This ontic porosity has been manifesting quite a bit in my work from the last few years, with analogous borrowings between Sails Knife-bright… and Partita No. 2, between Partita No. 3 and Ars Poetica, and others, as well as my typical derivations from other works, such as the forthcoming Se je fume, c'est ma compleccïon (drawing on Haspre's "Puisque je sui fumeux…"), and Adaptation of Verticalities from a Popular Song (Etude No. 3), for solo piano.

The three poems of “Small Philosophies” explore specific philosophical domains: the expansive spaces of consciousness in Phenomenology ("You are a twilight / and a twilight bird," . . . "You are a quality / and a thing silenced // by pine shrug. Stern willow. / Now run and hide in the fern"); the limits of rationality in the face of nature in Logic ("Who can grasp a lily of the valley / of the field? Every tall grass feigns wheat, and yet / and yet, rash and burn!"; the slippery nature of knowledge is critiqued yet also demanded in Epistemology: "I have stood in the clearing and cannot decide / if I miss the trees or if I love newborn clarity."

Given the prior existence of these songs (written for the superb Bowers Fader Duo), this description might suggest a 'song without words', where the melos of the song is stripped of text, but maintained instrumentally (here on violin). Here, though, something rather different happens: a chain of ekphrases, poems transformed into song, only to be reabsorbed into the domain of chamber music, distilling again and again the mood and affect projected by prior stages, toward its final instantiation in performance. In De Rerum Natura, musical material developed for setting and framing the text comes detached from the vocality and form of the poem, developing in new directions in the distinct instrumental technicity of my chamber music. And yet, while the text is vacated, its topoi remain: phenomenology, logic, and epistemology are not just empty signifiers in the movement titles. The technical traces, such as the rhythm of the setting, contour of the line, and harmonic vocabulary, perdure. The affects, the moods of the movements are, however, shifted and intensified.

In Small Philosophies the temporally unfolding text of the poem is given primacy, as its proper "songfulness" (and the associated tight relationship between poetry and music) situates music as a supportive structure in the text's critique of particular philosophies; in the "de-languaged", instrumental domain of De Rerum Natura, other critiques are mounted through other means, less contingent on logos. The first movement, Phenomenology, reworks the song’s musical material towards greater intensity and rapidity of change; the dynamics of experience are not described but instantiated. In the second movement Logic (the topic and title of the poem and movement) is articulated argumentatively, even combatively, as found not infrequently in philosophical debate, as if logic-in-the-singular misrepresents the multiple (and conflicting) logics of philosophy and of being. In movement 3, Epistemology, the absence of text heightens the inescapability of finitude, as the minimization of gesture, event, and line suggests the insufficiency of any epistemology and its requisite claim of knowing, given the relatively microscopic scale of conscious thought in the vast domain of music.

This video capture is from the work’s premiere by Dan Lippel and Yezu Woo at Tenri Cultural Arts Center, New York, NY, 20 Oct, 2024. on counter)induction’s concert The Order of Things.