Alexander Provan

The house where I stayed is perched above a Walden-esque pond, a few minutes from Thoreau Way, which leads through the woods and to the beach. The architects of the modernist homes in the area may not have subscribed to the Transcendentalist ideal—self-reliant individuals isolating themselves from society so as to exercise creativity without conformity—but the terrain is hard to separate from the mindset. For the artists, designers, and scholars who exiled themselves from Boston and beyond each summer, Cape Cod served as a laboratory for utopian thought, yet the architecture reflects a standard of single-family homes on parcels of private property rather than an experiment in collective living.

While at the CCMHT residency, I spent a lot of time thinking about the struggle to balance solitude and collectivity, the sense of untrammeled agency that comes from isolation and the sense of vitality that comes from breaking down boundaries been oneself and others. The tension between these ideals—forms of life as well as thought and expression—seems to be as fundamental to the CCMHT houses as the wooden boards and concrete blocks, the arrangement of space and sight lines. How are these intangible components of architecture manifest (or concealed) not only in the houses but in the intellectual and artistic currents that preoccupied the people who designed and inhabited them? How to reconcile the impulse to withdraw and the will to remake society? And how to do so without facing the true conditions of utopia: the violent displacement of Native populations, along with the writing of history and law to uphold the myth of a “blissfully untouched” land, in the parlance of tourism bureaus?

I spent much of the residency working on an essay about withdrawal—a rejection of the terms of self-representation, whether in the realm of politics or culture—as a form of retreat that points to a shift in the relationship between individuality and collectivity, rather than disengagement or resignation. At the same time, I created sketches of a sound work that takes up colonial-era music and the metaphors of harmony and order (as well as noise and disunion) that permeated songs as well as speeches. Drawing on recordings of Sacred Harp music, scenes of protest and street violence, and sounds of the Cape Cod coastline, I considered the adoption of Protestant choral music as a national style and, coincidentally, the denigration of genres associated with Africans and Native Americans. Composing the work, I asked how musical styles promote social coherence or threaten discord—and cause a sense of recognition or alienation—through the resolution of conflicting voices or the silencing of unassimilable expressions.