Liminality by Dave Hall

Performed by the University of Nebraska Percussion Ensemble at PASIC 2019.

Dr. Dave Hall, director

Video and Audio by Blank House Media: https://www.blankhousemedia.com

Program Notes:
This past summer I spent nearly two weeks on Martha’s Vineyard in a rental house with my wife’s extended family, with a nice TV we never turned on and mercifully unreliable cell service and internet connection. My sister-in-law Katie (who I have always looked up to for her humor, creativity, and quiet clairvoyance), lives inland on the island and we were there for her wedding. I spent most of each day outside reading books, going on strolls, or playing with our children. At night we would come together as a family and eat a meal made from a beautiful mélange of food grown on Island. I have known for a while that all I really need (beyond basic food and shelter) is time, beauty, and love, and all three were available in abundance on the Island.

The trip was right on time as I had become ambivalent about my role as an academic and expectations (both internal and external) to adhere to stale paradigms. I am certainly thankful for the opportunities and security of my position and am aware of the extreme privilege I fell into by way of my race, gender, upbringing, and dumb luck and am doing my best not to scuttle the opportunities that so many others are not afforded. I considered this retreat to be a hard reset for my mind and soul.

Some of the most profound things I read on the porch outside our rental house included Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: a rigorous and personal account of groundbreaking research in neurochemistry and guided psychedelic therapy (to treat addiction, depression, anxiety, trauma, and to help the terminally ill navigate the end of life). I became enamored with the concept of deliberate ego dissolution and removing myself from the art I hoped to create. Jenny Oddell’s How to Do Nothing compelled me to connect more deeply with other people and our natural world. I let go the last shred of interest I had in having a reputation or a categorizable job title after reading Austin Kleon’s Keep Going. His marching orders to “forget the noun, do the verb” reminded me that Players gotta play and Artists gotta art. We should make things and share them with our friends.

I am a shameless fanboy of pianist Brad Mehldau and have been particularly fond of his duo collaborations with both mandolinist Chris Thile and drummer Mark Guiliana, so I set out to expand the spirit of these duos to a larger ensemble. Recent residencies at Nebraska with Snarky Puppy, Stefon Harris, Andy Akiho, and the Jonathan Scales Fourchestra also infiltrated my subconscious as I sketched out the work. I also hoped to capture an aural cross-section of the diversity, virtuosity, artistry, creativity, and collaborative spirit of my students both past and present. All of this is a tall order for a six- to seven-minute piece of coherent music, but eventually Liminality emerged, its creation only possible at this time with these exact artists. We hope the result transcends ourselves as well as the dogmatic and ultimately ineffective borders that are hastily thrown up between particular musical genres and idioms.

It is true that I did sit at a desk and a piano for months looking at blank manuscript paper and scratching my head, and eventually at a computer attempting to translate all of the above into decipherable musical notation, but it truly feels like my students wrote this piece. It has reaffirmed to me that healing and transcendent experiences of beauty are available when given enough time and love. –Dave Hall