Cool as the Shade is my Soul – five Faces with Masks (2021)

This is a collection of five compositions that can be presented in any order during performance. Performers can also choose to present fewer than five compositions. If all five are performed, the numerical order is the preferred one. However, one can imagine that some performers would want to choose another order.

We are often, maybe even always, attempting in various ways to make sense of our experiences. During the pandemic humans all over the world were trying to find themselves (again) in unfamiliar situations. Being confronted with physical and social isolation brought about a myriad of coping strategies and too often a sense of failure. Like many others, I had questions: Do we need to learn to cope well with our new world, well enough for it to start feeling familiar, even natural? How much resistance is needed, how much acceptance? Did those who did not cope with the social isolation fail or succeed? Should we create art that reflects our impotence, or an art that builds something better?

Our masked faces did not give enough information to others, and they could give only scraps of information back. The eyes without the rest of the face and body became what they always were: inefficient entrances to our souls. A technologically mediated face without the rest of the present self could not anymore hide its status as an insufficient partner.

In this composition I present some of my experiences of the ‘work’ of these eyes without faces, and faces without selves, and some of my repeating, aimless impressions that seem to find no resolution, my turning and returning towards memories in order to feel some sense of sense making. Scraps of musical material that have been floating in my mind are presented – sometimes incoherently – as persistent ostinatos, slowly transforming melodies, strange chord sequences and indistinct rhythmic patterns. The sounds fail to create a convincing line of thought, and the contrasts between the five movements (the five ‘faces’) becomes slippery. The listener swims in a world in which gravitation has lost some of its force.

• Face 1 (c. 5 minutes)
• Face 2 (c. 5’30”)
• Face 3 (c. 3’45”)
• Face 4 (c. 4 minutes)
• Face 5 (c. 5’30”)

Total duration c. 24 minutes