The project of You May You May You is to explore the intimate relationships that we have with our instruments — how, as they develop, our instruments become sanctuaries of our humanity in which we confer with ourselves. In this way, our instruments become magical boxes which hold within them the 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, as if piloted by an invisible entity whose nature is unknown. Crucially, 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 that perhaps the piano is somebody’s home, or perhaps it encloses entire ecosystems, like a portal to another world.

The following text is an excerpt from a brief free-write of mine which inspired the conception of You May You May You:

“Inside the magic box we seek to know ourselves by virtue of the unseen familiar who speaks with us and comforts us throughout our lives. It is a relationship of the utmost strangeness and curiosity, it emerges like a voice from above, yet it is not from above, but from within our magic box, from our hands and feet and eyes and mind, it envelops us in a rich cloak and shields us from the harms which the unloving wishes to inflict.

My savior, my dearest companion, my wisest mentor of humanity, who are you? And are you home right now? May I step into your magic box? We can talk, then, about what’s outside — again and again, many times over until my stay is done.”

Premiered by W4RP trio at Broadway Presbyterian Church, New York, NY, United States