"The Workbench" — A Sonic Portrait of My Father
Premieres next Tuesday, November 7
A new project called The Workbench premiers next Tuesday, November 7. The Unheard-Of Ensemble will be performing it alongside two other projects by Ohio composers HyeKyung Lee and Robert McClure. The premiere is at the Short North Stage here in Columbus, Ohio (in the old Garden Theater), quickly followed by performances in Athens, Ohio (November 8), and in New York City (November 11). They are all free! If you are able to come to any of these performances, I would love to see you and say hello.
The Workbench is my most personal and vulnerable work to date: a sonic portrait of my father, Paul. The piece is a reflection on time, filial connections, life and death, and the power of inherited objects.
Growing up in Appalachian Ohio, my father repaired mechanical things: watches, clocks, typewriters, radios, and record players. His patience and curiosity with these modest and everyday items — combined with an ability to repair seemingly anything — gave him a mythical status in the family. (For more information on my father and the place where he grew up, you can read this post from a couple of years ago.)
After my father’s death, I inherited these things, along with his workbench. I began to think of the objects as conduits between past and present, living and dead. I began to ask: are there sonic traces of a person embedded in these collected, repaired, and loved objects? And do the objects have their own agency, which we can activate and listen to?
The music of The Workbench is both elegiac and curious, slowly building momentum over a dozen minutes. Throughout, we hear voicemails from my father, where his everyday questions and statements become both poignant and poetic. At times, we hear recordings of some of the repaired objects: ticking watches, radio static, and a slowly turning music box.
At the end, a recording of my father calmly sleeping and breathing in hospice is raw, intimate, and dignified. It lends gravity to the piece, and is both shocking and perfectly ordinary, too. Despite its extremely personal nature, these recordings of my father become archetypal: sounds that connect to everyone’s shared experiences. As we listen to my father moving through the stages of life and death, we are confronting the fundamental issues of what it means to be human, and mortal.
The project’s video methodically explores the workbench. Here, I am deeply indebted to my friend Kevin Davison, whose expert videography and video editing allow us to see the workbench and its textures in great detail. We see tools, radios, speakers, a typewriter, and many small collections of things. The objects are arranged just so; they reveal how one’s personal workspace can become an archive of everyday objects imbued with meaning and aesthetic pleasure.
The Workbench is both portrait and memorial. It directly uses the themes and methodologies that my work is concerned with: lives of everyday people, contemplative listening, found sounds, and interdisciplinary storytelling. Perhaps most importantly, it pays careful attention to seemingly trivial details of everyday life. It shows how attentive listening might reveal something to us right now: a way to think deeply about each other, and work toward healing the people and places where we live.
The Johnstone Fund for New Music commissioned The Workbench, for the Unheard-Of Ensemble. It was also supported with a Funds for Artists Award from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Many thanks to my niece Samantha Rehark for creating the exquisite line drawing of the workbench that will also be the cover of a future recording.
Once again, the premiere of The Workbench will take place at 7:00pm on November 7, 2023, at the Short North Stage, Columbus, Ohio, followed by a performance on November 8 in Athens, Ohio. The New York premiere will be part of the Unheard-of Dialogues Concert on Saturday, November 11, 2023, at Alchemical Studios. All of these concerts are free!
If you are unable to attend, look for an EP release of this project in mid-January, 2024, on Winesap Records.
Be well,
Brian