Piece Comment

Review of Recognizing the Value Ourselves


An experimental piece that I struggled to understand. You hear two voices - a young woman and an older man, their voices layered one after the other, on times over each other, with music and various sounds mixed in throughout the piece. I started listening without reading the information provided about the piece, so I had no "intro." An intro is necessary, but I think the piece perhaps suffers from being too "loose", and about too many topics, too many ideas. At times it was literally hard to hear the voices, and I think this was intentional at points, but as a listener I was frustrated. I felt I could not take away as much as I might from the ideas being expressed because the form got in the way. My sense is that the producers intention was to foreground "form" and play with it, and I appreciate and applaud the effort to push boundaries. But I think in this case the form was not helping as much as it could to shape the ideas of the piece, and I felt too often confused, and that the thoughts in the piece were too fragmented, too short, too often "over-juxtaposed" with other ideas. I would really like to hear the story of the older man. he clearly has a story to tell, but I think that story was lost a bit by cutting it up and putting it in contrast constantly with the younger woman's voice.