What Pain Calls to Witness (2023) for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, piano, and fixed media

What Pain Calls to Witness is a meditation on chronic physical pain, inspired by and setting texts from Travis Chi Wing Lau’s Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2023). In the first poem, “The Body in Pain,” Travis refers to the wide-held claim that physical pain evades language. This provoked a thought—music and pain are similar in that they are both abstract sensory experiences, difficult to describe with language, and excellent community-builders. 

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I began contemplating this work in January 2023 while on tour with UMKC Conservatory Singers. My friend and mezzo-soprano Gwendolyn DeLaney and I sat in the back of the bus and bonded over our individual experiences with chronic pain, reading Travis’s text to supplement our conversation. Though I had already gotten a chance to become acquainted with Gwen’s voice, this moment allowed me to understand more of their sensory experiences, which I considered while writing for their voice.

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Both Travis’s poems and my song cycle approach the artistic process through a cripistemelogical lens—that is, to acknowledge the experience of time and space through the experience of disability without any goal of overcoming it. Thus, the composition grew around the state of my body during Spring 2023: unstable, fatigued, and with amplified levels of pain. I discovered a certain honest music, which drew structure from its poetic source but also experienced deformation, sometimes shifting between musical regions or failing to progress. And in several movements, the electronic media insists on its own chronicity.

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In “The Body in Pain,” Travis refers to pain as a “congress of bodies.” I interpreted this passage as connecting with other humans that experience chronic pain; though we acknowledge that all of our experiences are individual, we share the experience of feeling pain with each other. The fixed media component is a sort of “pain congress,” featuring my voice and the voices of individuals with whom I’ve connected over pain: Travis, Gwendolyn, and my friend Joel Michael Harrison.