The way they understood themselves is a song cycle for baritone, soprano, narrator piano, and harmonium, with text written in collaboration with David Alejandro Hernandez. The cycle is a contemporary take on the Romantic-era trope of the protagonist pining over and becoming lost in the beloved. Here, rather than love being parabolic and consuming, it is grounded in a more mundane framing: two people living together, or at least trying to. 

Two versions exist of the cycle, each approaching the narrative differently. The first premiered on April 30, 2015 with Michael Hawes as baritone, Harrah Friedlander as soprano, and myself covering narrator, harmonium, and piano. The second version (this recording) was premiered on May 21, 2015 and featured Hernandez as narrator.

VI. Walked in and lost another June

The conclusion of Sphincter Control's debut album, Mow The F***ing Lawn (https://sphinctercontrol.bandcamp.com/album/mow-the-fucking-lawn) and the inaugural track of Let's talk about our feelings. (http://www.csvanderbeek.com/#!blank/cn8bk)

TEXT
There comes a time in an artist’s career when it is okay to publicly disclose depression. It happens when that person has enough financial security or aesthetic freedom that such a press release will not cause damage to reputation but reveal the profound personhood beneath the artist’s façade, beyond the years of game faces put up at cocktail parties for the chance of meeting this director or that producer, this conductor or that art dealer. It is at that point that overcoming depression is like beating cancer or bouncing back after the loss of a loved one.

I cannot begin to describe how disheartened I am by these stories, because, given how excruciatingly difficult it is for me to maintain a base level of daily functionality, I can hardly imagine myself even making it to that age, let alone that level of success. I wonder if, and for how many decades, that artist, who is now at least 35, wondered at what point mental illness would no longer have to be a secret but could instead become subject matter for some harrowing NPR interview. 


Now What Am I Supposed To Do With This Feeling Of Worthlessness

"Prayer" is a piece for open instrumentation set to a predetermined array of numbers. This array dictates the length of each note (from two seconds in length up to nineteen), but the harmony is of my design. The title refers to the process of prayer: in each faith or to each participating individual, a set of fixed gestures or texts through which one or many humble themselves to a higher power and ask for guidance or grace. In my case, music is the higher power to which I am devoted, as I believe it has the power to connect, heal, and improve humanity in a way that little else can. The rhythms are my fixed gestures, and my harmonies are my supplication.

Prayer

Welcome to the great American echo chamber, we all we can hear is the ever-increasing volume of our own outrage.

America's political climate is shockingly polarized, where opinions don't matter unless they are defended as unflinching belief. "Liberal" and "conservative" don't represent ends of a spectrum but bitter enemies, where the slightest suggestion of bridging the two sides is viewed as treason. Instead, each side vehemently denounces the other, stuck in the echo chamber of political dogmatism.

Conner Singh VanderBeek, introduction
Daniel Brottman, horn
Landon Hegedus, baritone saxophone
Casey Karr, double bass

Premiered on May 8 in Galvin Hall, Northwestern University

2016

AGAIN, THE GREAT AMERICAN ECHO CHAMBER

“I am, here, now, reaching the end. If possible.”
-Jacques Derrida, Aporias

for upright/grand piano or vibraphone and electronics
2016

An acute sense of belonging nowhere

"Skinless" is a piece with text by Lynn Hong that explores a woman's life with Sah, a conjoined twin that impedes on her livelihood but is her own skin. It is part of /Let's talk about our feelings./, a two-volume project drawing personal and abstracted stories about people's experiences with mental illness.

Skinless

On the condition of being multiple places (2018)is an audiovisual work that explores the ways in which continually moving around collapses distinctions between places. A sound or particular quality of sunlight gives flashes of other places lived, blurring the the differences among places but not shrinking the distances between.

Full video at https://vimeo.com/296923359.

Postlude

On the condition of being multiple places

After previous lives

With the water

Distance from

Track 5 off Sphincter Control's 3rd album, Extremely Stable Genius.

Guitar / percussion / noise by Chris Gomez
Keyboard / mixing & mastering by yours truly

Extremely Stable Genius

Citizen of Time

Ethnomusicologist // media artist 

University of Michigan
PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology
MA Program in South Asian Studies

Northwestern University '15
BM Music Composition + Ethnomusicology; BA South Asian Studies

Conner Singh VanderBeek

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