The graphic on the preceding page is a visualization of global wind patterns; massive amounts of weather data are fed into a supercomputer that then produces a live (or pseudo-live) “wind map.” The swirls and swoops are color-coded: areas of blue and green are relatively calm, while red and purple usually imply devastating conditions in a tropical system. There is something particularly poetic about seeing our atmosphere on such a macro scale; the same colors that are converted from numerical data also suggest Van Gogh-esque brushstrokes. The confluence of the empirical and the aesthetic in the “wind map” has proved wildly inspiring for the composition of this piece.

A video excerpt of the piece with a score can be seen here: youtube.com/watch?v=vjDpAPpVIVg

Ink and Wash is influenced by Chinese calligraphy, in particular the work of contemporary Chinese, New York based artist Gu Wenda. His works, Negative and Positive Characters and Tranquility Comes from Meditation, liberate themselves from traditional technical and aesthetic structures. His work often rearranges Chinese characters over surreal splashed ink landscapes.¹ These interrogations and juxtapositions create ’new’ symbols tied with social critique.²

For me, the works confront repression and the power of the human spirit. These ideas are expressed sonically in various strokes and lines of light and shade, attack and decay, from singular gestures to the mass.

“Bird Up” encapsulates the composer’s perspective on the erratic nature of New York City, as seen through the lens of the bizarre and chaotic humor in the Eric Andre Show. Throughout several years of living in the absurd and unpredictable environment that is New York, the composer found that his skits were a clever match to the everyday unpredictability of the city. The skit that inspires this piece reflects the extreme end of the chaos that New Yorkers often encounter with a humorous twist, Eric Andre dresses up as a bird and confronts strangers on the street. The composer develops the piece around direct inspiration from the show, the primary motivic material of the piece is derived from the opening chords of the tv show. Incorporating this motive in several modes, the piece gradually transforms, reflecting the humor of the ever changing yet constantly absurd reality of the show and New York City.

Many of Auznieks’s compositions are inspired by, and contextualized through, philosophy and poetry, drawn from a wide array of sources that include Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot. And the title of Crossing is, not surprisingly, also rich in literary associations, referring to Harold Bloom’s invocation of Emerson in his discussion of Wallace Stevens’s poem “Snow Man.” It envisages a crossing into another state of mind, suggested and catalyzed by rhetorical (and, in this composition, musical) devices. “I hope Crossing can become a leap from the familiar physical world and how memory operates in it,” says Auznieks, “to some other imaginary, utopian, idealistic world.”

The work centers on motivic transformations that function as an analogy to Proustian notions of memory. “The same motifs are heard, re-heard, and misheard,” Auznieks points out. As Feldman once observed, “The whole lesson of Proust is not to look for experiences in the object, but within ourselves.” Auznieks aims for this work to similarly elicit a parallel experience within the listener.