What Some Called Virtue, Some Called Sin

What Some Called Virtue, Some Called Sin was commissioned by Vertixe Sonora and premiered by them in Galicia on 25 June 2021. It lasts nine minutes and is scored for oboe, piano, fixed electronics and video.

The title comes from the way the same act — a woman speaking, a woman leaving, a woman wanting — is named differently depending on who is doing the naming. The oboe is the act; the piano and the electronics are the two namings. The oboe plays a single, long, winding line — modal, ornamented, close to the kind of melody I grew up hearing in Istanbul — and the piano surrounds it with two opposed kinds of harmony: a warm, chorale-like halo that calls it virtue, and a hard, percussive cluster-field that calls it sin. The electronics take the oboe’s own sound and stretch it into a choir of judges. The video, a slow processed image of a face that never quite resolves, refuses to take a side.

The line does not change. Only the words around it do.