...as he approaches I become not myself... 

Saxophonist: Noa Mick

 

The title of the work, ...as he approaches I become not myself... is a fragment from a quotation from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Here is the complete quotation

below:

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“...As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody – with whom? – with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?”

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Woolf’s novels are famous for their stream-of-consciousness construction and the various ways time passes throughout her non-linear storylines. In The Waves, Virginia Woolf experiments with collective consciousness, at times collapsing multiple voices into one. Their consciousnesses are interwoven and hard to distinguish from each other.

In this work, ...as he approaches I become not myself..., the composer focuses on things that are interwoven and that melt into and out of one another, simultaneously trying to combine different timbres and sounds that depict the process of transitioning from one sound state to another.