DESCRIPTION:
Premiere by Loadbang ensemble, NYU Grad Student Composer concert at Tenri, NYC (April 21st 2013)

More recordings and scores at www.adammirza.com
Information about the ensemble at www.loadbangmusic.com

Loadbang: Jeffrey Gavett (baritone), Will Lang (trombone), Andy Kozar (trumpet), Carlos Cordeiro (Bass Clarinet)

Reading: (A Mish-Mash) / For a Man / I will never (2013)
for Voice, Trumpet, Trombone and Bass Clarinet
composition by Adam Mirza

The physical act of typing with only thumb and index finger translates reading (thought) to writing (action) one letter at a time. For Laurence ("Larry") Joel Eigner (1927-1996), handicapped by cerebral palsy from birth, the typewriter was another wheelchair in the machinery of life: a tool whose limitations could be reappropriated and mobilized as productive conditions for acts of creation. Eigner's poetry is performative, carefully situated by its setting on the page. It exhibits a kind of embodied phenomenological awareness that is frequently compared to Charles Olson's concept of projective verse. And yet, Eigner's texts, which certainly induce poetic form as an emergent property of the activity of reading, nonetheless bear a problematic relationship to the paradigm of spoken utterances enthused for in Olson's manifesto. Poetry must be read, all agree. But must it be read aloud? What constitutes its projection, its embodiment, its sensuality, its history -- its performance? Here, the problematic performance of reading is taken for a different tack: a musical mish-mash of poems, phrases, and prosodies -- objects, instances and interactions gratefully borrowed from a body of work, from Mr. Larry Eigner.

Prose and poetry selections from Larry Eigner's works with permission of the Estate of Larry Eigner: areas / lights / heights: Writings 1954-1989 (1990, ed. Benjamin Friedlander), Windows / Walls / Yard / Ways (1994, ed. Robert Grenier), and readiness / enough / everything / depends on (2000, ed. Robert Grenier).