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About this Piece

I chose to focus on Anthony Davis' composition You Have the Right to Remain Silent for my artwork Untitled (I.Y.I), explicitly thinking about the relationship between the sonic, textural, and narrative role of the clarinet to the orchestra, how it conjures the vitality, autonomy, and persistence of an entity entangled within a system and structure, and grapples with unjust, racist police practices and imprisonment. The agility and defiance of the clarinet among the orchestra’s web of vocal, instrumental, and electronic characters and textures were emotionally, visually, and conceptually evocative, providing me a rich field to draw upon for this painting. While my artwork title contains an abbreviation for Impinged Yet Insistent as a dedication to the clarinet-narrator, the work is also inspired by and could have been titled with YHTRTRS's speculative and expansive finale, "Dance of the Other." —Pearl C. Hsiung