Recital: Lyra Montoya '22 MM, Contemporary Improvisation

Estradiol Valerate: 100mg/5mL, intra-muscularly, once weekly //

Program note

This day of May 8, 2022, is two years, nine months and twenty-two days from when I took my first dose of gender affirming hormones on July 16, 2019. About one year into this process I swapped from eating daily tablets of estrogen to an injectable form of estrogen which I deliver intra-muscularly on a weekly basis. I selected the injection process as a significant ritualistic event over the tablet counterparts of the hormone replacement therapy prescriptions as I have had a fear of needles for most of my life, and with my first injection realized the specific mental blocks I have around the act of puncturing my skin when self administering injections. In the process of atomizing and resolving the moving parts of these anxieties I have reduced what once was a two hour ordeal with my first injection, to a routine process that takes around ten minutes. These injections have served both as a direct agent in reshaping my body, and also as a catalyst for reconciling and overcoming my anxieties around needles. My relationship to my body has changed over these last three years since realizing my queerness and transness, and the numerous iterations of consuming and injecting hormones gradually reshaping my body is a central part of my experience as a trans person.
        The different elements involved in the injection process are represented through various musical elements, the most prominent being a leitmotif for the estradiol valerate. Different structures represent the 18 and 25 gauge needles, as well as the 3mL syringe, the vial of estrogen solution, the alcohol wipe, and band-aid which are involved throughout the injection process. These different elements recur in and across the different instruments throughout this piece as they are present and relevant, and the music shifts between through-composed structures and specificspaces of improvisation as the we realize the injection process in a musical space.

Mutations and Re-configurations

Familiarity
Plasticity
Onwards

Program note

This composition began as a lament reflecting upon the rapidly changing relation-ships in my life that all evolved very quickly at the same time after the turn of the new year in January 2022. The first portion I composed and wrote out is the second movement Plasticity on flute, which transforms and permutes several melodic figures. The articulation, inflection, and phrasing draw from Ornette Coleman’s melodic approach to performing. After composing this first portion, I decided to expand this piece into a short suite using different instruments in each movement. The order of the instrumentation reflects the order I learned to play each of these instrument families, as well as my changing relationship with each of the instruments. The instrument I am playing very much affects what and how I play, through a mixture of technical details in how each instrument behaves and responds to my touch, as well as what I’ve internalized as the instrument’s sound from other performers on those instruments.
        The suite explores the ways I have learned to accept the ever shifting circumstances of my relationships between myself and the instruments I play, the music I play, and especially my friends and lovers.

Synthetic Connections

Program note

I have always had to take very deliberate action in forming communities and social groups, especially with the loss of a middle ground in friendships and relationships between incidental acquaintances, and the inner circle of the most important people in one’s life due to the ongoing pandemic. I wrote this piece as a reflection of the conscious action of creating a community.
        The first section is based on a whole tone collection, which does not have any tonal center as a result of the symmetric nature and absence of any tendencies from that complete symmetry. Throughout the piece, different forms of cohesion are introduced through a consistent meter, ostinatos, and repetitive pieces of melodic content, as well as the creation of a synthetic scale that adds a single pitch to a whole tone collection to create half steps with resolving tendencies. The emergent polyphony and improvisation within the established constraints of time and pitch collection demonstrate a mutual development between the previously independent parts.

The Elders at the Falls

Program note

“In 1958 a dam was completed below the great falls of the Columbia River at Celilo, where for thousands of years there had been a town, and, when the salmon came up the river to spawn, a great fishery and meeting place for peoples from all over the region.”                                                                                             
– Ursula Le’Guin

I heard this story.
They stood all day with their backs turned.
They stood there just above the river
all the long day with their backs turned
to what was happening.
Like the chorus in ancient tragedies,
not the heroes but the old people
who do not see the battle,
the sacrifice, the murder,
they stood and listened to the messenger,
the voice that tells the story.
The voice they listened to
that had spoken all their lives
and all the lives before them
telling its story, their story, that great voice
Celilo
grew smaller, became less,
became quieter,
all day, until
at twilight
it was silent.

They turned around then.
They turned and looked at the flat lake of silence.                                                         

Ursula Le’Guin’s writing has fascinated me for years in her specific use of language, and how the worlds she writes specifically feel large and sparse with local centers of density. This composition uses a poem she wrote about an event that displaced the various first nations tribes that had lived at the site of the Celilo falls for generations, and sets the text of the poem into a sung melody. The various instruments play obligato lines that ornament and accent the sung melody through improvisation using text painting, harmony and unison with the sung poem.
 

Flowers for Androids

Program note

The central focus of this piece is the slow mutation of the different phrases and how they interact with one another. The angular figures given to the instruments function as a mutating ensemble wide ostinato. Each instrument has several fixed points of patterns and melodies, but the path for the evolution between the phrases that each voice takes is improvised and left to the performer’s taste and choice in how notes and durations and articulation change

Deboarding Network, Terminal West

Program note

In my last year of my undergrad, I read Dmitri Tymoczko’s article Scale networks and Debussy, in which he describes a system of closely related scale networks as a way to move through pitch collections. While I am not sure I fully agree with this article in the context of Debussy’s compositions the structure of these scale networks remained an interesting construct to me, and I then created a cyclic network of pitch collections that moves through nine different pitch collections before returning to the first, and I then wrote a melody to fit this network. The first version of this was named Deboarding Network as a minor play on words between Debussy and the scale networks. It had a fourteen bar form in common time, with a bass introduction.
        This version I am performing today is a revisited and recomposed version, which uses the same scale network from the original version. I kept the bass introduction as well as it is nostalgic to me of my earlier writing, which is the one portion that doesn’t follow this system of closely related scales, but instead moves in parallel dominant chords reminiscent of Debussy in a different manner. I rewrote the melody into a longer and less linear form that I feel is more appropriate for the shifting quality of these pitch collections. This is the one piece that cleanly falls into a head- solo- head form, another element from jazz language I find nostalgic and refuse to part with.

Sondering Together – For Nia

Program note

This song is dedicated to my girlfriend Nia, whom I have had as a partner and central part of my life for the last three years. I wanted to compose a song specifically for her, so I asked for a theme to work with, and she chose the word “sonder,” which is a neologism which refers to the realization that every other person has an equally vivid experience of the world as complex as your own.
        While the sources and definitions of these rarely employed neologisms are scarce, I understood a distinct melancholy about this unknowable quality and color in other’s lives that remain unknowable to us. With this in mind, I chose to write a poem that recognizes this bittersweet unknown in our interactions with each other, and that while we may never know them fully in their specificity, we still find comfort and companionship in these relationships in spite of this inherent separation in selves.
         Separate entities are represented through individual instrument voices, which start separately in a musical context, and then converge and interact with one another, before fragmenting and moving apart and on. I specifically wanted to focus on the joy that is found from relationships that evolve and change as we grow together, while recognizing that at some point these relationships inevitably end in one manner or another, be it changing interests, or death in the longest possible case, and that despite this we still find love and companionship with one another.

We move through the same streets
side by side
unbearably close at times

Where will their travels take them?
Bodies and lives
Each a journey unknown

We wander
together,
yet alone

Walking together in time we find
A face of comfort
a friend, a lover; another

Wonderfully close with time;
our discovered intimacy
And with beautiful ephemerality

We wander
alone,
yet together
 

Lyra Montoya, flute, alto saxophone, bass clarinet
Hunter McKay, clarinet, tenor saxophone
Joey Dies, trombone
Carson McHaney, Cate Byrne, violin
Eleanor Pruneau, Seulah Noh, piano
Chris Worden, double bass
CJ Schrieber, drums