The Unnamed is a composition created from a multitude of noises one might hear in a library.  A library is a house of books for all and, for some, a sanctuary for study and contemplation. A library is usually a very quiet place, and so extremely soft sounds are easily audible. These sounds may include people searching for books, sliding books in and out of bookshelves, flipping through the pages of books, writing down notes of their thoughts and ideas, and even tearing up these very ideas. I take these “library-sounds” and organize them into a percussive piece. The bookshelves in the library are amplified with contact mics and each music stand is amplified with a DPA microphone. The musicians are placed at the bookshelf and perform the piece, creating the "library sounds" mentiond above. The composition also uses traditional instruments that weave in and out of the percussive milieu of these library-sounds. The sounds of drums, bassoon, contrabass clarinet, and cello are interpolated into the soundscape library-sounds in order to add a dimension of expressive color that is unleashed by the musicians. These instrumental sounds are restrained and designed to cohere into a compounded form with the library-sounds.

In a larger perspective, this piece pays homage to the active process that is covertly at work in the library by visitors to the library. Everyday, millions of people around the world visit their local library. These innumerable, “anonymous” visitors to the library are the referent for The Unnamed. 

For thousands of years, human beings have written books, read books, copied books and, of course, even destroyed books. While we tend to focus on the knowledge contained within a book itself, this piece positions significance on people themselves, how people engage with books, and our behaviors that ultimately determine what ideas from our past are preserved and what ideas are forgotten. Unfortunately, there is no proper documentation of this performance. 

"The Unnamed" was premiered successfully in the Detmold Musikbibliothek; due to a sizable and excited audience, the video cameras were not properly placed and only shows audience members standing in front of the bookcases. I would love to have another opportunity to have this piece performed in a library so that I can share it again and also have an opportunity to properly document it. I hope to have this piece programmed again and to properly document in the future.

Photo: CC BY-SA 4.0 Thorsten Krienke

An alternate performance was recorded, however not in a library as intended: