On January 2, 2021 my father died due to complications from Covid-19, three weeks after testing positive. While he was on the ventilator I played music for him, and when he died, my ability to play the violin disappeared, and I haven't had the ability to play music with any real sense of love or purpose, meaning or vulnerability since. Many people said to just play my violin, not to focus on anything but just to allow all of the emotions to go somewhere. "Record it, and don't even listen back" is a piece of advice I received more than once. Until very recently, I couldn't do it. This improvisation is my first attempt to come back to music. 

Played on octave violin, this improvisation is an exploration of this long period of silence and frustration, and an attempt to explore the vulnerable, lonely and angering space of grief musically, finally. Specifically, this performance/recording explores the memory of watching my father pass away on Zoom, over 26 minutes. Each 30 seconds represents one of the 26 minutes it took for my father to pass away. Additionally, there are 26 vignettes (some disjointed, some connected, as the experience was) to represent each passing minute.  The 'silences' count. Everything is free and without any conscious model except for the final vignette, which is a purposely out of tune and rough nod to "Amazing Grace". I purposely chose to end this improvisation with this, as it was the last thing I ever played for my father on the violin, and the last thing I played on the violin for many weeks before I could finally pick up the instrument again.

twenty six minutes

Lucy Little is a multi-instrumental musician, composer, improvisor, and audio producer currently based in NYC. A classically trained violinist, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist, Lucy uses looping pedals and electronics in her playing, and her sound falls somewhere along the lines of minimalism, classical, fiddle, folk, and klezmer. Lucy received her masters in contemporary performance and improvisation in 2021 from the New England Conservatory of Music. In 2018-19, Lucy was a U.S. Fulbright-Schuman scholar to the European Union, where she worked with Musicians Without Borders.