Amirtha Kidambi
Digital Portfolio for Princeton University, PhD Application
Notes on the Portfolio:
My creative practice as a composer, performer, improviser, electronic musician and film composer is rooted in critical inquiry, collaboration, collectivity, ritual and embodiment. These selections represent my core values and guiding principles as an artist, and work that I am currently energized by and intent on developing in the coming years. For a more complete overview of my artistic work, you can refer to my CV and Statement of Purpose.
*The portfolio contains links to scores/charts in a Google Drive Folder where relevant, audio/video, project notes, program notes and personnel.
1. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)
Film Score
Adamastor Rises from the Sea Chart (excerpt, play until 3:15)
*The excerpts below show the interaction of the compositions and sound design, with the visual language and subject of the film. The compositions heard in the excerpts are specified below:
“Goa Liberation Theme” *taught orally to the ensemble, where I directed the improvisation
“Chorale” *taught orally to the ensemble (Excerpt, 10:45-15:25)
“Two Refusals” (score here) (Excerpt, 22:57-23:50)
Video password: Adamastor
Project Notes:
Currently on view at Brooklyn Museum (NYC) in the solo exhibition of filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri, Here the Earth Grows Gold (2023),Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?) is a two-channel experimental film focusing on interwoven narratives around the mutual struggle against Portuguese colonialism between India and Africa and the bonds of solidarity that developed between the two continents. Told through a mix of interviews and fictional narratives, Two Refusals utilizes a blend of CGI animation, super 16mm film, hand-processed and destroyed archival film to uncover lost layers of world-building, kinship, and the material and immaterial network of relations that developed between historical figures in Goa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. This is my fourth film collaboration with director Suneil Sanzgiri, previously scoring a trilogy of short films on the subjects of South Asian diaspora, hybridity, colonialism, protest movements in India, and transnational solidarity. Our partnership was born from a shared interest in activism and artistic production towards decolonization, utilizing experimental idioms and methods in our respective mediums.
Composition Notes:
For this score, I collaborated with sound designer Booker Stardrum, in creating electroacoustic soundscapes, themes, and motifs for this documentary-narrative hybrid. My materials were drawn from a song which the ninety-four year old Goan freedom fighter Sharada Sawaikar sings during an interview with Sanzgiri, telling him that she orally composed the melody and lyrics from her prison cell as a teenager, between brutal beatings by colonial forces. It was important for me to preserve this oral history of struggle by weaving melodic fragments, modes and pitch sets from this freedom song throughout the score, and although it is never directly featured in the film, it acts as the invisible hand guiding and linking the thematic materials. The instrumentation for the score blends traditional folk and acoustic chamber elements, with electronics and sound design. The score written for voice, electronics, percussion, synthesizers, cello, bass, piano, alto saxophone and harmonium, was realized through improvisation and oral direction in the studio. The manuscripts convey only some of the instrumentation as we added additional tracks and layers during the recording process, with synthesizer doublings, vibraphone and percussion, creating the depth and density of an orchestral score. My intention was to create ghostly electronic doubles for each instrument voice, influenced by the sound worlds of Jonny Greenwood, Vangelis, and Ravi Shankar’s scores for the films of Satyajit Ray, bringing ancestral traditions and technological interventions in relief and dialogue with each other.
Personnel:
Suneil Sanzgiri (Director, Editor)
Amirtha Kidambi (Compositions, Vocals, Harmonium, Electronics, Synthesizers)
Booker Stardrum (Sound Design, Percussion, Electronics)
Utsav Lal (Piano)
Aakash Mittal (Saxophone)
Lester St. Louis (Cello)
Luke Stewart (Bass)
2. Elder Ones
Jazz/Creative Music Ensemble
Excerpts from New Monuments, a suite of compositions which will be released as an album in March 2024 on We Jazz Records. The first is a studio recording, followed by live footage, which illustrates the performance practice of the ensemble.
“New Monuments” score on p. 15 in PDF (Excerpt: Part A + B - play until 9:00)
“Third Space” score on p. 5 in PDF (Excerpts: Part A + B - 00:30-5:30, Part C - 7:12-end)
*Note that the live performance is a quartet version, featuring Alfredo Colon on soprano saxophone and Lester St. Louis on bass
Program Notes:
New Monuments is a four-movement work, created in honor of people’s movements. The title refers to tearing down statues of slaveholders and colonizers, not in an effort to replace them with contemporary messianic figures, but to collectively reimagine them towards building a new future in community with each other. These compositions are centered on topics of anti-colonialism, the rise of global fascism, violence against Asian Americans, and continuing inequity in the growing shadow of late stage capitalism. They are not only a lament, but an explosive call to action, and an ode to those struggling for racial and labor justice around the world. My intention is that the performance of this work can create a communal space of solidarity, activation and transformative energy, which can be channeled into action.
These pieces were written between 2020-2021, while in residence at Pioneer Works in New York City. Inspired by cataclysmic events such as the protests in New York City, when I was regularly organizing musicians in marches, at the City Hall occupation, and for weekly music and sound demonstrations at the Metropolitan Detention Center federal prison in Sunset Park, I grappled with the tumultuous period through a responsive compositional process. These pieces are reactions to the killing of Asian women in Georgia, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the Racial Justice movement, the Farmer’s Protests in India (the largest mass labor protest in the history of the world), and the insurrection. As the period laid bare the ravages of the relentless exploitation in our system, the fragility of life, and the mutual entanglements and interconnectedness between us, we also witnessed powerful acts of collective struggle.
Composition Notes:
This work is composed for my band Elder Ones, which I have lead since 2015. Rather than writing for instrumentation, I write for individuals, with the understanding that the music will only take shape through playing, improvising, and collaboration. The compositional process is deeply embodied, originating with my voice and improvisation, slowly taking shape as structural forms, which create space for individual expression within a collective energetic ensemble. The musicians chosen for this project have formidable creative practices in their own right, so the music means to draw out those individual creative voices, giving them agency and autonomy within my artistic vision and subverting the hierarchical role of the composer. Some of these frameworks manifest as repeated asymmetric rhythmic cycles or grooves, drone textures for modal improvisation, free improvised spaces with electronics, and solos and duos emerging from ensemble playing. The score functions as a road map, balancing specific notated materials with open forms, text instructions and notes for improvisation. The compositions unfold over repeated performances over a long period, editing, rearranging and deepening the playing relationship to the forms.
Total Runtime: Approximately 45 minutes to one hour
Personnel:
Amirtha Kidambi (Compositions, Voice, Harmonium, Synthesizer, Electronics)
Lester St. Louis (Cello and Electronics)
Eva Lawitts (Bass and Electronics)
Matt Nelson or Alfredo Colon (Soprano Saxophone and Electronics)
Jason Nazary (Drums and Modular Synthesizer)
3. Neti-Neti
Electroacoustic improvised duo with Matt Evans
Excerpt for viewing (30:17-36:00)
*From a live performance in November 2023, as we prepare to go into the studio in a collaboration with producer Nick Zanca to translate the live experience of the psychoacoustic grief ritual to a recording.
Project Notes:
Neti-Neti is a collaboration that started in 2021, surrounding the expression of collective grief, shortly after both Matt Evans and I experienced traumatic and sudden loss. Our work as Neti-Neti makes space for collective grief by bringing the conversation directly to our audiences, offering time for healing and discussion, while prompting collective catharsis through our embodied performances. We continue this work now because we live in a devastating age defined by grief. By fluidly combining musical genres ranging from devotional Carnatic music, psychoacoustic electronic music, and propulsive freely improvised music, we open the grief space from multiple angles of listening, providing members of our various musical communities a pathway into this emotional space. Neti-Neti, translated as “It is not this, it is not that” from Sanskrit, is a contemplation on the nature of reality, life, death, birth, and rebirth extracted from the Hindu text of rituals The Upanishads. This grief meditation serves as a distillation of the duo’s relationship that emerged from the viscera of a year and a half of exchanging thoughts on the nonlinear nature of grief and its chaotic emotional trajectory, the abstraction of a person without physical form, and the trauma of one’s foundations being shattered, necessitating a total spiritual rebirth. The duo shapes a vessel for processing this loss using hazy rhythmic interplay, dredging piles of noise, feedback, and serene moments of ethereal melodic counterpoint. The duo has been presented in Europe and the United States, notably at the Skanu Mesz electronic music festival in Riga, Latvia. We released a lo-fi tape titled Impermanence in 2021, but plan to record a studio in January 2024 in a collaboration with producer Nick Zanca.
Improvisation Notes:
In this excerpt, Evans and I move from a trance inducing propulsive rhythmic language where I draw from Carnatic rhythms and Vedic chants, into a section which utilizes feedback from contact mics on low tom drums, combined with intense pure sine waves and tuning and detuning through my voice and pedal. The pedal made by Snyderphonics (Jeff Snyder) is a prototype and includes a patch that emulates the “string piano” of Harry Partch. I found I could create near sine waves with this patch by increasing the decay time and adjusting the “dampers” parameter, generating pure tones with my singing. While creating the tones, I sing against them microtonally, while also adjusting the range of the strings and slowly tuning and detuning the strings, simultaneously interacting with the drum feedback. This creates a large variety of difference tones and beatings at various rates, which create physical sensation of other worldly presences. The experience is intensely somatic and psychoacoustic, recalling the work of Éliane Radigue in pieces such as Trilogie de la Mort (1994), a psychoacoustic masterwork on death, life, grief and rebirth, however, we arrive in this space entirely through improvisation.
Personnel:
Amirtha Kidambi (Voice, Electronics, Feedback)
Matt Evans (Percussion, Electronics, Feedback)
Supplemental Work
4. “Light from Other Worlds” from Songs for the Alter-Destiny for Angels & Demons (2022)
Duo for voice and alto saxophone with Darius Jones based on the poetry of Sun Ra
Video Password: A&D_2023
“Light From Other Worlds” score p. 6 in PDF (Excerpts: 13:38-20:00, 25:33-29:36)
*Video from a live performance at The Kitchen in December, 2023 in collaboration with lighting designer Nicholas Houfek, costumes by Sunder Ganglani and in conversation with poet and multi-disciplinary artist LaTasha N. Diggs. Due to the immersive sensory lighting experience, the video visibility is low at times.
Project Notes:
Angels & Demons is a collaboration with Darius Jones (alto sax) in musical adaptations of poetry by iconic musician and writer Sun Ra. Formed to honor the intellectual, literary, and spiritual contribution of Sun Ra, as a philosopher and teacher, the duo’s music dances between the prophetic poetic verse, abstract phonemes and syllables, sound, noise, tone, melody and rhythmic interplay of Ra’s written word. We draw parallels between the generativity of our collaboration and that of Sun Ra and Arkestra band-member June Tyson, a powerful vocalist and violinist, in a ritualistic dialogue. Angels & Demons is a joining of two kindred instruments rarely experienced as a duo: the voice and the saxophone. In Jones, I found a creative partner who uplifts virtuosic vocal musicianship within jazz and new music, where the vocalist has historically been a sidelined figure. We are interested in collapsing binaries between the instrumental and vocal and exploding perceptions of what’s possible for either.
Composition Notes:
These compositions for the duo Angels & Demons (Darius Jones and Amirtha Kidambi) are conceptually a modern art song cycle presented as a cosmic alien ritual, with Ra’s verse as a focal point intertwined with explosive improvisatory expressions. The selections given here are my compositions, “The End”, “Light from Other Worlds” and “Touch the Stars”, poems that I chose after spending the isolated period of the pandemic with his words, ringing truer than ever in the apocalyptic fervor of the moment and a racial justice reckoning. Ra’s words feel strikingly contemporary and prescient, hitting chords that can provide a potent release. Ra oscillates between disparities, from dark to light, fear to hope, isolation to ecstatic exuberance, utilizing dissonance and consonance, tension and release, homophony and asynchrony, order and chaos. I was particularly drawn to Ra’s poetic cycles, and chant-like repetition which can also be found in his music. I use short pitch sets rather than linear melodies in various permutations, so that their beginnings and ends become obscured. Through the insistent repetition the words simultaneously grow in their scope and significance and become increasingly absurd and meaningless.
5. Lines of Light Vocal Ensemble
Vocal Ensemble
*I have chosen to include this supplemental material of my vocal ensemble Lines of Light from 2018. I feel it is an important addendum as I plan to return to writing for this ensemble in the coming year 2024, with new personnel. Vocal ensemble work will be integral to my doctorate, for my research in embodiment and orality.
Lines of Light Score (Excerpt: Part B + C - 6:18-10:15)
Project Notes:
I initially assembled the vocal quintet to free improvise after the 2016 election, as women of diverse backgrounds, races, ethnicities, nationalities, identities and immigration status, to sing together and commune in solidarity. The singers chosen for the project have distinct improvising vocal vocabularies, which are given expression in the flexible and open nature of the compositions. The project is distinct in the realm of improvised and free music, where the voice has been marginalized due to its gendering as feminine and an emphasis on instrumental virtuosity. The piece was written in memoriam for a friend's mother and my musical hero Cecil Taylor, who both died in April 2018, and has since been dedicated to my best friend Ellen O’Meara, who died by suicide in 2019. The text, which I have written, is about cycles of birth and death, contemplating the trajectory of the soul or “atman” in the days after a person’s passing, during the process of mourning. The composition contains limited pitch sets, repetition, indeterminate elements and open sections, to allow for flexibility. The music must be deeply embodied, so each singer feels simultaneously grounded and free. Unlike choral music, which seeks to achieve a blend, the distinct timbre, articulation, pronunciation and character of each voice is essential. To me, this is a metaphor for community; a group of diverse individuals unified in a common goal. I planned to continue work with this group in 2020, however, due to the pandemic multiple members were forced to relocate. My plan is to regroup the ensemble with different membership, record the existing pieces and begin collaboratively composing new works. Performers left to right; Anais Maviel, Emilie Lesbros, Amirtha Kidambi, Jean Carla Rodea, Charmaine Lee
New Personnel for work in 2024:
Amirtha Kidambi
Isabel Crespo Pardo
Yuniya Edi Kwon
Miriam El-Hajli
Shara Lunon