“Unabout, Maintaining” is a work that places the value of maintenance at its forefront, inspired by the article “Hail the Maintainers!” by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel. Its foundation, and the vast majority of all musical material in the piece, is re-purposed from the existing vocabulary of the performers.
Following a series of simple written prompts, each of the members of But What About? provided me with a recorded sampling of their musical palette, a set of personal libraries and instrumental idiosyncrasies. The work almost immediately revealed itself in a set of soft, tender gestures from bassist Julián Sarmiento – a comforting world around which all other sounds and fragments find themselves orbiting. The piece rarely asks for the performers to perform something that isn’t already deeply within their practice and bodies – it is a maintaining work, cementing these sounds and gestures as distinctly by and for “But What About?”.
And what else “about?” Really, one of my favourite things about music is that it’s an artform that doesn’t have to be about anything at all. It can be, as one of my students put it, “positively aimless” – the express desire for wandering without a particular place in mind, but an aimlessness that is imbued with a sense of positivity towards formlessness, exploration, play, patience, space, and un-aboutness. The piece is about the piece, about “But What About?”, about being unabout.
