the bodiless
note:
The Bodiless is a meditation on sound, time, and autonomy. I wrote it at the tail end of the winter in early 2021, as my immediate world was thawing, but also as the larger world was approaching the first anniversary of an ongoing crisis that has enacted a heavy toll on humanity. I was overtaken with a powerful sense that I needed to feel connected to something transcendent, outside the realm of the terrestrial or quotidian. I was also aware that this piece would likely be one of the last that I wrote in New Haven, CT, a city which I’d called home for nearly half a decade.
And so The Bodiless begins with an orchestration of music that ends the first piece I finished in New Haven, a work for clarinet and piano called After William Forsythe—two alternations, one melodic and one harmonic, are set against one another above low, rumbling bass notes. Beyond sharing this verbatim material, the pieces otherwise have very little to do with one another—but I like it that way. A lot of my favorite art feels profoundly meaningful but also essentially arbitrary.
The Bodiless is dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004), whose music has had a profound influence on me, and who I was listening to a great deal during my first months living in Connecticut. The title is taken from Wallace Stevens’ “The Auroras of Autumn”:
This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.