multiple

Duration: 7'

Instrumentation: soprano, clarinet, alto saxophone, vibraphone (sus. cym.), piano

Text: "multiple," by Michael Hessel-Mial

Program Notes:

"At the end of 2010, just finished with a long-term relationship, I met a woman on a train and talked about poetry for the entire trip, swapping numbers as we parted ways. That winter and spring, we wrote collaborative love poems by text message, and she eventually agreed to fly from the Midwest to Atlanta to visit me, still having only known one another in person for a few hours. In between myworkdays at the university archive, absorbing Deleuze and Guattari's a "thousand" plateaus on the bus to and from home, we got drunk, made love a few times, fought once, and then she flew back north. That time period of erotic and poetic collaboration only resulted in a single poem, but that space between each other, that space between poetry and the world, remained open. "multiple" is one such poem to result from that. Those moments of contact and dark magic activate hidden spaces only accessible between one another, where senses become spectra and bodies become piecemeal. In a similar spirit, the poem draws upon my deep love for the philosophical works of Deleuze and Guattari, and their affinity for the virtual andmultiple. The intensity of their collaboration should also be called by no other name but erotic." -Michael Hessel-Mial, poet

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