INTRA for Cello, Live Electronics and Lights (2023)
INTRA explores the inner life of the cello, its intersubjective entanglement with the performer, and an imagined shared unconscious between cellist and cello. What memories, thoughts, and desires does the human-material, instrument- performer entanglement hold? The piece seeks to imagine the inner world of a shared human-object intersubjectivity and to animate the cello as an autonomous “living” subject. INTRA explores agency, absence, and presence within human/more-than-human entanglements and performer/electronic interaction. Co-mingled with the instrument, both the human body and instrumental body share a complex collective unconscious, represented by the shape-shifting shadows cast behind the performer, à la the Jungian shadow (a metaphor for the subconscious). INTRA moves through a sea of dreams, memories, thoughts, and emotions within this shared psychological space between instrument and performer, meditating on the performative body, the performativity of the cello as an artifact-object, and the trauma, ecstasy, and dramatism of musical performance and traditional classical pedagogies.
Premiered by Robbie Bui on February 17th, 2023 at the Conrad Prebys Music Center Experimental Theatre at the University of California San Diego
Composition, electronics, and lighting design - ess whiteley
Cello - Robbie Bui
Video recording and editing - Robbie Bui
Audio mixing and mastering - ess whiteley
