Fluency - Juilliard New Dances (2021)

In 2021, choreographer Norbert De La Cruz III approached me about creating music for his work Fluency, which he was developing for Juilliard’s New Dances program. The piece was commissioned by Juilliard (where both Norbert and I were on faculty at the time), and would be performed by the full ensemble of third year dancers. With the piece, Norbert was exploring ideas of linguistic and cultural fluency, heritage and communication across generations, which gave me plenty of fertile ground to work with musically (and technologically). I wrote a score for a live string quartet and a (mostly) pre-recorded electronics component. That electronics component was a whirlwind of materials referencing both Norbert’s and my familial and cultural ties across hundreds of years of history. A non-exhaustive list of the components I used for that track include: audio recordings of Norbert’s niece as she was just learning to talk, a Slovak fujara (an overtone flute), a medieval string drum processed by a modular synthesizer, an ensemble of bluegrass instruments (all played by me), granular synthesis, and a whole lot more. All of those disparate elements were woven together with the live string quartet to support the dancers as they navigated the complex, beautiful choreographic environment that Norbert designed.

An excerpt of the 21’ work is below.