Respiration, Memory, Addiction
Respiration, Memory, Addiction (~11’) is a new work for piano commissioned by and developed in collaboration with Eric Huebner, who is the resident pianist at the New York Philharmonic and a member of SUNY Buffalo’s music faculty. The piece is a reflection on trauma and depression, specifically extending from my own experience of addiction to opioids in 2010.
Some musicians worry that tying musical expression to specific ‘real-world’ meanings can diminish some of what’s possible in music listening. I don’t disagree. And yet most of us have experienced a thought or a feeling, in connection with music, that we can’t imagine being expressed well in any other way. I have developed a habit of making music — piano music in particular —that attempts to address a hard-to-describe psychological state, and then pairing that music with words about the worldly situation in which that state of mind occurred. An off-kilter idea in a medieval poem. A pop-culture take on policing and race in the 1980s. A friend’s story about a protest movement, or a radio interview with Paul Bowles. A silly misreading of a soccer movie¹. I turn to the piano as a medium for reflection on an emerging, but uncertain, feeling; later I’ll try to write about the thought process that led me to the music that results.
Respiration, Memory, Addiction, for piano, began in a reflection on a struggle in the face of addiction—in particular, a mental struggle with what might be termed evolving pasts. Pasts that we remake and redeploy, pasts that, since they are remade, necessarily have their own pasts. I played with musical time in a few ways, and then wrote, in the margins:
Pasts that — if they were conscious, would know who they once were, know their own vanishing stories, but would prefer not to know them, pasts that would prefer the heroic selves they have now become — the ones that better justify their persisting and mattering as pasts — to those younger sequences, the forgettable and inchoate early pasts, tired now, so long after their assembly in the wake of their once-present events.
The opening of Respiration, Memory, Addiction, centers on a very loud F, in the middle of the keyboard, always with a stark grace-note. As new gestures and flurries move around it, the meaning of that F might change for some listeners. For me, it changes not only in the present, but in memory. And so I begin to think of both a former impression and a current impression of the past, simultaneously.
***
By the time of my accident in 2010—I was struck by a car while bicycling— the “first phase” of the U.S. opioid epidemic had drawn to a close², a phase in which pharmaceutical companies, including Sackler-family owned Purdue Pharma, marketed powerful neuro-tropic substances to doctors and concealed what they knew about health and addictive risks — all while making large financial contributions financially to the Federation of State Medical Boards, and other physicians’ groups. Despite having paid more than $600 million in settlements in 2007 (negotiated on their behalf by the company’s chief counsel Rudy Giuliani), distribution of the drugs continued to escalate.
My post-accident surgeon was convinced of my non-addictive personality (reflecting my normative white privilege in health-care access, in a racially encoded distinction³), and prescribed opioids for my recovery, without significant restriction. I had seen headlines about opioids. Stories of their abuse formed a context for my first experience of them. And my first experience of them shaped my experience, my memory, of those evolving stories.
Later in Respiration…, there’s a passage that might be a representation of trauma—a brief change in character toward the emphatic and angular—but it is suddenly interrupted by something more placid, filled with held chords and brief pauses. This slowing sparseness, though, is layered: what sounds a little like a “choral” approach to harmony at first, is quietly contorted by the presence of competing rhythms, all of them slow and gentle, but slow and gentle in different ways:
I did not recognize my dependency until it had been a fact of my body for months. I wrote more in the margins of musical sketches:
At first I thought my character had shifted — darkened — due to life circumstances, but a temporality of my depression soon showed itself: my sense of what needed to be done, what needed to be ignored, who needed to be loved or distanced, and what streams of consciousness to ride into the night, was a shifting orientation, a whiplash of re-imagined pasts, ebbing and flowing startlingly in perfect time with patterns of self-medication. […] But one morning, tracing the roots of my rollicking contempt for nearly anything around me, the lines of memory collided, and either merged or severed.
In composing the work around these reflections, I tried to make rhythm and form that would reflect on what a better “past” that is — to mix mental anguish with what Luce Irigaray calls aisthesis⁴, something like the capacity to feel with, feel against. Finally, “Respiration, Memory, Addiction tries to “put pasts together”, and lets them converse, but gives them a thread that (regardless of fact, distortion, distance, and the rise and fall of meaningfulness) is made less like a story and more like breathing.”
Eric Huebner will tour a variety of cities with this work, as well as my works “Péle / Peleas” and “Fors Seulement condition…” in April and May of 2023. His May 2021 recording of “Respiration, Memory, Addiction” may be streamed here via Google Docs.
NOTES
- Those are actually the topics of piano works that you can hear at <http://benleedscarson.com> → Music for Piano. For more commentary, see Benjamin Carson and Christopher Williams. “On the Piano Music of Benjamin Carson: A Correspondence of Essays.” In the Open Space Magazine 5 (Fall 2003), 231–250.
- DeWeerdt, Sarah (2019). “Tracing the US opioid crisis to its roots.” Nature. 11 September 2019.
- Xin Chen, Wei Hou, Sina Rashidian, Yu Wang, Xia Zhao, George Stuart Leibowitz, Richard N. Rosenthal, Mary Saltz, Joel H. Saltz, Elinor Randi Schoenfeld & Fusheng Wang, “A large-scale retrospective study of opioid poisoning in New York State with implications for targeted interventions,” in Nature: Scientific Reports, 4 March 2021.
- Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity.” In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1993), 185.
[ Respiration, Memory, Addiction (full score) ]
