Composition

Notes

This work was written as a musical response to Agnes Martin’s Untitled No. 6, which I had the fortune of viewing in person during my residency at the Atlantic Music Festival. I was already aware of Martin as an artist who spent most of her life disconnected from society, or, as she put it, “with my back to the world,” and was amazed at how that sensation of isolation and disconnect from society showed in her work. As I myself have been wholly disconnected from social interactions during the past six months because of the COVID pandemic, I have frequently reflected about the experience of seeing Martin’s work in person. The more I thought back to the subtlety and meditative nature of the painting, the circumstances it was painted in, and its relation to the current moment we are living in, the more I understood what it must have been like to paint something which so strongly resists being named. I responded to this by resisting planning out motifs, textures, or really even trying to give the work any solid sense of form and narrative. I simply wrote in a stream-of-consciousness manner, allowing my own state of mind to map itself onto the work as freely and uninhibitedly as possible, creating an abstract representation of my state of being while cut off from the tangible world.