Juniana Lanning – Little Mind (2024–25)

Описание: Juniana Lanning’s “Little Mind” (2024–25), performed by Collin Oldham (cello), Shao Way Wu (bass), and Matt Carlson (piano) at the Extradition Summer Concert 2025, held at Leaven Community in Portland, Oregon, USA, on Saturday, June 14, 2025.

This piece began in author Maya Angelou’s strategy against writer’s block: “There are times when I sit on that bed, with Roget’s Thesaurus, the dictionary, and the Bible, and a deck of playing cards. I play solitaire. And sometime in a month of writing, I might use up two or three decks of Bicycle cards, giving my ‘little mind’ something to do. I got that from my grandmother, who used to say, when something would come up and it would surprise her, she’d say, ‘Sister, you know, that wasn’t even on my littlest mind.’ So I really thought that there was a small mind and a large mind. And if I could occupy the small mind, I could then go more quickly down to the big mind.”

For Juniana Lanning, the two knobs of a classic Etch A Sketch toy replace Angelou’s playing cards. “This piece was created initially by my Little Mind on the Etch A Sketch,” Lanning writes in the score’s direction, “but also by my Big Mind, which is employed to do the important figuring on how these images can be re-created sonically.” Each of the score’s three Etchings occupies a page and is given its own approach. For the page identified as “Play,” one performer chooses a starting point in the graphics and proceeds to follow a path away from it — a relatively clear path, since all an Etch A Sketch can do is create one long, uninterrupted line. The second performer tries to guess which section of the graphic the first player is performing and begins to follow, then the third player does the same. For the page “Relax,” players start with the square box that contains all the other graphics, interpreting it as four repetitions of a motif that becomes the basis for the rest of their playing, with each further repetition becoming shorter and more focused, as if spiraling to a point. For page 3, “Repetition,” players work from a very small musical expression, connecting each repetition to the next with a sustained or resonating note, repeating and repeating until the whole becomes one looping, surrendering, trance-like experience.

Based in Portland, Oregon, Extradition is an ensemble and concert series that works at the intersection of composition and improvisation, deliberation and chance, clarity and silence.

Performance photos by Glenn Sogge

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