My Year of Rest and Relaxation
for symphony orchestra
15 minutes
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first performed by the Irish National Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Brophy at New Music Dublin, April 2023
Program Note:
In 2021, I can say without exaggeration that I hardly slept, going through the worst period of insomnia I’ve experienced. At some point that year, I read Otessa Moshfegh’s novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Myself and the novel’s protagonist were trying to get to sleep to different extremes. The protagonist, to sleep for a year. Me, to sleep a decent amount at some point. I was interested in the form of the novel. The section of the novel where the protagonist carried out these precise, exacting routines in their goal to sleep, mirrored my own. Though these routines resembled some pattern of normalcy, they were destructive and completely joyless. I was interested in how that could work musically. Could I write patterns of periodicity? Yes. Could I write patterns that were machine-like and without nuance? Maybe. For one of these patterns, I was inspired by Mahler’s own night music of anxiety, his Nachtmusik cowbells; taken out of context from the bucolic soundworld of the ‘ringing bells of a grazing herd’ and into something with less life in them. I listened to 10-hour-long videos of theta wave frequencies on YouTube in the late hours, but I kept returning to choral music, especially a certain penultimate chorus of J.S Bach’s St John Passion. This chorus is what drives the majority of the piece, but it is mangled (in most parts) beyond recognition. I was interested in creating a sonic tapestry of my sleepless nights. This Bach chorus, with all its harmonic and structural clarity, when fed into my insomniac brain, became something very different. It looped and curved in the mind in very unrelaxing, unrelenting ways.
Diverging from Moshfegh's protagonist, the root of this piece is not an annihilating nothingness, but the simple ability to shut off and pause for oneself. It is about seeing true rest as a form of rebellion against the neoliberal discourse of work ethic, and the very unhealthy relationship most of the world has formed with work, rest, and our bodies.