An excerpt of "Causation," an experiment in Zoom-based new music

"Causation" Excerpt

faces in the crowd

Fragments From The Middle Of Something

Spiraling Out Of Control

This summer, I worked at a pro bono community law practice specializing in immigration law. My job was to sort through and alphabetize all the practice's old files from the past decade or so. On my first day at the job, my boss told me that some of the files that I was going to come across would be heartbreaking; the first case that I examined dealt was a daughter's plea for immigration relief for her dying mother, the second with claims of credible fear of torture at the hands of the national police if an individual was deported back to their country of birth. 
       In one particular instance, I came across a document regarding an individual that I knew from my life outside of work. This was someone that had been in my high school class. I had talked them a couple of times. I had worked with them on a sixth grade science project. Up until this point, I had viewed the documents as being only paper — I had not seen beyond the paper to the harsh lives that they represented. 
     The text excerpts in this piece come from statements made by the government in cases similar to that of the individual that I knew. They have been gathered from many public domain sources to represent a coherent narrative of removal defense in immigration law. This was what my classmate faced as they were put into removal proceedings. They represent the point at which the lives that I had been reading about on paper became reduced to pieces of paper. They are the points at which these individual lives were broken apart; the point at which the location of their births began to eclipse the lives they had built. In many cases, they are the last trace that I could see of the multi-year legal struggle they underwent to remain in the United States. They are the breaking points of many lives; the last records I had of lives seen only on paper.

Broken Paper Lives

Recording of the Fox Lane Middle School Seventh Grade choir singing a setting of the Ella Higginson poem "Four - Leaf Clover." This was commissioned by Sarah Fay on her retirement as the choir director at Fox Lane Middle School.

Four - Leaf Clover

My first ever jazz composition back! This was when 14-year-old little Sammy thought he was super cool and fancy for adding some minor-9 chords.

Count Me Out

Beat. Rest. Beat. is based on my fall break experience. It started in early September, when my grandmother had an extreme cardiac incident. I was quite close with my grandmother growing up. She would visit me at camp every summer. I used to think that I got my musical abilities—her mother and father were talented violinists and she played cello as a child.
Shortly after she was hospitalized, I made plans to go visit her over fall break. After a weekend of visiting her with my family, I spent six hours alone with her as she was transferred out of the hospital. That morning, however, I had received multiple emails from an important source on an investigative article I was working on. This was my first experience with serious investigative journalism, and as the machines behind me monitored the beating of my grandmother's heart I prepared to transfer reporting beats, from arts to news, innocent reviews to serious journalism. I was working on something I felt strongly about, something I was willing to dedicate four months of my life to. Yet that day it was also a distraction from my grandmother and the beating of her heart.

Beat. Rest. Beat.

Zeitgeist for violin and piano

Composed for Emma Schubart

Premiered by Allison Taylor and Cole P. Abod

Zeitgeist

Performed via ZOOM as part of the 2020 Fresh Inc Festival

Sammy Sussman

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