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I first thought of writing a piano piece for my friend Du Yun after hearing her perform Frederic Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated” in a practice room at Oberlin Conservatory in May of 2000. Roughly five months later I heard the title of that piece chanted by thousands of demonstrators against corporate politics and the death penalty, outside the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George W. Bush, at UMass Boston on October 3. That evening I linked arms with my friends, crossed a police barricade and sat down in the roadway leading from the debate hall. Between that moment and my arrest I was introduced to a whole new world of brutality in the service of our government. The next morning I saw Bush on local TV, congratulating the Massachusetts State Police on their job of handling the protesters. Contrary to the intentions of the Police State, my experience at their hands has solidified a feeling in me that I need to do this kind of thing again and again.

            At the time of this event I was in the early stages of writing a piece for violin and piano, in which either part could be performed separately as a solo version. I planned for the two parts to fuse together in unison at a few key points, separated by passages in which the instruments would explore similar harmonic material independently, viewed from different angles.  After listening to the accounts of other people who were at the protest, I became interested in the idea of superimposing their spoken accounts on tape, relating to each other in much the same way as the two parts of the previously planned composition. I decided to put together the tape as a sort of “sound-documentary” in which I would combine multiple recorded accounts from fellow demonstrators with sounds from the event, as well as samples from other sources. I then decided to write the piano solo for Du Yun first, which would determine how I cut up the narrative on tape. I wrote the piano music as another layer in this documentary— a musical journal written between my arraignment and pre-trial, between the first presidential debate and the aborted recounting of election ballots, written in full recognition of the short public attention span regarding current events.

Spoken word of:

Howard Zinn

Paul Lovelace

Jamie Washam

Julia Sero

Erik Spangler

Indymedia coverage of the protest at the first 2000 Presidential Debate, Boston, MA

Musical samples from:

Mos Def, Fear Not of Man

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