Only a small part of music is actu­ally about sound. The major­ity of music-making has to do with social inter­ac­tions more than any­thing else. Music ful­fills cer­tain func­tions (usu­ally pre-determined) within cer­tain social sit­u­a­tions, or serves as a replace­ment for var­i­ous social func­tions when we use it in pri­vate. There­fore, music can be said to be a community-normed phe­nom­e­non: what makes music music are the peo­ple who find a use for it, usu­ally by listening.

On top of that, the most use­ful (or best) pieces of music are gen­er­ally those for which there is the most con­sen­sus on usage: Beethoven’s ninth sym­phony and Michale Jackson’s album, Thriller are both “good” because a lot of peo­ple agree that they are good; i.e., a lot of peo­ple have found those two pieces of music use­ful for cer­tain social functions.

Any­way, these were some of the thoughts run­ning through my head while writ­ing this piece, and they influ­enced my choice and usage of musi­cal materials.

Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby is an arrange­ment of Community-Normed, which was com­mis­sioned by the Con­tin­uum Ensem­ble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increas­ingly inter­ested in pre­sent­ing pieces in mul­ti­ple ver­sions and com­bi­na­tions. Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby, with a few changes, is also the mid­dle move­ment of Community-Normed. I’ve also writ­ten a third ver­sion, for a cham­ber music con­fer­ence in Ver­mont in July 2009, with dif­fer­ent instru­men­ta­tion and adapted for ama­teur performers.

Why mul­ti­ple ver­sions? Because music today is mul­ti­ple. Every­one is exposed to music from mul­ti­ple cul­tures all the time, from mul­ti­ple time peri­ods, and in mul­ti­ple ver­sions. DJs remix pop songs, which are avail­able in numer­ous ver­sions, and do mash-ups that inter­twine mul­ti­ple tracks in the space of a few sec­onds. I think this is a good way to deal with the fact that we are, for the first time in his­tory, drown­ing in more music than any­one knows what to do with. For this rea­son, cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple ver­sions is an impor­tant project of mine.

Musi­cally, Jack­ham­mer Lul­laby presents a humor­ous musi­cal set­ting of try­ing to fall asleep with con­struc­tion going on out­side the window.