IV. Out of Breath - I Don't Know What to Do, Therefore I Scream!

The fourth movement was the last I developed, and the most difficult. Going back to the score several times, I paid much closer attention to its paratext: the title—Out of Breath / Tired After Run, Catching the Breath—the tempo marking (scream-breathe, natural, bodily flow), the performance indications (angry, very high energy; last energy hype; exhausted but keep tension; calming completely down; tired; into absolute stillness). The question that emerged was whether to take those indications more literally—not only as sonic metaphors but as actual physical and emotional conditions to inhabit. This brought me back to a conversation with Pranulytė from nearly two years earlier, in which she described how the piece was built around an analogy between percussion instruments and the vocal apparatus—the way certain techniques, like folding the thunder sheet, change resonance in ways that approximate the filtering behaviour of a mouth, without the instrument ever becoming a voice. Breath was central to this: she spoke about finding ways to let the sound, the space, the intensity, and the dramaturgy breathe. I therefore began developing a version in which I use my voice—screaming and breathing—as the primary sound source, pressing my mouth against the metal surfaces so that the voice is filtered by the material rather than projected into the room. I set the bow aside: listening back to recordings I had made with a contact microphone on the metal surfaces, I found that the contact microphone track evoked enough of the sonic character of the bow to stand in for it. The screaming, filtered through the metal plate behind which I am not visible to the audience, loses some of its more extreme extra-musical associations—with pain, violence, distress—without losing its physical intensity. A pre-recorded vocal layer, made by singing into a tam-tam through a contact microphone, fills in the humming and vowel sounds that the score calls for but that I can no longer perform simultaneously with the screaming.