This piece is based on the sound of the word shit in twelve dif­fer­ent lan­guages. It trav­els from west to east geo­graph­i­cally across the world. The lan­guages were cho­sen either because I speak them, or because I could find a native speaker of that lan­guage to teach me how to say shit. I did, how­ever, attempt to keep a some­what even spac­ing between geo­graph­i­cal areas, although a com­pletely even dis­tri­b­u­tion would have been, of course, impos­si­ble to realize.

Cul­ture no.1 is the first in a series of three pieces that deal with the chang­ing role of music in cul­ture, and I wrote it while work­ing on my Master’s degree at UC San Diego. The impe­tus for the piece was a series of four unre­lated sam­ples (and one deriv­a­tive sam­ple) that I found on my hard drive, left over from other projects. The sam­ples play at var­i­ous points in the music, and in one way or another, the instru­men­tal parts derive their mate­r­ial from them.

In Cul­ture no.1, I wanted to focus on sev­eral issues that I saw as par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to our rapidly chang­ing cul­ture milieu. These include an imme­di­ate and sim­ple pre­sen­ta­tion of mate­r­ial, clar­ity of pur­pose, the high­est pos­si­ble degree of sim­plic­ity in the orga­ni­za­tion of mate­r­ial, and musi­cal ideas that can live “in the moment”, with­out the need to ref­er­ence large sec­tions of the piece on mul­ti­ple lev­els. These are themes that have remained impor­tant to me since and have also fig­ured promi­nently in the sub­se­quent two pieces in the Cul­ture series.

When I first wrote Cul­ture no.1, I thought of it in terms of a dichotomy between pop­u­lar music and the West­ern clas­si­cal tra­di­tion. How­ever, in the sub­se­quent years I’ve tem­pered my inter­pre­ta­tion. I no longer see a con­flict between tra­di­tions, only a reflec­tion on the rit­u­als of music-making. It is also, to a point, a test­ing of cul­tural con­ven­tions par­tic­u­lar to the concert-music rit­ual. This focus on rit­ual and cul­tural con­ven­tion is what I think makes the piece suc­cess­ful in the end. I’ve got­ten a lot of strong reac­tions to Cul­ture no.1, from “incom­pre­hen­si­ble” to “mas­ter­piece”. For me, that kind of polar­iza­tion always speaks to the cul­tural res­o­nance of a work of art, and cul­tural res­o­nance is cer­tainly appro­pri­ate to the theme I wanted to explore.

The title of the piece is in ref­er­ence to an argu­ment between two of the composer’s friends, regard­ing the mean­ing of form in new music. The piece explores this ques­tion musi­cally: is it in ternary form or not?