Your Network Is Unstable (2024)

Your Network Is Unstable (2024) for symphonic orchestra

This new work incorporates the classic trope of depiction in American music, as found in Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, Ruth Crawford, Elliott Carter, Duke Ellington, and many others.  Most centrally, I aim to remind listeners of our endemic condition of instability, to foster not only a subliminal psychological discouragement of complacency, but also a celebration of mobility.

The work of the 18th century Afro-German philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo has been described as “eine Philosophie ohne festen Wohnsitz,” a philosophy without a fixed abode.  Similarly, this music asks listeners to consider the consequences of being no longer at ease in an increasingly unstable world, one in which new modes of mobile relation and processes of decolonization and creolization seem most relevant to our contemporary situation.  What might these processes send like?

Finally, long before network analysis became a means of debugging Internet connections, it was (and still is) a key research technique in many fields for tracing social structures and technologies of power.  This relates to my longstanding work with musical AI, which deals with the formation of hybrid human-machine microsocialities of improvisation.  But social network analysis can also be deployed to research the spread of memes--such as “your network is unstable.”   And since we are all networked, if our network is unstable, we are also in a condition of instability--an interregnum, the soil that nurtures change.