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Command Voices - 251A

from Quadrivium by Elizabeth A. Baker

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about

Command Voices
In patients with psychosis, command voices are the ones that instruct them to do destructive things or behave in a certain manner. I am intensely fascinated with the relationship between a musician and their instrument as a secondary self, and the implied consciousness of an inanimate object. In many ways, musicians are command voices for instruments, composers are command voices for musicians, fundamental tones are command voices for the partials that make up the pitches that we know; but all of these instances are largely predictable and controlled.

A vibrator presents a more accurate depiction of a command voice in a psychotic patient, while I may be able to control one or two of them in manipulating the sound of the piano, as I add more of them, I lose control… specific pitches and the resulting resonant tones are left to chance. In this way, the instrument is coming alive in a manner that removes my authoritative energy, and my conversation with the instrument inevitably must fundamentally change. Furthermore, vibrators in piano create a certain underlying chaos; as I begin to interact with the instrument in a traditional manner (playing the keys) I am acting as a dominant command voice, but on a deeper level because of the subtlety of the resonant voices underneath, I am also, presenting the public face of my instrument. We all have noise in our heads, it may manifest as non-command voices, but an inner dialogue is always present; however, we don’t go around sharing our inner thoughts all the time, we have a mask… in this relationship, I am the piano’s mask, which conceptually obliterates the conventional relationship between musician and instrument.

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from Quadrivium, released May 18, 2018

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Elizabeth A. Baker St Petersburg, Florida

The Honourable Elizabeth A. Baker
New Renaissance Artist.
New Music. Equity.
Human.
Planet Earth.
2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Fellow.

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