Adumbration: to suggest, disclose, or outline partially; to foreshadow vaguely; overshadow, obscure.

Adumbrations goes through a series of statements towards a sensibility of ideals and shadows, utilizing female voices reciting a series of tongue twisters that iterate sibilant, fricative, and bilabial sounds. If spoken incorrectly, the sound qualities of these tongue twisters are heard as curse words. Therefore, there needs to be consistency in the process of speaking these tongue twisters explicitly. In the English language curse words can function as multiple parts of speech, and as the saying goes, people who curse more frequently are more honest.

This piece explores the dichotomous relationship between certain ideals and shadows, i.e. consistencies and inconsistencies, actuality and potentiality, and the explicit and the honest, as it goes through a series of musical adumbrations that “halo” the process of these tongue twisters. Through these adumbrations, the contradictory can be either one or the other of the ideals or shadows turning on itself, and at times the appearance of the clarity and the inaccuracy are in an indefinite flux through these halos. This occurs as inconsistent phonemes are turned from inaccurate iterations of the tongue twisters into something sounding consistent. The halos are supplementing the voice within varying simultaneous parameters that include shimmering, radiating around the iterations and vice/versa, and existing as a spatial supplement revolving in different stereo planes around and as a process, and out of the immersive comes our personal perception of the contradiction. One can think of this adumbrated halo, in this sense, as a place where the dichotomous relationship becomes indistinguishable, and laughter for a flawed system.

This piece is partially inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s movie Persona.

Thank you so much for the wonderful voice recordings:
Elizabeth Gartman
Caroline Mckinzie
Logan Piker