A few years ago, when I was composing a concerto for myself as vocalist, I rediscovered some tapes I had made when I was 6 years old. Back then one of my favorite things was a portable Aiwa cassette recorder and I used it to make non-linear musique concrète — that is a fancy way of saying I recorded weird sounds around the house, rubbing my toy cars against the microphone, alternately growling and counting off numbers in Japanese like some spastic MC.

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I am a composer and a vocalist, but not in the traditional classical sense. As a vocalist, I have learned how to make sounds inspired by different vocal traditions from around the world — sub-tone singing and screaming from heavy metal, throat singing from Tuva and Tibet — and have also invented new techniques like singing multi-band multiphonics inspired by jazz saxophonists. In each new piece I compose, I start by finding a sound that embodies a feeling that I want to be central to the piece. I write pieces for myself and for others to perform. In the pieces written for others, I often use an instrument to discover new sounds. In both instances, I feel that the lab is in the body. When we learn an instrument, when we practice and learn a new piece, we are, essentially, transforming our bodies. It is there that memory can be embedded too.

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When I was 16, I was abandoned in a mountain cabin. I went there on a skiing trip with my brother and his friends, but when I awoke that morning, they were gone. They had ditched me to go fishing. Stranded there all day, and not finding a television to keep me entertained, I snooped around the house. Eventually, I came across a turntable and a box of LPs. I started going through the records, one by one. Crosby, Stills, and Nash; Led Zeppelin; Cream. After about a half-day survey of classic rock, I put on a record with the most earth-shattering, alien sounds I had ever heard. I was converted. For the rest of the day I kept replaying it — Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” I immediately knew I had to learn to play the guitar.

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Hendrix’s electric guitar is visceral. It is somatic in Whitman’s sense — the song of itself — and emphatically American. Hendrix’s guitar is immediately recognizable in the way speaking voices of loved ones are immediately familiar. It taught me that a sound, in and of itself, can embody a feeling and that there is a meaning that can only be expressed with that sound, that voice, that guitar playing in that unique way. It also taught me, by extension, to look for my own voice, my identity, in sounds. Yes, rather than putting on a uniform, or trying to fit in with people around me. To not only embrace my idiosyncrasies, but to amplify them.

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But at 16, I had already determined my life plan: go to West Point, become a general, serve my country, return to California, become a senator. Bound up in that plan was a search for identity. In my formative years, my family lived in Japan and Switzerland, and I was always insecure of my identity as an American. As a naïve 16-year-old, I thought that if I put on a uniform and was willing to fight for my country, then others would have to accept me as one of their own. Two years later, everything was on schedule. West Point had accepted me after high school and I had just completed my plebe year. But then I suffered an injury during an exercise in gymnastics class, and had to leave. My life plan had to be revised.

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During the period of my convalescence, all I did was go to physical therapy and play guitar for eight or more hours a day. I started writing songs and playing in bands, and, eventually, after all the lofty motivations of public service, I had enough courage to consider completing my college education in music instead. I found a school, Berklee College of Music in Boston, which accepted the electric guitar as a legitimate instrument in which to major. There, I was introduced to the music of Bartók and Stravinsky. I experienced a second musical epiphany, and began studying to become a composer.

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When I first heard Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet at Berklee, I felt like my body understood it. It was visceral. It spoke to me on a plane similar to the Metallica and Black Sabbath I was playing with my friends. But in another sense, I felt there was an entirely separate cabalistic code embedded in the written score, one I did not yet understand. It was the desire to understand that code, to hopefully someday be able to compose notated music as beautifully complex as Bartók did that turned me into a composer, and led to 12 years of graduate school. It was only years after finishing my doctorate that I began to reassess my relationship to the written score and reclaim some aspect of what I was doing naturally as a kid.

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I was converted to Hendrix by a recording. It was a recording, too, that introduced me to throat singers in Tuva. I somehow felt that I could learn to do it, and I began to practice. The recording served as a score to teach me how to make those sounds. The sounds, transmitted through time and place on a recording, as an external mode of memory, were translated, through practice, into the body.

When I listened as an adult, and as a trained musician, to the tapes I made when I was 6, I was shocked to find that I wasn’t just growling —I was singing multiphonics. So, in some sense, I had been non-semantically broadcasting my identity before I ever thought to transcribe those sounds. The tape recorder, serving as a kind of score, helped me reclaim myself. Nodding to that, the beginning of my concerto, “On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis,” starts with an edited mix of my 6-year-old self singing on tape, over which I sing live. The tape allows me to sing in counterpoint with myself, 30-plus years apart. The opening also includes excerpts of me counting in Japanese as a kid. At the end of the piece, during the cadenza, I recite some numbers in Japanese, which, to me, not only recapitulates the tape part, but reconnects me to that moment when I was 6, when I recorded myself counting. The real score, in this sense, is in the body.

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Working with non-traditional sounds in this way, I have to create graphics and signs to represent my sounds. Yet, since these signs and sounds are not standard practice, I often have to make clear what my intentions are in non-traditional ways. Put in another way, my music ventures into the realm where the limitations of traditional notation are tested. A reader has to know what the sounds are before a syllabary can be useful. This is where technology has proven handy. Nowadays, I can send recordings of my multiphonics, as well as videos of me demonstrating instrumental techniques and sounds to supplement my scores. I consider recordings and videos employed in this way as an extension of the score. It is somewhere in between an aural tradition and a written one, albeit a digitally facilitated one. Between Socrates and Plato — a contemplative space between the oral and written.

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When a Western ethnomusicologist transcribes foreign music using the system of Western notation, there are potential neocolonial subtexts at play, as well as the potential for filtering out sounds difficult to represent in Western notation. Not belonging to the dominant cultures of classical music, I am critical of Western notation at the same time as I am embracing and participating in the use of it. The invention of new graphics and signs and the incorporation of recordings and videos as extensions of Western notation, however, gives me the space to tap into a language that feels to me more personal.

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Sometimes, I imagine my music as being like a tribe in the Amazon forest, a tribe without a system of writing. One day, a missionary comes to learn my language. I discern later that his main purpose in learning my language, however is to translate the bible to my language, to use it as a tool to convert me.

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The cadenza of “On a Sufficient Condition” is not notated. It is improvised, but I follow a pre-determined phrase structure. When I perform it, I am also constrained by the sounds my body knows how to make. The score is the body and the instrument is the body as well. Notated music and non-notated music have different expressive modes, and a different feeling of time. The tape part recalls my youth; the notated orchestral score recalls those months as an adult when I composed the piece; and the live cadenza expresses that moment in the present, as shared with the audience. There is also a vector that looks to the future. Acknowledging that my body and voice will change, my plan is to make another version of the piece 30 years from today by incorporating vocal sounds I can make today with those from my childhood in the opening tape part. My greatest artistic ambition is to be able to make at least two iterations of this process during my lifetime. There is risk involved in this process — intangibles of survivorship implicit in the score, on the page, in the body and on tape — but it is inspiring to me and I hope it can be inspiring for others as well.

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