Politically Correct Minorities

Politically Correct Minorities was composed jointly with Lucas Rei Ramos for the Hermes Ensemble, who premiered it in Antwerp in July 2019. It is a ten-minute piece for viola, flute and electronics.

We wrote it as two foreigners in Belgium, at a moment when the word minority was being used about us in ways that were polite and deadening in equal measure. The piece takes the form of a conversation that has been pre-approved. Viola and flute are each given their own well-behaved material — smooth, consonant, agreeable — and are asked to take turns, never to interrupt, never to play too loudly. The electronics are the room: a processed bed of the two instruments’ own sounds that applauds gently whenever they stay within bounds and turns to noise when they do not. Over ten minutes the two players find more and more ways of being disobedient inside the rules — playing the right notes too quietly to hear, too slowly to follow, with the wrong part of the bow — until the room, unsure whether to applaud, does both at once.

Co-writing it meant neither of us could pretend the joke was only about the other.