Beside Oneself (2007) by Aaron Einbond
for viola and electonics
World premiere
Most people think what could I do, I think what shouldn't I do. What I should do perhaps is involved with the fact that I'm Jewish and what is known as Jewish paranoia. I don't feel comfortable enough to feel that everything is on my side and that it’s going to work just the way I want it.
— Morton Feldman
In Beside Oneself the violist alternates obsessively among a repertoire of gestures, testing the different responses they elicit from the electronics. Not until the end can she settle on a tenor incantation that unites the other gestures and the electronics into a plaintive call. The work takes as its point of departure Temper for bass clarinet and live electronics, written for the 2006 Festival MANCA in Nice, France. Computer analyses of complex sounds from the viola and bass clarinet are treated as models, resculpted, and combined to produce a new environment in which their distinctions are blurred.
I dedicate Beside Oneself to the memory of great composer and teacher Andrew Imbrie. The final elegaic melody is a tribute to his saying "music is singing and dancing."
— A. E.
[from program for February 11, 2008 concert]