Anthem for Personal Interruptions

Anthem for Personal Interruptions is a sixteen-channel work for voice and tape, written in Strasbourg at the end of 2025 and first presented in January 2026 in the Conservatoire’s multichannel studio.

An anthem is a song a group sings in unison to prove it is a group. This one is for a person who keeps being interrupted — by a notification, by a thought, by her own second voice — and cannot finish a line. Sixteen loudspeakers surround the listener, and from each of them, at unpredictable moments, comes a fragment of the same sung phrase — the “anthem,” never heard whole — cutting across whichever fragment was already in the air. The live voice tries to carry the tune from one speaker to the next and is interrupted by herself in another corner of the room. Over ten minutes the interruptions become the piece: a choir of one, never in unison, assembling an anthem no one can stand to attention for.

It is the closest I have come to writing a comedy, and it is about the least funny thing I know.