I want ___ please, for processed harp and fixed media

You have to pull them out of their bodiless dream. You have to make them talk to you; they have to practice speech, but they're nonverbal, so you have to make a mouth for them out of paper, or a laptop, or their hands. Any tongue you can find, any teeth you can afford, you try, you try, you try, because when they age out of high school, you can't help them anymore. If you can't instill the habit by age 22, there's a possibility that no one will ever ask or push them to use language again.

This piece is dedicated to the staff and students at Heather Empfield Day School and Transition Center, a school for children with severe and profound autism.

I want ___ please

at first I liked how bright you shone, how smooth under my thumbs; i could call on you like a star, for some hopeful future. but all the sweat and sand and polish, whetstone and wishing... I can no longer touch you without bleeding.

Written for the New Thread Sax Quartet. Ryan Muncy, soprano sax; Erin Rogers, alto and tenor sax; Zach Herchen, bari sax. Recorded by Travis Thatcher, mix and electronics by Becky Brown.

some favored gem

Somewhere between watching the whole day pass from under the covers, the future a thing that spits the pause button out of my throat; between rich dreams that I am wading through, gripping whole handfuls, watching them pour between my fingers, a few pocked pearls rolled by my burning palms; between the steps that push me forward, and backward, and forward again, progress built with footsteps built with words that walk their plosives and fricatives and sibilance, delicately, over the steps of the tips of my teeth.

This is a piece about lying.

Tomorrow When I Grow Up

This is the best version of this movement, with a number of edits made to the tape part during/after SEAMUS 2018 in Eugene, Oregon.

Somewhere between watching the whole day pass from under the covers, the future a thing that spits the pause button out of my throat; between rich dreams that I am wading through, gripping whole handfuls, watching them pour between my fingers, a few pocked pearls rolled by my burning palms; between the steps that push me forward, and backward, and forward again, progress built with footsteps built with words that walk their plosives and fricatives and sibilance, delicately, over the steps of the tips of my teeth.

This is a piece about lying.

Tomorrow, When I Grow Up - i. the empties

Performed by Splinter Reeds.

When I was in high school, there was a block near me that had a Chinese restaurant, a big craft store, and a shoddy movie theater. When the Chinese place shut down, I realized none of the kids in the area after us would share the memory of trying to bring too many people to sit at one table, ordering the wrong thing off the menu, and then stressing about getting to a movie on time. The craft store and the movie theater shut down not long after.

bardbarienne

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