for nothing
a piano solo
duration 10'

The title of this work is drawn, with admiration, from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, a series of short prose pieces where a narrator expresses a dizzying range of bewildering thoughts in a tragicomical stream of consciousness.

My piece inhabits a world of rapidly shifting thoughts that span expressive extremes. Behaviors are briefly established and then left without transition, moving in and out in a sort of slipstream approach. The tendency for distinct categories of material to acquire expressive allies as the work progresses is, perhaps, evidence of an awakening consciousness able to contextualize dramatically combative sensibilities into a meaningful equipoise.

If the score is a dialog between composer and performer, then for nothing confounds the usual channels of communication by including texts (not intended to be spoken) that introduce a poetic element into the problem of interpretation. The texts themselves do not have a straightforward connection with the music – indeed sometimes they run deliberately against the grain – nonetheless, they are intended to invite the performer to engage in joint speculation regarding the potential flexibility of notated musical statements. Consider the following sample of texts found at various points in the score: a murmur of nothingness; the mind slips its focus; silence swallows my words; I cannot complete the thought. If there is anything clear about this language, it is that there is no direct mechanical connection to musical behaviors. I find the uncertainty of this issue, and the potential range of interpretive decisions it might suggest, to be provocative and captivating.

There has always been music behind the music, where the history of performance practice informs a deeper expressive context for musical understanding. In the case of my work, where there is no long shared history of performance (or implicit cultural guidance thereof) perhaps these idiosyncratic texts function as such. Interpreting these texts – regardless of their variable expressive immediacy – is an additional layer of engagement for the performer, who is already occupied with musical figures that are juxtaposed and layered in a sometimes tangled mass. Layers (polyphony) are central to the piece, so the text issue is consistent with the general musical discourse.
for nothing is dedicated to my friend Shannon Wettstein, whose remarkable dedication to performing challenging modern works has been both inspiring and heartwarming. Her premiere performances of this piece, in 2006, serendipitously marked the Beckett centennial.