece with live electronics on my singing voice.