secondhand by Caleb Pickering (2019)
'secondhand’ is a tongue-in-cheek statement piece about climate change, deniers, and those who actively make decisions that negatively impact our environment for their own personal gain, and set up future generations for failure by handing them a ravaged planet.
‘If I sound pleased about this, it's only because my programmers made this my default tone of voice! I'm actually quite depressed!’ -Claptrap, Borderlands II
Caleb Pickering’s ‘secondhand’ is a piece for solo vibraphone and tape, written in 2019 for the Green Vibes Project. Upon first glance, the piece functions as a satirical play on a speech given by the previous US president Donald Trump during one of his speeches. The tape consists of electronic drums and electric guitar, as well as distorted text-to-speech quotes from Trump’s speech on wind energy. The composer himself has a record of turning political topics into structured pieces of music, with his piece “Non-Prophets” taking on televangelists and their questionable ethics, along with his piece “Tinfoil”, which uses quotes from conspiracy theories, and attempts to display the danger of these conspiracies when they stop becoming theories to personally-held beliefs.*
In this light, secondhand is another in his line of framing political issues through music. As compared to ecoacoustic music, however, the material of the music is not inspired by or influenced by natural phenomena. Rather the music serves as a translation of emotion or sentiment when hearing the quotes in the tape. Because of this, the significance of what is notated is fairly significant compared to something like Child of Tree, which simply attempts to explore the sound worlds of plants.
Compared to the other pieces, it is important to digest the musical content in a more traditional way to see how Pickering engages with the topic of climate change, and broadly, environmentalism, through a political lens.
There are three main fragments that recur throughout the piece. The first is a simple pentatonic melody, which seems to represent the statements that Trump makes about wind and energy. They are both matter-of-fact, and straightforward, and on the outside, anyone can understand them both.
The second is a passage of repetitive notes in mixed meter, in which the performer must play random notes with these notated minor and major second motifs coming out of it as well. In context, this seems to juxtapose the subverted implication Trump’s ‘melodic’ statements are making, as in ulterior motives, hyperbolism, or simply falsehoods. Simply, this motif serves to counter the simplicity of the melody, with sharp juxtaposition.
After a thorough developmental section with grooving patterns and solo lines, there is a section that combines fragmented parts of the motifs, here two of the fragments discussed before are to now played simultaneously, the harmonic underpinning of the pentatonic melody plus the dissonant aleatoric phrases in the foreground now.
Like the music, hearing the quotes of “I never understood wind”, “you know I know windmills very much, I’ve studied it better than anyone”, or “You know we have a world, right?” instills a sort of uneasiness given the context, discussing how wind energy is dangerous and harmful according to Trump. Trump historically has proclaimed his knowledge on subjects as ‘better than others’, with the Washington Post even making an article titled, “19 things Donald Trump knows better than anyone else, according to Donald Trump”1.
While perhaps many people are aware he is not speaking honestly, the danger in these statements lies in the fact that in a position of power, someone refuses to seek other professional opinions on issues, as well as misinforming a large public that is liable to take what he says as fact.
Musically, Pickering demonstrates this by showing the audience at the beginning of the piece a pentatonic melody that recurs throughout. This melody in context appears out of place, due to the left-hand accompaniment’s dissonance, utilizing minor and major 2nds. One could consider the melody to be the statement Trump is making, that wind energy is dangerous or harmful. As the piece progresses, the melody becomes more and more insistent, returning multiple times with a more active accompaniment as well. In the final passage of the piece, not only is the melody present, but the accompaniment is now forcing itself in the spaces of the melody, pushing against it until the final line breaks both patterns, with the final message in the vibraphone a slow and purposefully nonchalant repetition of the 4 note melody, as though it either has resolved or the performer has resigned to let it go.
Throughout the score, Pickering tells the performer to freely improvise or play random notes, offering opportunities for improvisation and creativity, though these moments represent more of a way to further this sentiment of the spoken quotes not making sense, or subverting emotion despite the significance of these statements causing more harm than good. A powerful figure saying these phrases in the piece, such as wind energy is dangerous, impacts both the environment and people’s perception of climate change. Thus, Pickering’s secondhand attempts to demonstrate the danger that lies within figures of power refusing to accept or make a change in an issue, in this case, climate change.
Contextualization
Looking into the variables a performer can utilize, the clear variable available for this piece would be adding in further contextualization. With the state of the tape being difficult at times to hear the quotes, along with the pertinent information within it, having additional information for the audience helps reinforce the purpose of the piece. Altering instrumentation and performers is not logical in this setting, as this fundamentally affects how the piece functions. Therefore, we can safely assume these two variables are fundamental to the piece and can focus on contextualization and performance space.
For my performances of this piece, I incorporated an introductory video to the music. I wanted to allow audience members to understand the context of the quotes used in the piece, so including the original speech that Trump gave creates a connection between the music and the topic at hand. For many pieces, the addition of other art mediums appears to be a popular method to enhance musical performance. For example, Kate Moore, a popular Dutch composer, often incorporates different kinds of art installations, such as in her piece "Days And Nature". The piece uses large metal noise-making machines that serve both a musical purpose and a visual purpose. Because her piece focuses on the human versus nature relationship1, these instruments are a clear representation of the 'man-made' industrialization that can very easily overpower nature, aptly overtaking a large portion of the soundscape in the piece when they begin to play. This representation of a topic through visual and aural artistry seemed a fitting inclusion into "secondhand", and while Kate's machines may be a fundamental part of the piece, incorporating additional context into the vibraphone piece helps audiences to grasp the topic at hand more easily than played completely as written with no additional media.
In "secondhand", my video serves only as a pretext, rather than an accompaniment to the music, as the video itself is only present before the piece starts. In this way, I could prevent the musical content from being subverted by a visual attraction. One important detail of this piece is the complete focus on the performer and the relationship between the musical material. Thus, having visual media during the performance could impact how audiences interpret the musical content. Furthermore, this preamble addition allows for preparation into the tape part for an audience, meaning that the recognition of the quotes from the tape may be easier to grasp given some context than if the video was not present.
Video Addition
For the material of the video, I chose to include an abridged version of Trump’s full speech, making sure to include the quotes that are used in the piece, as well as selecting more of the phrases Trump uses to support his own claims of knowledge about wind energy and windmills. I enhanced what was being said by incorporating fragments of common-use videos of wind turbines in the US, as well as other landscape backgrounds, simply to be clear about what the music is discussing. As this was the first piece in the program, it also served as an opportunity to define the entire program and what I hope to explore for the next hour. By adding these elements, along with representations of greenhouse gas emissions and pollution rates, I gently direct the audience in the direction of why this piece is significant in an environmental context: figures of power refusing to take action on this issue harms everyone, and those figures should be held accountable if simply to be called out. While the video itself helps to contextualize the quotes used within the piece, I did add some additional information regarding human involvement in climate change, as well as how past US President Donald Trump has failed multiple times in maintaining businesses, making his statements less convincing and highlighting the danger these sentiments have coming from someone in power. You can watch the video here.
The final motif, which is the 'hook' of the piece, is this mixed meter motif. Virtuosic in nature, it incorporates a heavy amount of dissonance and open perfect fourths, tritones, and perfect fifths. This is heavily inspired by progressive metal, and in context with the other two motifs, serves as a bridge to the two. Pickering himself says many parts of the piece are inspired by the robot Claptrap in the video game Borderlands 2, who regardless of their own emotional state, sounds happy and excited. This subversion of emotion in the robot’s voice can be heard throughout the piece as this contrast of progressive metal riffs and dissonance clash with the pentatonic melody, undermining the usually brighter tone the pentatonic scale has in music.
Location
For the location, this piece only becomes slightly challenging to play in outdoor areas due to the electronic backing tape. It seems most effective in a concert hall where the tape is very present, and allows a blending between the live instrument as well. It could work successfully in an open-air festival similar to where a band might play, but like many pieces with a backing tape, non-traditional venues often cause difficulty in achieving the same effect as in a concert hall in regards to blending and clarity of soloist and tape alike. Thus, location is something that for my purposes, I avoid altering because it would not offer a noticeable benefit to the context of the piece, and possibly harm it.
Instrumentation
Simply put, the alteration of instrumentation in a piece like this would not affect the output of the piece and may be less of an effective course of action than in other pieces. Due to the nature of the vibraphone and the idiomatic writing for the instrument, playing on something like a flairdrum, which is made of air-filled plastic bottles, could be a way to use up recycled materials and show the piece in a new way. However, besides being much more difficult to perform as written, it lacks the drive and volume that a vibraphone can produce, which the piece clearly intends for. The high energy and loud dynamics require an instrument that can project and matches timbre with the tape, consisting of metal drums and electric guitar.
Personnel
As stated before, the number of people for this piece would not greatly enhance or benefit the piece. Written specifically for a soloist, the only additional performers that would change the piece would be to have a band backing the soloist in place of the electronic tape. There may be options to altering the tape's instrumentation through that scenario as well, being able to include other instruments in place of the ones Pickering used in the electronic version. However, I opted to stick with the tape as in the program of the concert, it would flow better between this and the second piece if it remained a solo performance.