Turnpike

Turnpike is a twenty-minute multimedia work for two horns, live processing, fixed media, and video, commissioned by Richard Deane (Associate Principal Horn of the New York Philharmonic). The piece is built from field recordings, interviews, and footage gathered during long drives up and down the New Jersey Turnpike — the same road my grandfather worked for decades as a long-haul driver for Overnight, and the road I drove repeatedly during the early pandemic while helping to care for him after major surgery. Turnpike sets the highway’s economic and ecological force against a generational account of vision, labour, and the New Jersey landscape.

Program Note

Through 2020 I was often charged with helping to care for my ailing grandparents. My grandfather had recently lost most of his colon to cancer; my grandmother was developing dementia alongside long-standing psychiatric concerns. The living arrangement was nominally about keeping them safe from the virus — though they were going out regardless of their risk. The drive from Englewood to Point Pleasant Beach is about an hour and fifteen minutes on some of the busiest roads in the country. With the engine on and nothing else demanding my attention, the highway began to ask questions of itself.

I became fascinated with the area near the Linden Co-generation plant. Commuters tend to forget that the Turnpike runs along one of the most active industrial zones in the world; a serrated section of pavement there changes pitch as you cross from one slab to the next. I recorded an entire ride from inside the car with a stereo pair in the passenger seat, switching the radio across local stations as I went. As the Italian Futurists felt, there is an entire world of sound out in industrial space, much of it immediately striking.

The piece is also concerned with vision. I had begun to experience double vision late at night — a defect in the musculature of my eyes. My grandfather had dealt with cataracts during his driving years and is now living with macular degeneration, which appears as a black spot in the middle of his sight. Using material from interviews with him, the work assembles a viewpoint from past and present on a road whose force is both economic and ecological; New Jersey has more EPA Superfund sites than any other state, and many of them lie along these polluted estuaries and corridors. The video footage runs along the same lines.

The piece was first imagined as a solo work for hornist Jason Friedman, who recorded a sample of the opening movement in a noisier early-electronics aesthetic. The original Max/MSP conception was more than my technique could realise at the time, so I set part of it aside. When I arrived at Rutgers I met Christine Stinchi, who was looking for repertoire involving electronics; that conversation reached her teacher Richard Deane, who offered the commission to expand the piece into a duet. With new skills from the Rutgers computer-composition course, the result finally reached the scope I had first imagined. Turnpike — my first work to incorporate video — is, at root, an attempt to express the constant juxtaposition of nature and industry in our fine state, and in many of our own lives.