Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments is based on a sequence of very brief text frag­ments extracted from a much longer poetic work, enti­tled I Lost Every­thing by poet Sarah Lang. The piece always presents this series of word-units in order and with­out over­lap. Each unit is spoken—not sung—at the begin­ning of a musi­cal ges­ture, and always by the per­former who is play­ing the ges­ture. Each unit is also repeated mul­ti­ple times.

I have decided on this approach in order to dis­tance the text from any fixed nar­ra­tive. The music instead pro­vides a space for these lan­guage objects to be observed in, and in which the lis­tener can choose to cre­ate or not cre­ate his or her own nar­ra­tive. Pre­sented in this mono­lithic man­ner and detached from the con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of lan­guage prepo­si­tions, Five Reflec­tive Frag­ments sets up the oppor­tu­nity for a kind of mytho­log­i­cal reac­tion to develop around the pre­con­cep­tions of the lis­tener. The word-units com­bine with the music to cre­ate hints, but hope­fully hints that will take each lis­tener in a dif­fer­ent direction.