Anxiety

Anxiety is a four-minute piece for viola, clarinet, piano and electronics, written in 2017 for the Hermes Ensemble and premiered by them in Antwerp that July — my first piece for a professional European ensemble, written in my first months in Belgium.

The title is not a metaphor. The piece is an attempt to notate the thing itself: a texture that cannot settle. The clarinet repeats a two-note figure slightly faster each time; the viola plays a sustained tone that keeps breaking into tremolo as if it cannot hold its breath; the piano drops single low notes at irregular intervals, each one a small shock; and the electronics — a granular cloud made from the three instruments — slowly raise the floor of the room until there is no silence left to rest in. Nothing in it is loud. Everything in it is too close.

It ends not with a resolution but with a cut, as these states do — the sound simply stops and the room is suddenly there again.