I Belong to Nothing, I Belong to Everything

I Belong to Nothing, I Belong to Everything is a solo for my own voice and electronics, premiered at Mosswood Chapel in Oakland on 23 April 2023 on the sfSound Mosswood series, with CNMAT’s support.

The title is two sentences that cancel each other and are both true — the condition of someone who has left one country for another and belongs, depending on the hour, to neither or to both. The piece takes that contradiction as its form. A single sung line, in a mode that could be Anatolian or could be nothing in particular, is offered plainly and then given to the electronics, which do two opposite things with it at once: one process strips it, pitch by pitch, until only breath is left — belonging to nothing — while the other multiplies it into a choir of my own voice filling every corner of the room — belonging to everything. The live voice moves between the two, sometimes joining the choir, sometimes the breath, never settling in either.

The ending is the line sung once more, alone, without processing, by a person who has decided, for the length of one phrase, to belong to herself.