Kojiro Umezaki

“Breathe”

It’s hard to imagine one living through the year 2020 without stopping for moments to contemplate the act of breathing, and the struggle to do so freely, without obstruction. During this period, countless others surely produced works similarly or even identically titled ”Breathe.” Movements in American social justice and protests against systemic racism rallied around and indelibly memorialized those who were deliberately and forcibly denied breath and therefore life. Raised were deep questions on how best to elevate the human condition; amplified was the rhetoric fueling the dynamics of similarity and difference. All of this against the backdrop of the world being indiscriminately and repeatedly brought to its knees by an inconspicuous peril replicating exponentially (and paradoxically) through the life-giving/sustaining act of breathing.

The twenty modules in “Breathe” (each on average loosely around one minute in duration) are designed to be resequenced and reordered. Any number of them can be played/omitted, depending on the occasion. For this album, a sequence of select modules were assembled. All the models on this recording focus on the open strings and the natural harmonics of the violin. As if the instrument were an organism, perhaps. The electronic part — an optional yet critical element of the work-echoes in its output, not repeating/fading identical copies of the input, but previously played and captured passages that lie on a continuum between most similar and most different.

I am truly grateful to The Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College for commissioning and supporting this work. And, equally so to Johnny Gandelsman — a dear friend — to and for whom this work is dedicated and written. —Kojiro Umezaki

“Breathe” was generously commissioned by the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH)