The eye-trunks, grasping each other tightly, and the visible wet air exhale. (2022)

for amplified muted viola (9 min.)

In November of 2021, I had the opportunity to travel to Vienna for the first time, where I was exposed to the work of Austrian Expressionist painter Egon Schiele at the Leopold Museum. A student of Gustav Klimt, much of Schiele’s work is known for its contorted body shapes, its extraordinary intensity, and its raw sexuality.

This piece was written in reaction to my first exposure to Schiele’s portraits and writings. While I develop this piece in response to his broader oeuvre of work, I found myself particularly captivated by his 1910 Nude Self-Portrait in Gray with Open Mouth . The grimmest of greys and most sable of blacks is broken only by the slightest tinge of yellow around the eyes of his self-portrait—a much darker and more resigned existence than I find in his other portrait work.

Schiele died at the age of twenty-eight from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

The eye-trunks, grasping each other tightly, and the visible wet air exhale. was written for Nadia Sirota as part of a residency with the Peabody Institute at the Johns Hopkins University. It was premiered by Lena Vidulich of earspace, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

earspace
Lena Vidulich, viola
November 5, 2022
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC