Are You You
Michi Wiancko

In a video work covering 21 huge screens in the World Trade Center, artist Shantell Martin used deceptively simple phrases — “Are you being you? Who are you? Are you you?” — to encourage viewers to self-reflect on personal identity and one’s relationship to larger socioeconomic structures. This artwork inspired composer Michi Wiancko, who extended the concept to the question, “how do we express the core of who we are today through instruments that were made centuries ago?”

In Are You You, Wiancko was tasked with writing for a Baroque ensemble of string quartet plus harpsichord. A harpsichord uses tiny plectrums to pluck the strings, producing a clear, rhythmic onset of sound that quickly fades. Translating this aural profile to the string quartet, Wiancko weaves a tapestry of pizzicato rhythms against which arco (bowed) melodies shine while the shimmering motion of the harpsichord weaves in and out.

Pizzicato — plucking instead of bowing the string —was occasionally but not extensively used during the Baroque period; it is more characteristic of later eras. Wiancko’s treatment of the harpsichord is more idiomatic to the Baroque: just as a continuo player would, she uses chords with lots of doubled notes to create a forte. By combining such historically rooted techniques with more modern treatments of the instruments, Wiancko explores the connections between historical artifacts and contemporary identity.