Across the Open Spaces

and revisiting choices from a distance

Plans for Sentences #59, by Renee Gladman, 2018

KHORIKOS's latest album, Across the Open Spaces, is out now on Apple Music (in Dolby Atmos,) Bandcamp, Spotify, and elsewhere! [deep exhale]. I've put some liner notes up on our label's page along with my thanks to the many talented people that helped make it.

We're performing the whole thing live on June 14th at the Sound Mind Center in Brooklyn (I hear there will be cheese) and a few songs from it at Powerhouse Arts this coming Saturday at 4:30pm, along with some music from April’s Aspiration.

The ideas for the album started bubbling up in winter 2020, and we recorded it immediately after crawling out of our pandemic caves in April 2022. Somehow, three years elapsed as we mixed the stereo and spatial releases, pitched to record labels, fretted, breathed, etc. I’ve described the project in so many ways now that I risk over-reducing it, or coming close to that point at which words disempower it, but still the word that reminds me most of what it was like to make is “distance.” I’ve had some distance from it since, but because distance causes you to see things differently, I’ve spotted another way in.

The album starts with music by Renaissance composer Benedetto Marcello, whom I hope got a firm handshake for his competent triple canon. I took up his musical foundation and thought I'd see what would happen if I overloaded it with new melodies, in what I thought would be a playful study on constraint, as in creative restrictions. Of course during the writing it became about constraint, as in the guidelines and frameworks that we impose upon ourselves (voluntarily or not) or that are shackled to us by others (same.) Here’s a score if you’d like to follow along!

Canon Triplex and other limitations is a microcosm of the whole album in the way it bounds naively into a lush open space, then clenches, resets, appears to learn something, and finally reopens. I had the opportunity to introduce the piece to some intimidatingly smart colleagues recently, and in doing so, unsealed a three-plus-year-old emotional vault, revealing some of the links (or at least some of the ones I’m aware of) between the musical abstractions that dot the page and the personal challenges and doubts that they touch. Across the Open Spaces as a whole also deals with constraint, especially as you approach the three middle tracks, each full of tense minor 2nds. I don't remember when in the process this emerged (and I say "emerged" because I can't remember how much of this involved intention and how much it just happened) but that part of the album does reframe constraint for me. I love that half-step.

(I’m also starting to enjoy forgetting why I made creative decisions.)

I'm reading Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates, which lays out this notion that we move through our lives by operating on our own answers to what she calls “untimely questions.” Sometimes these answers are unexamined assumptions. They do focus us, though; having to constantly re-ask every question would render us immobile. (I bet she proposes a way out of this; I haven’t finished the book yet :)) A constraint, like the one in Canon, becomes an answer that we rely on — in this case, to questions like “how will this piece go” or “what am I saying here”. The piece is a cycle: first, it benefits from that answer, then collapses under its weight, then finally chooses new answers that become new music.

Is there any other option?

The last piece on the album is our arrangement of Anna Meredith’s Heal You (spearheaded by the brilliant Paul Doust) and gives the singers very few constraints, at least relative to what they’re used to: each singer chooses a vowel sound from a wide range of options of timbres and textures. This is very individualistic singing, but somehow the ensemble still coheres. Collectivization is a through-line in every KHORIKOS project; in this case the choir’s sound is a collection of individually chosen constraints, and the choir a community specific to the piece.

This week I’ve been very lucky to work alongside a cohort of artists from other disciplines, and it’s another manifestation of the same thing: they’re all quite focused in their own practices (which of course I envy) but somehow their critique and affirmation is extra meaningful to me because their constraints are so different from mine. The distance between my work and theirs helps mine speak more clearly.

But also makes me want to examine my held answers more. Help, Agnes!

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This might only be a little related, but: I’ve also had chances to talk to people from across Europe about the funding landscape for their various nonprofit arts endeavors. Over these next few years, I’m putting in effort to grow KHORIKOS’s capacity, despite how challenging that landscape is in the US; when I describe that challenge to others, I talk about America as a country that cared about art a little bit, until recently, where it’s now the case that our government is openly hostile to it, as made very real by this record of terminated NEA grants. Cowards. Snuffing out art, like stifiling speech, does damage that can’t ever be fully repaired.

The challenge then, is to find and build communities that can both critique and affirm, and bear a variety of answers/focuses/constraints.

like dis one:

my neighbors rn

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Thanks for reading and listening. If you’re new to this newsletter: this is usually an every-few-months sort of thing, with brief updates on my work and other collected ideas. I write this in part as an alternative to other forms of social media. If you’d rather not receive emails from me, feel free to unsubscribe.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Alec