The Exhausted

Written in 2021 as a comission by OSSIA New Music. This is a piece for quartet and live electronics was heavily inspired by Gilles Deleuze's essay "The Exhausted" which discusses the aesthetics of exhaustion in Samuel Beckett's work. In the essay, Deleuze describes exhaustion not only as physical tiredness, but also as the mathematical exhaustion of all possibilities. He goes on to discuss types of language and communication in reference to Beckett's work across many different mediums. Coming across the essay provided some clarity on many of musical interests at the time. As a composer long interested in formal materials, and composing a long-form piece during quarantine, began to think of the piece as a series of complete statements without direction. The musical material is derived from the extended just intonation system of "combination product sets" pioneered by Mexican-American music theorist Erv Wilson. Pitch series, chords progressions, rhythms, and the parameters of the electronic processing are based around patterns derived from numbers with shared factors.