Recording: Zachary Taylor, Trevor Gould, Alice Kabira, and Alexandra Karafotias, Trumpet
“Flaws are what make you you. Quit trying to be perfect.” - Greg Wadsworth
you comes from a very difficult part of my life. At the age of nineteen, I was experiencing a great crisis of identity, and a constant sense of anxiety and self-doubt for my relationships with the people around me and for the qualities that I consider to define me. I had so many questions: Who am I? Who should I be? Who should I not be? I couldn’t stop thinking about how to be “good”. I asked myself: Am I a good musician? Am I a good friend? Am I a good partner? Am I a good son? Many of the adults in my life told me that what I was going through is commonly referred to as “growing up”, and with the help of those around me, I came to understand that no one could answer all of these questions but me. Through you, I sought to begin my journey towards finding my identity.
The end product is a work about separateness and convergence. I began by taking each of those four questions - Am I a good ? - and giving them a voice. These voices are separate in timbre, key, and rhythm, but they come from the same place of self-doubt, so their material is the same. Then each of these four voices begin, slowly, to converge. First into the same rhythm, in which they lividly shout one question: Who am I? Then, after frustration subsides to reflection, they converge slowly into the same key and timbre. As one unified voice, the four questions shout again, but with a new optimism. The final convergence of the work is one of pitch - each of the four voices resolve to one note that grows to a nearly-unbearable volume before giving way to silence.
I am still growing and changing every day, and so is the way in which I see my own identity. I suspect the exact answer to the question “Who am I?” will never stay the same. But the final note is my way of speaking the answer that I found by composing this work: I am me. And that is good enough.