for guitar and percussion
Premiered by Hypercube ensemble, 2021, as a part of Hypercube's CubeLab Composition Lab

This piece is based on my experience of breaking my ankle, which required surgical repair. This was my first major medical procedure, and therefore I experienced many new and challenging emotional spaces. The piece was a way of processing and visualizing this narrative, and the stages are reflected as follows. 

It begins with a crack – the breaking of bone, the catalyst of pain. Anxiety builds as foreign terms are thrown about, ‘posterior malleolus fracture,’ ‘surgical stabilization’ due to ‘exquisite tenderness,’ a ‘concern for syndesmotic instability.’

Everything is happening beyond my control, without full understanding or awareness. I’m caught in a swirling cloud of fear, uncertainty, and panic; changes and choices made for me, as time rushes ahead before I can catch my breath.

Surgery begins. Anaesthesia is induced via intravenous injection, creating numbness, paralysis, unconsciousness, and amnesia  – thus an amorphous, ethereal and strange atmosphere exists in the score. More foreign terms are introduced, but they are obscured, nonlinear, blurred, and confusing. Everything comes in and out of focus, in and out of reality and clarity. A swirling, nonsensical, spacious, dreamlike existence.
 
Awakening from surgery means the realization of limited mobility for the foreseeable future. Clarity returns, but so does pain. Independence and sensation are lost, and I’m hit with waves of claustrophobia, frustration, and a newfound sort of grief. Pain emerges as a recurring flashback, both in memory and in reality.
 
With time and patience, the pain and numbness slowly begin to dissolve into stiffness and weakness, receding with a gradual rebuilding, continuous and difficult, but hopeful.

open reduction internal fixation (2021)

"During a frustrating period, my effort to write meaningful music felt futile; sketches and ideas had no clear direction or purpose. Through the process, I began to understand that this wandering lostness was representative of my own uncertainty about my place in the world. My headspace swelled with an internal conflict between anxiety -- fear, darkness, feeling lost, disconnected -- and the calm beauty of the emptiness of winter -- hushed and still, unknown but not rushed or frantic. Caught up in the overwhelming waves of this anxiety, I found myself turning to the comfort of the silent, frozen landscape: the faint, warm glow of an obscured sunset refracting through crystalline trees; a tentative breath; a hesitant step outward; the hushed crunch of fresh snow. In all its wandering disconnect, this piece became representative of my acceptance of myself as I was. The piece focuses on leaving the darkness of anxiety, the obsession with purpose and direction, and chooses instead to focus on moments of lightness. It highlights the desire to find quiet, calm, and peace within the internal turmoil, and embraces the uncertainty with open arms -- a first step towards self-love."

from Eight Threads, track released March 12, 2021
Music by Erika Malpass

Performed by Sprig of That:
Krissy Bergmark - tabla
Ilan Blanck - guitar
Isabel Dammann - violin

Recorded and mixed by Jason McGlone at the Hideaway in Minneapolis, MN. Mastered by Rob Schlette at Anthem Mastering. Album art by Nick Nootenboom.

"This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund."

tentative breath, a moment (2020)

Erika Malpass (b. 1997)

Performed by
Jennifer Rodriguez (flute, vocals)
John Kelley (alto saxophone, vocals)
Em Singleton (viola, vocals)
Ben Hausman (percussion, vocals)
Erika Malpass (vocals)

Field recordings of Common Loon by Jocelyn Lauzon
Mixing by Erika Malpass & Kevin Yetter
Video production by Jennifer Rodriguez 
(see video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L036srAkwyk)

program note:
As I was writing this piece, I was thinking about the current moment: this transition from life in an intense pandemic experience to an uncertain future. For me this transition has created an extreme level of anxiety – what does it look like to return to “normal” life? How does that exist while a pandemic continues to rage? Even if it slows, how can we move on after experiencing the trauma of the past year?

Part of this anxiety for me was thinking about travel – specifically airports – and I arrived at the metaphor of a moving walkway. For the past year time has marched on, and we’ve been pushed along, unable to choose direction or to slow down. We’ve been stuck on this path, stagnated in our own lives yet swept forward, isolated from our communities. Now, we’re being thrust towards a transition, a threshold. Whether we like it or not, things are changing. We have to adapt and figure out how to exist in a changed world. We have to relearn how to move forward of our own accord.

And it’s terrifying. There’s still so much uncertainty, so much grief and trauma that has occurred in the past year. It’s unnerving to just decide to move on, to walk outside and act as if nothing has changed. But everything has changed. We have changed. 

There’s a sense of misalignment that I’ve noticed – within our personal experiences, as well as between the experiences of different people. There’s a sense of disconnect in the way we’re approaching this transition. These concepts of misalignment, disconnect, isolation, and anxiety are ideas I’ve worked to convey and explore musically in this piece. 

I don’t want to assume that everyone has had the same pandemic experience I have – for me the anxiety, uncertainty and fear have been a primary force in shaping my daily existence. So, instead I invite you to consider any time you have felt lost, unstable, or desperate, and let those experiences color your listening of the piece.

caution // please // watch your step (2021)

for flute, trumpet, and piano
premiered by Microcosm Ensemble

I connected with Alec, Edward, and Jen through our shared experiences of impostor syndrome – the experience of and anxiety resulting from believing you are not as competent as others perceive you to be, that you’ve somehow achieved success by mistake and that you don’t belong where you are – which became the inspiration for this piece.
I’ve been using my music as a way to examine, sort through, and communicate many emotional spaces that I struggle with. At the same time, I often experience self-doubt and anxiety in my creative process, and with this project, I found the act of writing and the subject of impostor syndrome were too closely intertwined. I doubted my ideas and my creativity and was frustrated with myself for allowing this doubt to paralyze my writing process. I couldn’t write about this specific facet of anxiety when I was experiencing it so vividly every day.
Writing this piece became a process of discovering how to survive these emotions. Instead of trying to illustrate or understand my anxiety, the piece became the refuge from these emotions that I needed. Starting with improvisation, I created music that to me felt organic and breathing; calm, fluid, and spacious. I tried to allow the piece to simply be, floating from one idea to the next like my improvisation, and letting go of what it wasn’t or should have been. By accepting the piece for what it is, I found an antidote to this anxiety. To me, the piece represents time taken to embrace, with intentionality, moments where I am at peace with myself.
We’re battered with complexity, darkness, and turmoil every day — we can’t constantly try to understand all of it. Sometimes what we need is to turn away and find room within ourselves for a bit of peace. We have many challenges and difficulties to face, but we can’t meet them if we don’t give time for ourselves and for each other — if we’re falling apart. These small moments of calm, healing, and groundedness are what allow us to accept ourselves, and give us the strength to keep working, and moving forwards. My hope is that listening to the piece will provide a moment of peace for you, as writing it did for me. I hope that it also prompts you to create space for and appreciate these moments in your life.

to find the beauty in surviving our emotions (2022)

for solo percussion 
performed by Lucas Sem

Writing music has become a way for me to examine, explore, express, and understand emotional spaces that I find difficult to process and communicate. In my recent music, I have been exploring the recurring concept of anxiety and its antidote, the act of searching for calm. Writing about these concepts has helped me process living in this time, understand my emotional responses, and feel connected and grounded.
 
I noticed myself mostly writing in a way that depicts anxiety or provokes it in the ear of the listener. ‘What am I trying to do with this piece?’ became a lingering question. Was it enough to simply depict anxiety? Why did I feel the need to depict anxiety? Was writing this music, as I was processing my own experience, only creating more anxious feelings in myself, my performer, and my audience? Was there a more helpful way to examine these concepts?

I decided to write a piece centered on the performer’s experience and emotions. The piece would be there for a performer to play when they were feeling anxious and would help them work through that moment of anxiety and into a space of feeling grounded and calm.

There’s something visceral about percussion – hitting things with intensity – that embodies the physical experience of anxiety, panic, or intense anger. The idea of the first half of the piece is to externalize the already-present anxious thoughts. Externalizing these emotions in the piece is a musical representation of what talking about our emotions does. By bringing them out of the internal, spiraling chaos and into the real world, they become easier to put into perspective and sort through.

When anxious, running my hands under cold water gives me a physical sensation to focus on, snapping me out of the spiral and giving me something concrete. Similarly, focusing on the breath or the ground beneath my feet helps to guide me out of moments of panic. The piece does this through the sonification of the breath (using ‘shh’ or humming), rubbing brushes across the surface of the bass drum, and slowing down to focus on the subtle nuances and textures of each note in the vibraphone.

when anxious:  (2022)

for saxophone quartet
premiered by ~Nois saxophone quartet

In this piece, I am exploring the ways in which memory is altered by experiences of trauma, and the related fluid and spectral matrices of fragility.
 
The way that trauma memory is cataloged differs from regular memory. The memory of an entire day can become a wash of numbness, with details blending together and obscuring. A linear narrative becomes untraceable, with images and moments fragmented, scattered, and impossible to map onto a cohesive whole. Nuances are blurred, sensations are disembodied, and recollection of specificity is lost in ambiguity and dissociation.
 
Trauma memory can also be cataloged as flashes. In these memories, the full vividness of a micro-moment is re-experienced with a high saturation of sensory details and piercing emotion. These memory-fragments resurface and are re-experienced as a split-second image, a shock of electric current coursing through the body, illuminating every tiny detail of that fraction of a second.
 
In my experience, memory that has been and is being cataloged in this way leads to a fragile existence in multiple dimensions. Stasis is dissolved, and snippets of sensory input can lead to sudden and unexpected shifts of states of being. One exists within a physical fragility: stability, constancy, and safety are transient. Interactions with memory shift in focal length, tipping between clouds of numbness and fragmented vividness.

5.10.23 DePaul Series for Contemporary Music

mercurial (2023)

divinations from the birds
1. red-bellied woodpecker

for mixed chamber ensemble (mezzo-soprano, clarinet, percussion, piano, harp)
Premiered by fellows at the Cortona Sessions 2023

red bellied woodpecker: there was a terrible storm — there are softer woodlands ahead —
you are in the window between a dark and light time — do not despair in the blank feeling — to be enshrouded by fog is to be guided through to the next place

text by Claire Jussel

divinations from the birds: red-bellied woodpecker

or solo violin & electronics
Premiered by the composer on October 27, 2023 at DePaul University.

program note:
Our experiences affect us. Our emotional relationship to memories changes over time: as years pass, we retain marks of past hurt, healed over but forever changed. Creating this piece was motivated out of an unresolved fixation on a particularly traumatic memory and relationship. I’ve struggled with how to frame a piece like this. How should I navigate the intense vulnerability, rawness, and variability of my emotional relationship to the subject matter?

The result in its current form juxtaposes my emotional state towards these memories in the past and the present. Recordings capture an expression of my emotions from a specific moment in time, a moment in the past. Electronics processes manipulate these recordings – reorganizing and fracturing the sounds, allowing organic snippets to emerge, and embracing the variability and unpredictability of my emotional relationship to the past. Guided improvisation in real-time reflects and responds, contextualized by my current feeling toward these memories. 

This piece is a letter: to and from a past and current self; to, or in spite of, you who caused me harm.

10.27.23 Composer's Forum

to you, or in spite of (2023)

for symphonic band
based on poetry by Mac Gimse

premiered by the St. Olaf Band April 2019

"out of a mountain of despair..."

"out of a mountain of despair..." (2018)

Original composition for marimba quartet.
Recorded remotely by Heartland Marimba Quartet, January 2021.
Video courtesy of Heartland Marimba Quartet, used with permission.

What have you seen?
from your high arches, reaching 
extending towards
an ever-blank grey sky
Have you seen the massacre? 
of ancient peoples, of trees, 
of ways of life upheaved
for convenience,
for destiny?
Have you seen the white-topped eagles 
absorbed into a picture of divine violence?
Through winds and flames and battles 
you survived, watching your companions
sliced at the ankles, drowned,
and set off to the sound of progress – 
you stood silent,
waiting, watching, waiting.

Minnesota was one of the largest timber-producing states in the 1880’s. Thousands of acres of red and white pine were felled by logging companies, expending a resource thought at the time to be infinite. A survey crew mapping a region of northern Minnesota during the winter accidentally mapped a lake incorrectly, leaving a section of pines untouched. Today, these pines, known as The Lost Forty, are at least 300 years old. Currently, old-growth forests represent less than 2% of all forests in Minnesota.
Recent research has discovered networks of fungi and bacteria connecting trees in old- growth forests and suggests that trees use these networks to communicate. They share nutrients, warn of danger, and mourn lost ones. These networks take thousands of years to develop and planted or farmed forests may never develop them.
While walking through this section of old-growth forest, I felt a deep sense of loss and regret –for hundreds of years, Western conceptions of progress, destiny, and convenience have directed actions of violence, upheaval and destruction towards Indigenous Peoples and nature. Even now, as our world is devastated by the consequences of Western influence on the climate, those in power choose to doubt the source: greed and ignorance.
After visiting The Lost Forty, I wrote the above poem, “What have you seen?” as a way of processing and focusing my emotions and intent for this piece. I was drawn towards the idea of massacre – an act of extreme and widespread violence – as a way to encompass the agitation, disruption, and disorder of our history and our current moment.
Using the poem as a guide for this piece, I created two sound-worlds. The first is the swaying nostalgia of the trees: shimmering, reaching, extending. Their ancient wisdom whispers hushed and slow, continuous and watchful. The arrival of Western colonizers brings upheaval. Jagged lines intersect and interrupt, slicing and suffocating. Accented, agitated rhythms and dense clusters evoke the anguish of crashing, splintering, chopping. A sense of chaos and disorder consumes us as we’re swept away, drowning, absorbed into a picture of divine violence.
Yet, The Lost Forty survives this upheaval. They stand, rooted in place, at the mercy of an uncertain future – waiting, watching, waiting.

Lost Forty (2020)

Original composition for solo marimba. 
Recorded by Matthew Coley, video used with permission. 

This marimba etude focuses on single alternating strokes, with the fun concept of a cat chasing a mouse across the bars.

Chasing Mice (2020)

Erika Malpass is an interdisciplinary creator – composer, violinist, vocalist, poet, and visual artist. She writes for percussion and chamber ensembles, symphonic band, and vocal music.
 
Erika is interested in exploring challenging emotional spaces and the physicality of how emotions are embodied. In her work, she centers these concepts in order to process, understand, and more fully experience emotions that are challenging or difficult.

 

Recent works have focused on the relationships between two emotional spaces: anxiety and self-doubt; and calm, contentment, comfort, and grounding. She embraces these spaces as a part of her creative process and works towards transforming them from intangible abstract concepts into tangible musical experiences. 

She strives to move beyond creating an objective representation of emotional spaces, moving into exploring these concepts collaboratively with performers. She is interested in bringing the performers’ personal experiences into the piece directly and creating a space for both composer and performer to process and understand their emotions. Her goal is for the audience to perceive the depth created from this shared vulnerability, and therefore inspire people to connect through a communal musical experience.  

 

Erika’s music features timbral color painting, affective atmospheric textures, and sounds of nature. Text, form, orchestration, and her exploration of tension and release are focal points in her music. She believes that being honest and vulnerable in her process and in her music is a compelling way to make connections with others. She aims to create pieces that are relevant to our time, centering authenticity and accessibility in her writing.

 

Erika has been commissioned by Sprig of That ensemble, Microcosm Ensemble, OopsMN (Opera-Oriented Projects Minnesota), and New Works Project. She has also written for Unheard-of//Ensemble, Meghan Burke of the Rhythm Method String Quartet, Heartland Marimba Quartet, and Hypercube ensemble, and attended Lake George Music Festival and the So Percussion Summer Institute. In 2018, she received a grant from the Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry program (CURI) at St. Olaf College to create a work for symphonic band. She earned a Bachelor of Music from St. Olaf College in 2019, where she studied with Timothy Mahr and Justin Merritt. She is currently pursuing a Master of Music in Composition at DePaul University, studying with Osnat Netzer and Christopher Wendell Jones.
Malpass works to write music that explores new sounds and techniques, and that engages people with an emotional experience. As a composer, her goal is to convey stories that are often difficult to put into words and to use music to connect people in a way they may not have connected before. She sees music as a language that reaches deeper than our differences and speaks to us on a more intimate level. She aims to create pieces that are relevant to our time, centering honesty, vulnerability, and accessibility.

Malpass explores new combinations of instruments, using the tone and color of the instruments as an expressive technique. Her creative process derives from translating visual and literary motifs into musical ones, drawing from stories and emotions, and creating unique sound-color textures. She often composes from poetry, either setting text in a vocal piece or using text as a rhythmic and color inspiration to translate into an instrumental work. She is inspired by collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, working with poets and choreographers and writing music for film.

Erika Malpass

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