Self-Portrait 2023 (late) for string quartet (2025)
Temporary six digit two-factor authentication codes became an increasingly ubiquitous element of using the internet in the early 2020s. Having to use these collections of numbers for everyday tasks such as checking email and making online purchases, I began to view these codes, despite their abstract and soulless surface, as my personal identity to a single entity for a handful of seconds or minutes. In late 2023 I started writing down – by hand in a paper journal – all of the codes that I used in daily life. I recorded this data with the intention of using it to generate pieces of music that would represent “me” from a certain time period in a manner broadly analogous to John Cage’s method in Variations II where measurements taken from perpendiculars connecting dropped points and lines are used to determine the nature of sound events. In my project, the date a code is generated locates a sound event chronologically within a piece while the code itself delineates the event’s details. Self-Portrait 2023 (late) employs the limited data gathered from the end of 2023 to create a brief string quartet.