The Music Box by Sarah Elise Thompson

Details

Description

About the piece:
By Matt Stiens
My first memories include a tiny wooden music box my mother owns that plays a very ornate "Edelweiss". I would listen to it over and over, enamored that such a small device could produce such magnificent beauty. This paired with wearing out a few VHS tapes of the "Sound of Music" (which heavily features "Edelweiss" throughout the musical) creates this vivid memory of perhaps my first intense studies into music. So, when I met Sarah in the summer of 2017 and she said she had this piece about music boxes, I couldn't help but beg for the music and create a recording.

Sarah took handful of music boxes owned by various people in her family (some boxes were over 100 years old!), recorded them, and created this hauntingly beautiful landscape by altering and layering their sounds on top of each other in a sound editor. For me, one of the best parts of playing this piece is that tape part stands on its own - it could be heard without the vibraphone and doesn't have a rigid metronome beating to it, just benchmarks to hit. As a performer, this allows me to explore the piece a little more each time, playing with the give and pull of the improvisatory vibraphone accompaniment Sarah wrote. There's even a full improv section in the middle of the piece, which forces me to listen and respond to the tape even more so than in the rest of the piece.

Every time I play "The Music Box", I think of how our perceptions of memories change as we get farther from them and as our experiences grow and evolve. Recalling/arriving at major benchmarks consistently while subtly changing how I get there each time is really a performance art of how we recall significant life events. In addition, my growing experience of performances and practice will change how I phrase and emphasize certain parts of the piece. Like any performance of "The Music Box", our memory is both fixed and flexible or, as is the case when a full improvisation is required, can have gaps in recollection.

******
Video by 2X1 Media: https://www.2x1media.com/
Recorded at the Peabody Conservatory

Many thanks to Taylor Davis and Ricky Bracamontes,!

******
Performer website: https://www.matthew-stiens.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Matthew-Stie...
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/matt-stiens
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattstiens/...