THE WORKBENCH

INSTRUMENTATION:
Bass Clarinet
Piano
Violin
’Cello
Audio Samples

TOTAL TIME: 11’08”

TRANSPOSED SCORE

NOTES:

The Workbench is my most personal work to date: a sonic portrait of my father, Paul. The piece is a reflection on time, filial connections, life and death, and the power of inherited objects.

Growing up in Appalachian Ohio, my father repaired mechanical things: watches, clocks, typewriters, radios, and record players. His patience and curiosity with these modest and everyday items — combined with an ability to repair seemingly anything — gave him a mythical status in the family. 

After my father’s death, I inherited these things, along with his workbench. I saw them as conduits between past and present, living and dead. I began to ask: are there sonic traces of a person embedded in these collected, repaired, and loved objects? And do the objects have their own agency, which we can activate and listen to?

The music of The Workbench is both elegiac and curious, slowly building momentum over a dozen minutes. Throughout, we hear voicemails from my father, where his everyday questions and statements become both poignant and poetic. At times, we hear recordings of some of the repaired objects: ticking watches, radio static, and a slowly turning music box. 

At the end, a recording of my father calmly sleeping and breathing in hospice is raw, intimate, and dignified. It lends gravity to the piece, and is both shocking and perfectly ordinary, too. Despite its extremely personal nature, these recordings of my father become archetypal: sounds that connect to everyone’s shared experiences. As we listen to my father moving through the stages of life and death, we are confronting the fundamental issues of what it means to be human, and mortal.

The project’s video methodically explores the workbench. We see tools, radios, speakers, a typewriter, and many small collections of things. The objects are arranged just so; they reveal how one’s personal workspace can become an archive of everyday objects imbued with meaning and aesthetic pleasure. 

The Workbench is both portrait and memorial. It directly uses the themes and methodologies that my work is concerned with: lives of everyday people, contemplative listening, found sounds, and interdisciplinary storytelling. Perhaps most importantly, it pays careful attention to seemingly trivial details of everyday life. It shows how attentive listening might reveal something to us right now: a way to think deeply about each other, and work toward healing the people and places where we live.

The Johnstone Fund for New Music commissioned The Workbench, for the Unheard-Of Ensemble. It was also supported with a Funds for Artists Award from the Greater Columbus Arts Council.

The premiere of The Workbench was on November 7, 2023, at the Short North Stage, Columbus, Ohio, followed by a performance at Glidden Hall on November 8 in Athens, Ohio. The New York premiere was part of the Unheard-of Dialogues Concert on November 11, 2023, at Alchemical Studios.