Musical performance is a feat of legerdemain, where the trick is made plain and yet still refuses explanation. How exactly a musician manages the physical task of maneuvering about their instrument is most often a secret for them alone. On their debut album field anatomies (Carrier Records), out February 22nd, flutist Laura Cocks seeks to bring those interior realities of music-making to the fore. Five works by David Bird, Bethany Younge, DM R (Diana M. Rodriguez), Jessie Cox, and Joan Arnau Pàlmies are united in their use of gasping, screaming, wheezing, and other indications of physical exertion that most works, particularly in the classical realm, would typically ask the performer to shroud. There is no instrument better suited to such an exposé than a wind instrument like the flute—powered by that most fundamental physical activity, the breath—and perhaps no player better suited than Cocks, whose research in what they have termed “corporeal analysis” argues that a performer’s physical relationship to a work, often neglected in favor of history or theory, is a valuable source of musical understanding. Cocks, a new music mainstay and director of the invigorating new music ensemble TAK, has kept these pieces in their rotation for years. That commitment is evident across this intimate study of what it means, as Cocks has described, to hold a musical work in your body.
Cocks’ introduction to this physical examination of musicianship is David Bird’s bristling Atolls (2013) for solo flute with 29 spatialized piccolos, whose parts Cocks recorded separately and cues electronically for this recording. Inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s immense final novel on an unsolved femicide in Mexico, 2666, Atolls begins innocuously, with a flurry of breath sounds. What unfolds is a deft portrait of an emergency—suggested at the outset by a recurring motif of a short descending scale, that eventually evolves to resemble an automated alarm. Of interest in Atolls, as in his later work for Cocks, Multiplicities, seems to be the terror of many flutes at once, with a gigantic, seething chord of 29 piccolos—the rat king of instruments, a behemoth before which Cerberus would resign—coalescing in the middle. What aptly follows their appearance is Cocks’ so-called “scream solo,” an unnerving, pulpy minute of Cocks screaming into their instrument that is, per Bird, “the result of a combined spectral analysis of a crash cymbal and Janet Leigh's infamous scream from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.” In their dissertation, Cocks describes how the scream requires them to sustain a level of effort with the potential to cause physical harm. The work ends meekly, not because anyone has come to the rescue, but because one has become too exhausted to call for help.
Music-making, as Atolls implies, can have potent physical consequences. A relationship with an instrument can become so long and concerted that it might well seem part of the player. The evidence of such hybridity lies partly in physical relics: in my case, the so-called “violin hickey,” the abstinent achievement of practicing for so long the chin rest scuffs the underside of your neck; or, in a flutist’s case, as Cocks describes in their dissertation, the slight permanent misalignment of hip and shoulder brought about by the requisite playing posture. Bethany Younge’s Oxygen and Reality, composed for Cocks in 2018, manipulates that relationship with a series of balloons—one of which, in the last section, the performer attaches to the end of the flute for what Cocks describes as a “prosthetic lung,” providing an additional source of air as Cocks plays. Between the prosthesis, two other balloons full of hardware, and electronics, Cocks strings together an array of huffing, puffing, and other sounds that suggest a scene of crepuscular whimsy. There is a video, but the audio alone lets you fantasize about the origins of so many peculiar timbres: some bureaucratic operation after hours, a clandestine circus of whirring printers and pencil sharpeners.
The idea that an instrument can be a site of physical transformation receives further due in Jessie Cox’s Spiritus. Cox’s style is described as “musical science fiction,” and the hazy glow of Spiritus (2018) does in fact imply that Cocks, acclimating to some intergalactic atmosphere, has transcended their tellurian lung capacity. Spiritus, Latin for “breath,” examines the act of breathing by turning Cocks into a microtonal respiration refinery: between breaths, Cocks generates different chords by simultaneously singing and generating multiple pitches; later in the work, they navigate the boggling difficulty of playing and singing in contrary motion. Though the repose of Spiritus gives an otherwise dynamic album balance, the piece doesn’t leave much of an impression beyond Cocks’ technical achievement.
More memorable transformations await in the radioactive joyride of DM R’s You’ll see me return to the city of fury (2017) for flute and electronics. Drawing on a sample of the Argentinian rock band Soda Stereo’s “En La Ciudad de la Furia” (In the City of Fury), the work finds Cocks hurling sinuous phrases through an electronic haze, for the sense that they’ve awakened in a video game. DM R transforms the flute itself by having Cocks use a glissando headjoint, an accessory inspired by the electric guitar’s whammy bar that allows Cocks to glide between notes as though on some cosmic Slip n’ Slide. Midway through, Cocks’ performance suddenly skews zoomorphic when they suddenly let out a low growl—a vivid glimpse of what creatures stand to emerge once the flute is at Cocks’ lips.
Joan Arnau Pàmies’ Produktionsmittel I (2014), for amplified flute, aluminum foil, glass bottle, and fixed media, snaps the album back to reality. The first in a three-part cycle exploring workers’ alienation under capitalism, Produktionsmittel I (German for “means of production”) offers twenty-five minutes of dyspeptic mouth sounds invoked by Pàmies’ purposely overwhelming notation, which instructs the player to generate as many sounds as possible. This all might beckon disgust, with various stretches resembling the sonic equivalent of a laparoscopy. But Cocks and Pàmies navigate this all nimbly enough to make them cohere, stirring a nervous curiosity about what sounds Cocks could possibly manage next. When Cocks suddenly breaks into a triumphant, self-congratulatory series of etude-like arpeggios, like Jack Horner pulling out the plum, there’s an impulse to laugh—after so much effortful preamble, the result is something a child could play. What’s all the more ridiculous, though, is that this moment is but the tiniest glimpse into how musical work is work: racking up an endless and completely unreimbursable tab in the practice room, trying to make the impossible sound simple. Cocks gives us the inverse of virtuosity: the marvel isn’t how easy, but rather how horribly difficult Cocks is making it seem to produce any sound at all.
With a player as adept and as imaginative as Cocks, it takes the hurly-burly of works like Produktionsmittel I to force the reality of musical effort under a klieg light. Even so, as close as field anatomies allow us to get to the physical realities of Cocks’ music-making, what they suggest even more powerfully are the limits of that intimacy: the most unknowable truths are often those that are closest to us. Not that that will stop anyone from listening again.
