Untitled (“I sell the shadow to support the substance”)

2022
2 instruments or voices (variable), 2 recordings. variable dur. 7–10m
part of Songs (Book 1)

Sojourner Truth sold many small portraits of herself (called cartes de visite) to finance political activities; the motto “I sell the shadow to support the substance” is written on these portraits beginning from 1864 (“shadow” = the photograph, a copy of reality; “substance” = Truth’s life and work). This piece encodes the motto as pitches and durations, and is one of many “songs” in a project begun in 2020 exploring words, speech, and cipher across various media. Two instrumental (or vocal) lines and two recordings are presented as (types of) mirror canons in which the motto is encoded forwards and backwards or in inversion — this form and the use of recording are adopted as metaphors for the process of photographic reproduction implied by the text.

The recordings part contains directions for preparing and playing two audio tracks. Each letter of the motto is treated as an equal time unit: taken together, the number of letters in each word determines longer or shorter periods of time during which sounds and silences alternate in the finished tracks.

In the instrumental parts, the 26 letters of the alphabet are assigned to the notes of the U.S. Civil War-era song “John Brown’s Body” (chosen because it is known to have been sung to the lyrics “These Valiant Soldiers” by Truth). The motto is ‘read’ by re-ordering these notes in accordance with their assignments.

At the end of the piece, a notated silence (the period of time marking the final letters in the recordings) shifts the focus from documentation and reproduction (as recording and [re-]writing) to real-time observation in the form of listening to the live sounding environment — the “substance” — of the performance hall.

(note January 18, 2023)