Phoenix Loose in The Bank

This piece was written in collaboration with the good folks in Bent Frequency for the 2021 iteration of the Charlotte New Music Festival.

The title of this piece came about when I was thinking about Bent Frequency’s theme for their 2021 season: renewal. A lovely theme, but a lot of the music I write is a tad more cynical than that theme might imply, but upon further examination, I realized that any instance of renewal must necessarily follow an instance of destruction.

With this in mind, the destruction I zeroed in on is the destruction that is wrought upon the common people of the world by institutions of economic oppression, namely banks. So, the loose narrative of this piece concerns a phoenix who is accidentally let loose inside of a bank and ends up burning it down, resulting in a kind of renewal in which those who were disenfranchised by the practices of banks and their proprietors would be able to achieve a freedom unencumbered by loans, mortgages and overdraft fees.

The imagery behind this piece is also partially inspired by the local history of Isla Vista, CA (where I started writing this piece). In 1970, UCSB students were protesting Bank of America for issuing illegal loans to the government of South Africa during the era of Apartheid. When the protest escalated the bank (now a lecture hall!) ended as embers.

While this act may seem outrightly violent, it was a strong stand against the deadly racism directly funded by Bank of America and, in my mind at least, much more important than any material losses suffered by a multinational conglomerate.