I Feel the Nail in My Heart

When his wife died, the man said: My wife’s picture hangs on the wall, but I feel the nail in my heart.

That sentence is the whole of the piece. I Feel the Nail in My Heart was composed in March 2022 at CNMAT, UC Berkeley, for Nicholas Isherwood, who premiered it at Mosswood Chapel in Oakland on 29 April 2022. The baritone enters with a basket containing everything he needs: four small Bluetooth speakers, each pre-loaded with a single drone — D, F♯, C♯, G — which he places one by one in the four corners of the stage, and a music box, which he holds in his right hand for most of the performance and winds at the moments the score marks. The drones enter in sequence, so that the harmony of the room is assembled by hand, like furniture. Over them the voice sings the sentence, muffled at times by the singer’s own palm pressed over his mouth, sliding in irregular glissandi, breaking into the granular rattle of vocal fry.

The score itself lasts only a couple of minutes; the performance — the placing, the winding, the listening — takes as long as it takes, and is usually closer to ten. It is a piece about the object that remains when the person does not.