Written for the Royal Danish Academy of Music's "Accordion Festival - The New World" (2021), performed by Arcangelo Pignatelli

Our breaths are what keep us alive. They take from the air around us and give back. Usually the phrase “catch my breath” refers to our own selves taking a pause, defined as “to wait and rest for a moment when you have been very active, so that you can begin to breathe more slowly” (Cambridge Dictionary). The saying “hold my breath” literally means stop breathing briefly, and figuratively means waiting on the edge of one’s seat for something, as in “I won’t hold my breath.”  But imagine if a breath could be caught and held in your hands…if it was something material, instead of being one with the air. Saying it to someone as opposed to applying it to yourself. Who would you say this to? What would this sensation feel like? How is it let go?

I connect breathing with time; both invisible, intangible yet inescapable, coming and going every moment. This piece is as an expression of breathing patterns, thinking about certain memories based on a graphic provided for the performer involving at times blurry dualities between still vs. moving, spoken vs. wordless, broken vs. healing, forgotten vs. relived, wrong vs. right, deafening vs. nothing, distant vs. suffocating, absent vs. present. The performer inhales and exhales the sound into the audience, with them, as if pushing them away and pulling them back in. But there is also another "audience": people in the performer's memories (especially if playing alone), and the sound qualities that memory would have...the nature of the breath in that memory. Connecting the physical and psychological, the accordion is the brain constantly sponging and absorbing life, with all the ever-oscillating neurological activity molding the mind ranging from emotions to logic. It’s about both the physicality of the body and accordion as well as the mentality fueling it. 

Physical breakage and repair are a definitive present moment that turns to past, dictated by real time. Mental breakage and repair, however, are ethereally connected between past and present, cycling back and forth more ambiguously in slow or fast motion, governed by our singular minds’ idiosyncratic perceptions; the eyes and ears through which we see, hear and process the world.

In this piece, there is always a common note bridging the left and right hands, either vertically or horizontally, in harmony or melody, representing this thread between two energies, passing breaths between each other. Often, the chord clusters grow bigger and add to what’s already there, carrying the past to the present to the future, constantly re-contextualizing the accumulation of emotional energy and memories, and playing with all the possible frameworks that could color a chord or note. In theory, to catch one’s breath, one has to meet halfway and pass it. The left and right hands become more than just functional components of the body; they are two living breathing bodies trying to connect with each other. They actively maintain their joint balance amidst sonic fragility that creates a kind of illusion of physical fragility, as if there is a possibility of suddenly falling through a floor, or beneath a high-wire, at any moment.

Cover art: Annie Nikunen

Catch My Breath And Hold It

Counterpointe is a piece composed/choreographed for multi-tracked pointe shoes, emphasizing the percussive elements and ephemeral physicality of dancing en pointe.

Counterpoint(e)

Periapsis Benefit performance of "What kind of land will we be together in?", performed by Eleonor Sandresky and Jonathan Katz.

Soapbox Gallery, November 2021

What kind of land will we be together in? - V.II

This is the original source material for the two voices in the Prelude and Postlude in "The Love of Being Lost in Anonymity." It consists of multi-tracking/layering two separate tracks of me improvising a vocal line and piano accompaniment, with the same text. Recorded while experimenting in a studio at Avaloch Farm Music Institute.

Annie Nikunen, voice and piano

Photo credit: Caroline Mariko-Stucky

The Love of Being Lost in Anonymity - Improvised Prelude/Postlude Track

Performed by The Rhythm Method at NYU Steinhardt
April 2022
Mixed by Tyler Neidermayer

Abridged program note:

It's so fascinating to me why certain people come into our lives, why they enter at the moments they do, why certain ones leave lasting imprints. Related to this, bell hooks’ all about love is a book I resonate with deeply, bringing love to light; how we experience it in our private lives, but rarely discuss so openly and fearlessly in the world we face as soon as we walk out the door. Among the countless noteworthy quotes hooks includes, I was particularly struck by the one opening Chapter 3, “Honesty: Be True To Love”:

“When we reveal ourselves to our partner and find that this brings healing rather than harm, we make an important discovery—that intimate relationship can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves, as we are…This kind of unmasking—speaking our truth, sharing our inner struggles, and revealing our raw edges—is sacred activity, which allows two souls to meet and touch more deeply.” -John Welwood

In this piece, the strings constantly strive and reach for this touch; they pass it between one another in developmental re-contextualization, but moving both forward and back, as development is not always linear. There are four movements fluidly connected; they bleed, build, breathe and find new meaning in each other:

Reaching - Imagining

Heartracing - Beginning

Embracing - Depths

Reaching - Self

Though the movements seem linear - progressing from imagining love, beginning it, experiencing the depths of it, and revisiting that first imagining in the context of self-love - they operate in an oscillating cycle. The piece predominantly rests in a Feldman-like stasis, but there is much activity embedded within incessant displacement of musical elements, including register, voicing, bow speed and pressure, dynamics, trills, timbre, vibrato, glissandi and harmonics. In exploring how to embody text in sound, I aimed to italicize sound on a scale from frailty to warmth, using these various elements of sonic manipulation to convey that lean, that stressed emphasis, of spoken words. Though the movements convey the heart at its fullest, they also trace the threads of heartbreak that shape and reveal us in that underlying sonic bed of fragility, breakage, and realness.

There are many different kinds of love…partnered, familial, friend, self...and the development of what those mean over time and life lived. This piece is inspired by various stages of partnered love: newness and exploration, transition phases and milestones, the depths of all that love truly embodies and every moment in between, as well as self-love, which is just as much of a development with oneself. The first movement expresses that initial reaching, trying to imagine who you will love in life while those people are usually beyond imagination until you meet them. The second movement is more physically active, presenting a sharp contrast to the surrounding glassy blurriness with heart-racing intensity. The third movement is sonically wed to the first and fourth, but explodes out of the glassy blurry confines into concentrated, steadfast warmth and shimmer. The final movement is essentially an echo of the first - both being titled “Reaching” - but coalescing the self with how others color it; the lifelong shift between our initial untouched palette and where we come to be after having mixed our palettes with another.

this kind of unmasking

Composed by Gavin Goodrich
Performed by Annie Nikunen

I Am A Strange Flute: A Self-Referential Symphony by Gavin Goodrich

Part I of my "Son de Parfum" ("Sound of Scent") series based on Le Labo scents.

Members of TMC New Fromm Players
Sage Park, violin
Benjamin Fryxell, cello

2023-08-04 0130PM CD1

SANTAL 33

Piece #2 of my "Son de Parfum" ("Sound of Scent") series based on Le Labo scents.

Members of TMC New Fromm Players
Tiffany Wee, violin
Elizabeth Doubrawa, viola

YLANG 49

Part II of my "Son de Parfum" ("Sound of Scent") series based on Le Labo scents.

Members of TMC New Fromm Players
Dominique Kim, flute
Sangwon Lee, cello

ROSE 31

“You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa...All mass is interaction.” -Richard Feynman

This piece is a collage-like ecosystem of interacting sounds that are constantly re- contextualized throughout. The same material builds on different relationships between the players, which become stronger and more dependent as the piece progresses. The duality of memory and present tense is strewn throughout the piece in the form of warm and sharp textures, basking in a moment and snapping out of it. There is an open-ended question in the sound regarding who is in the present tense and who is still in the memory, and how these two realms of time become blurry.

Performed by TMC New Fromm Players:

Sage Park, violin
Tiffany Wee, violin
Elizabeth Doubrawa, viola
Benjamin Fryxell, cello
Dominique Kim, flute
Sangwon Lee, clarinet

2023-08-06 1000AM CD2

all mass is interaction

The moments when flickers of someone's true self show beneath the everyday exterior.

Annie Nikunen, flute
John Melendez, piano

Pierced by Transparency

When tragedy strikes in a person’s life, the rest of the world goes on. There is an incessant ring in the fabric of the air invincible to any individual’s inside story. 

The hit happens as an invisible explosion. Cut off from everything. A gunshot-like trigger within the confines of the victim’s mind sparks the escalating white noise symphony of cluttered buzz silent to the surrounding world. This still, mute drone perpetually hangs in the air when it strikes; its bulletproof vibration doesn’t quiver even slightly. Like yelling underwater. Looking around frantically, only to find the rest is in their own worlds a million mental miles away. Others can empathize, but not truly realize. The rest continues at its unforgiving fixed speed. Hyper-awareness of every subtle stimuli stings. Tense wisps of breath buy ticking time for what’s about to surge. It’s isolating, strangling, unifying. It’s all in only us.

Composed/text written by: Annie Nikunen
Performed by: Fonema Consort

it's all in only us

My little rendition of Carole King's "So Far Away"

So Far Away (Carole King)

Abridged program note:

When two people are connected, there’s a sound world in the silence between them, an unspoken yet ear-splitting link “heard” by no one else but them...a “silent soundtrack” I aim to make sonically material. Though physically a solo, the piece is permeated by another voice at play; the multi-tracking expands this single voice, interacting with that other presence growing and falling with it...coloring, speaking and moving with it. A perpetual thread of yearning within shapeshifting surroundings. Internal torment screaming in slow motion.

Camilla Caldwell, multi-tracked violin
Annie Nikunen, composer

the sound of space between us

-Composer, Choreographer, Flutist, Dancer
-BlackBox Ensemble
-WKCR DJ, Former Business Manager and Director of Classical Department

Annie Nikunen

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