In Episode 12 of Multi-Verse, poet Timothy Liu reads “Last Christmas”  and chats with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham about the poem's themes of love, desire, and loneliness—and how much detail is enough to tell a story.

“Last Christmas” can be found in Liu's collection “Down Low And Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues” (Barrow Street Press, 2023), available here:

https://barrowstreet.org/press/product/down-low-and-lowdown-timothy-lius-bedside-bottom-feeder-blues-timothy-liu/

12. Timothy Liu: Last Christmas

In Episode 13 of Multi-Verse, poet Eugene Ostashevsky reads five sonnets and talks with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham about mixing humor with horror and the stupidity of war.

Ostashevsky's latest collection, THE FEELING SONNETS (New York Review Books, 2022), is available here:
https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-feeling-sonnets

13. Eugene Ostashevsky: Five Sonnets

Performers: Steven Schick, conductor; Wilfrido Terrazas, flute; Ellen Hindson, oboe; Grace Talaski, clarinet; Kosuke Matsuda, percussion; Kyle Adam Blair, piano; Miguel Zazueta, Natalia Merlano Gomez, Alex Taylor, voice; Amir Norouz Nasseri, Ilana Waniuk, violins; Myra Hinrichs, viola; Peter Ko, cello; Matthew Henson, bass

Production assistance from Alex Stephenson, David Espiritu and Jessica Flores 

---

Stylistically, Interviews resembles a collage: materials borrowed from Josquin, spectralism, Leonard Cohen, high modernism, elevator music, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Kyle Adam Blair, Appalachian folk singing, bits recycled from my own pieces, the recorded voice of my mother, my own songs and poems. But collage is generally creating something new out of things that come from different places, disparate things; this feels more like a multifarious reflection of my own musical and personal world – things that all come from, or at least have been absorbed into, the same place, a musical inheritance or accumulation. I’ve always felt slightly unsure of the relationship between all of the many aspects (personas?) of my music making – sometimes they feel far away from each other, held in different compartments – but here I feel I’ve found a way for many of them to coexist in one place.

Conceptually, I think of Interviews as more concerned with storytelling than with aesthetics. Or at least, Interviews represents an intersection between musical and personal concerns. In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, I undertook ethnographic research as part of my PhD coursework. For this I interviewed both my parents, Vicki and Trish, asking them all kinds of questions about their lives: what it was like for them growing up, how they came to terms with their sexuality, what it was like living through the politically tumultuous 1980s in New Zealand, how they went about starting a family, how it was for them when I came out. 

At the time, this was a really rewarding process of discovery and documentation, a way to learn new things about my family and where I’d come from, a way to feel connected to them across the Pacific during the enforced separation of the pandemic. Now, those interview recordings have other resonances. Trish was diagnosed with early onset dementia several years before we made the interviews; by the time we recorded them, her dementia had started to really affect her short term memory. Now, nearly four years later, her dementia is quite advanced, and many of those memories are gone for her. Looking back, the documentation of those memories is precious. 

The making of this piece has been both a way for me to hold on to that preciousness, those past perfect moments of connection, but also a way to process grief, the ongoing present of loss and change. In many ways Interviews occupies a threshold, between looking back and looking forward; it is both at once, acknowledging the messiness and multifacetedness of memory, not singular, smooth, or linear. I also see it as a small way of showing gratitude for both of my devoted, supportive, sensitive, beloved parents, and of celebrating Trish’s life.

Interviews, for ensemble and prerecorded sound

In Episode 14 of Multi-Verse, poet Barbara Tran reads “Loon Song” and chats with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham about fever, living with uncertainty, and the wisdom of beehives. 

“Loon Song” can be found in Tran's debut collection, PRECEDENTED PARROTING (Palimpsest Press, 2024), available here:

https://palimpsestpress.ca/books/precedented-parroting-barbara-tran/

14. Barbara Tran: Loon Song

In Episode 15 of Multi-Verse, poet Philip Metres reads “Fugitive” and talks with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham about memory, home-longing, and paying attention to the accordion of time.

“Fugitive” can be found in Metres's latest collection, FUGITIVE/REFUGE (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), available here:

https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/fugitive-refuge-by-philip-metres/

15. Philip Metres: Fugitive

In Episode 16 of Multi-Verse, poet Devon Walker-Figueroa reads “Private Lessons" and talks with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham about ghosts, dance, and shaping and breaking form.

“Private Lessons” can be found in Walker-Figueroa's collection PHILOMATH (Milkweed Editions, 2021), available here:

https://milkweed.org/book/philomath

Devon Walker-Figueroa: Private Lessons

Justine Cormack, violin
James Bush, cello
Simon Martyn-Ellis, theorbo

Recorded by RNZ Concert at St Andrew's on The Terrace

on what grounds, for violin, cello, and theorbo

Eric Moore solo cello, Kemp Recital Hall, Illinois State University 10.22.24

Differences, for solo cello

Three Dreams for tenor, piano, and string quartet

Commissioned by Miguel Zazueta

Performed by Miguel Zazueta (tenor), Kyle Adam Blair (piano), and Quartet Nouveau (Batya MacAdam-Somer, Missy Lukin, violins; Annabelle Terbetski, viola; Elizabeth Brown, cello)

Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, UC San Diego, 05.22.25

I. The Dream Keeper (Langston Hughes)
II. Sueño Despierto (José Martí)
III. In Tall Grass (Carl Sandburg) / Primero Sueño (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz)


The Dream Keeper - Langston Hughes

Bring me all of your dreams, 
You dreamers. 
Bring me all of your 
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them 
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too rough fingers
Of the world. 


Sueño despierto - José Martí

Yo sueño con los ojos
Abiertos, y de día
Y noche siempre sueño.
Y sobre las espumas
Del ancho mar revuelto,
Y por entre las crespas
Arenas del desierto,
Y del león pujante,
Monarca de mi pecho,
Montado alegremente
Sobre el sumiso cuello,
Un niño que me llama
Flotando siempre veo.

 
In Tall Grass - Carl Sandburg

Bees and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner—a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.       

And I ask no better a winding sheet
                             (over the earth and under the sun.) 

Let the bees go honey-hunting with yellow blur of wings in the dome of my head, in the rumbling, singing arch of my skull.     

Let there be wings and yellow dust and the drone of dreams of honey—who loses and remembers?—who keeps and forgets? 

In a blue sheen of moon over the bones and under the hanging honeycomb the bees come home and the bees sleep.

 
from Primero Sueño - Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Piramidal, funesta de la tierra
nacida sombra, al cielo encaminaba
de vanos obeliscos punta altiva,
escalar pretendiendo las estrellas;
si bien sus luces bellas
esemptas siempre, siempre rutilantes,
la tenebrosa guerra
que con negros vapores le intimaba
la vaporosa sombra fugitiva
burlaban tan distantes,
que su atezado ceño
al superior convexo aún no llegaba
del orbe de la diosa
que tres veces hermosa
con tres hermosos rostros ser ostenta;

quedando sólo dueño
del aire que empañaba
con el aliento denso que exhalaba.

Y en la quietud contenta […]

12. Timothy Liu: Last Christmas

Multi-Verse

Related tracks