The title You May You May You... originates from a superimposition of the question and answer, “may you?” and “you may.” The project of this piece is to explore the intimate relationships that we have with our instruments, or with the tools that we use — how, as these relationships develop throughout our lives as artists, our instruments/tools become entangled with our memory, identity, and being, becoming sanctuaries in which we confer with ourselves. They are reflections of how we use them, of how we are. Many of the most illuminating conversations in my life, the ones which have revealed myself, have occurred in private moments between myself and my instruments. In this way, they become magic boxes which hold within them secrets of our own personhood. This piece of music and theater imagines a bizarre manifestation of this relationship wherein the instrument itself has agency to respond, to converse, to act as if piloted by an invisible entity whose nature is entirely unknown. A speaker is hidden inside the piano, invisible to the audience. Thus, the electronics mysteriously emerge from within the box of the piano. Glass breaking, footsteps creaking up stairs, doors opening, birds chirping — all these sounds suggest the possibility that the piano is alive, perhaps somebody’s home, or perhaps it encloses an entire ecosystem, like a portal to another universe.

Premiered by W4RP at Broadway Presbyterian Church, New York, NY, United States on December 7th, 2023. Revised for the 2025 Inštitut .abeceda Contemporary Music Festival V.; to be performed on June 27th, 2025 in Bled, Slovenia.