Unfamiliar Spaces
For Flute or Eb/Bb Saxophone | 5’30” | 2018
Program Notes: unfamiliar spaces is an exploration of new techniques and sound worlds while maintaining my own musical language and artistic tendencies. Recently I have been interested in the question who is music for, who is the world for, and how are people supposed to act and be in spaces that are not their own. How am I as a queer man supposed to act in spaces inhabited primarily by the heterosexual world. This has been made more clear having moved from a neighborhood that was the center of LGBT life in Seattle where I would walk down the street and feel a sense of homogeneous community. My goal for this work was to find a way to take something that is comfortable (the flutists ability to play their instrument), and my own abilities (composing melodies with harmonies, rhythms ect.) and place it within a context of unfamiliarity. A context that LGBT folk are familiar with. We are rarely in a place that is ours, but that begs the question, what is ours? Gay men have gay bars, but they are often times exclusionary of women, people of color, and non cis-gendered individuals. My hope is to open up this dialogue and to ask the question to the performer and the listener, who is this space for, and does its mere existence exclude those individuals who are in the most need of familiarity.
Commissioner: Brice Smith
Kevin Norton, Soprano Saxophone