EXPOSURE
notes by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti

I. Adjacencies
II. Everyone keeps me
III. Overlay (for David Lang)
IV. Everyone keeps me

“The beautiful thing is not really attainable, it only exists in a memory.” Ted says, his voice slightly distorted over the phone. It’s taken us months to find time for this interview and now the connection is going in and out. Often the only moments we have to catch up are while he’s driving—uninterrupted time exists only in memory.

Exposure is a piece built from fragments, their overlays and adjacencies telling a story of past experiences remembered, processed, lost. In the first movement, different types of material are laid next to each other, bleed into each other and sometimes fight for space. In the third, two bits of material (drawn, as a tribute, from two pieces by my teacher David Lang) are overlaid and combined—the harmonic progression of one superimposed upon the rhythmic scheme of another. The second and fourth movements are like verses of a song.

The “beautiful” hidden song Ted references is drawn from another work: his setting of a text by the poet Dorothea Lasky. This type of self-reference is an important part of Ted’s work: the emotional content of the song has a personal meaning to Ted, and therefore the manipulation of the other parts—through juxtaposition, overlay, fragmentation, and nonpitched sounds—reframe, distort, scrawl on that unspoken text. “Which is why the ‘beautiful music’ is never really ‘there,’” Ted adds.

While we hear remnants of the song throughout the piece, Ted never really lets us hear it in an unaltered way. Instead, its melody comes and goes too quickly to grasp onto or is forced into the frame of a sped-up and intensified scherzo, the tenderness of its push-pull drained and calcified. At the other extreme, when the quartet tries to slow down enough to hear the underlying song as in the last movement of Exposure, it is too slow, in Ted’s own words “glacial, and still out of context.” Groans from slow overpressure in the quartet distort what could have been beautiful. Or is it only “beautiful” because it’s distorted? The music exposes these conflicts of intention.

The piece ends with the hint of the dance at the beginning of the album from For the Love of Charles Mingus. But there is nothing left to develop—the memory of the dance is just the raw “hazy heart pump sound” itself. In the words of Saul Williams, “your heartbeat is enough to dance? Dance.”