The string trio 102nd & Amsterdam is dedicated to my father, Raymond Boyce; this was the first of many New York addresses for him. My father’s stories of growing up in New York in the 40’s and 50’s cemented in my mind the idea of New York as The City, an idea strengthened by my own relocations and peregrinations. My father is a wonderful, if diffuse, storyteller, with many narrative elements being developed, abandoned, rediscovered and sometimes corrected; while writing this piece, I thought often of his kaleidoscopic rhetoric, not merely episodic, and yet open and unbounded.
The work is discursive in at least two ways. It is discursive in the same sense that all music is;– the work is emplaced within a network of practices and repertoires and it achieves significance not through any inherent and essential content, but rather through dialogue with its historical-æsthetic context. In this particular instance, the terrain of signification encompasses the personal and familial archeology described above, but for most listeners, the primary axis of actorialization and meaning making will be the technical roots of the work in texturalism, the mainline chamber strings repertoire, and post-serial Modernism in general.
It is at this technical level that the second discursive mode becomes perceivable. "102nd & Amsterdam" foregrounds the interactive character of performance, a concept of the work as conversation. The piece is not an object, but an exchange of roles, attention, instrumental color and motivic material;– these transaction that in themselves do not bear import, but by their being afford opportunities for music making. This model is manifest in the works shifts (from highly imitative counterpoint with its egalitarian organization of entrances and continuance to the marked soliloquies and features which highlight each performer in turn. The framework of exchanges and partnerships shift as voices emerge, participate in, and leave a conversation devoid of semantic content but not of significance.
This discursive focus on counterpoint and polyphony is presented not merely as a model, or a static representation of a conversation but as a experience in the moment of performance. The score is structured using numerous 'open pulse' textures in which the temporal placement of entrances, the duration of passages, and the alignment of events are renegotiated in each performance by the performers in real-time. The practical negotiations of collective music-making, present in all performances, here move to center stage, making the living dialogue amongst the musicians visible and audible.
The openness of the score also provides some intimation of a third discursive mode operative in the work;– given the degree of freedom the printed score allows, the relationship between the composer and performer is opened up to examination and transformation. The work, or rather the series of instantiations of musical practice which we find convenient to call this work, is produced not by the inspired scribbling of an autonomous individual composer, but through the collective, varied, occasionally contradictory, always fascinating tychastic actions of a collection of individuals, individuals capable of action and possessing agency. A collection, it should be added, that can easily and should always be understood as encompassing the audience. –DB
