Solitude (2017)
An early work for Teeth and Metals, prototyping the MUGIC motion sensor.
Solitude holds an unusual place in Duke Ellington’s oeuvre. Ellington’s compositions are generally marked by their wide intervallic leaps, knotty chromaticism, and dramatic modulations, yet Solitude stands out for its unapologetic simplicity. Ellington claimed to have composed it in twenty minutes, as a consequence of having some extra studio time during a recording session. Yet despite its inconspicuous origins, Solitude has enjoyed tremendous popularity among singers and arrangers, with Ellington himself recording the tune over one hundred times. The brevity and potency of the melody provide the perfect foundation for a wide range of interpretational palettes, from the quietly understated to the densely reconfigured.
My own arrangement of Solitude was largely inspired by Billie Holiday’s slow and melancholic take the song. I’m still struck by the eerie, almost ghostly quality of Eddie DeLange and Irving Mills’s lyrics, as well as the short, pithy sentences that nonetheless take up to sixteen bars to find their rhymes and resolutions. In my version, the words are sung by an unseen, disembodied voice, conjured up as if by magic. Each syllable is tightly controlled by the electronic musician’s movements (thanks to two MUGICTM motion sensors), with some syllables taking on a human quality, and others embracing sounds that twist and turn in strange, otherworldly directions.
Special thanks to Hanah Davenport for providing the vocal samples, and to Mari Kimura for her advice and guidance throughout this project.