...Right in Front of You, What You Are Looking For...

…Right in Front of You, What You Are Looking For… was written in 2017 on a commission from the American violinist Sarah Mareen Cave and is still awaiting its premiere. It is a fifteen-minute piece for solo violin and fixed media.

The title is the sentence one is told after a long search — the keys were on the table, the answer was in the first line — and the piece is built on a found object of exactly that kind: a short, plain melody, almost a folk tune, that is present from the first bar in the fixed media, buried under layers of processed violin, and that the live player spends fifteen minutes searching for. She circles it in harmonics, approaches it in the wrong key, finds one phrase of it and loses the rest; the tape, meanwhile, keeps it going patiently underneath, in plain sight. Only in the last minute does the violin play the tune through, simply, once — and the tape falls silent, as though it had only been waiting to be heard.

The ellipses mark the long middle of the sentence, where most of the looking happens.