Jess Garrett - Void

I want to sneak in one more composer profile before the upcoming Pendulum
concert: Jess Garrett, a senior undergraduate at CU. Garrett’s work on this
week’s concert is ‘Void’, composed for solo violin and electronics. Her work
shares ties with Cole Ingraham’s piece ‘Lattice’, composed for a solo instrument
and electronics, and both pieces are relatively short (at least in classical music
terms, if you consider something under ten minutes short. It’s epic when
compared to pop-music time but a fleeting moment in a symphony.)

Garrett’s starting ideas for ‘Void’ are a bit different than Ingraham’s however,
as she started with a conceptual question while Ingraham seems to begin with
an organizational system (i.e. alternate tunings and pitch collections). Garrett
describes her initial spark of inspiration as an

“attempt to musically depict the thing that freaked me out the most as
a little kid and continues to do so to this day, namely the "nothingness"
that would be if there was no universe. What is that nothing? We as
humans don't even have a word for it, the concept is so difficult for us to
grasp. Even our idea of nothing involves other concepts, such as
darkness. But true nothing?”

Garrett began composing ‘Void’ by recording and manipulating found sounds.
The piece took off after the composer heard, of all things, the sound of a
squeaky dishwasher door. As common and familiar as the squeak was, says
Garrett, “for years I'd been saying "What a cool sound, I should do something
with that!"” ‘Void’ also incorporated Jess’s other interests in computer science
and programming. After altering the sounds of the famed childhood dishwasher,
the composer then inserted them into a computer-coded ‘nest’ of sounds, overtop
of which an electronically distorted violin part plays more soloistically. I wonder
if my ears will try to conceptualize what exactly that original dishwasher door
sounded like, and try to trace her evolution of electronic sound to what it is like in
the concert hall when I hear the piece for the first time.

But like Ingraham’s continual back-and-forth dialogue with the saxophonist for
his work ‘Lattice’, when I asked Garrett about what challenged her with this
work, her response was much the same. “The distortion patch for the violin is
capable of some really interesting sounds, but the backing noise is also quite
compelling on its own. So [composing] it required a lot of careful consideration
and tweaking so that neither part overpowered the other.” Finding a balance
between performer and electronics seems to be essential for these works: both the
creators of the pieces and the audiences listening to them want to see an organic
performance emerge, a performance where the player is not overwhelmed by his
or her task (unless of course that may be the point of the piece) but instead the
sounds and performances seem to ‘fit’, or make sense together. Perhaps the ‘nest’
of sounds begins in one place and transforms; perhaps the two instruments will
be in dialogue. Or perhaps the piece will interact in other ways unique to the
language of computer programming. While the electronic components of ‘Void’
and ‘Lattice’ may be voiced by computers, (certainly the lesser-opinionated of

a performer-electronics duo as the computer’s not going to suggest rewrites or
need a coffee break), we human composers still control much about the piece and
desire a fruitful outcome.

Thanks to Jess and Cole for all their feedback to my interview questions. Look for
their works with other great pieces on Wednesday’s concert, 7:30 in Grusin Hall.