Composer's Note
When Steven and I first mastered Doctor Vysarius together in his attic apartment in Iowa City, we ordered chicken tikka masala from an Indian place in town and worked for the entire day. I did very little, as Steven seemed more adept at working the intricacies of GarageBand to achieve almost exactly the sound we wanted (sweeping, roiling, active, and painfully imperfect) than I did. I was terribly heart sick that spring, as were many who worked on that project. I could feel the whole world thrumming in the back of my head as we all seemed to remember—for the third or fourth time in my life, at least—the presence of a certain acute oppositional force that shipwrecked/shipwrecks so many lives into dangerous precarity, splayed out on a knife’s edge, the blade digging into the bottom of heels, the whole operation swaying unevenly back and forth.
Some students the previous summer had shut down the highway just north for a few evenings to demand an end to the terms of racial capital that resulted in the murder of George Floyd. That previous September, a refugee camp in Lesbos burned to the ground and thousands of people were displaced further, as Fortress Europe and America looked on passively. That May, I said goodbye to someone I loved deeply after bickering over nonsense for weeks—as we were all wracked with anxiety over our powerlessness in the wake of this virus that every few weeks would remake itself and its terror.
Doctor Vysarius came out of countless phone calls with Steven (when all you could do was call one another to pass the day) that helped to give shape to a certain architectural shorthand for the project. Many years later (this past year, in fact), I found myself listening to Bernard Herrmann’s masterpiece of a film score Marnie (1964) and reflecting on how much this dramatically-frontal, conceptually-paced thing mirrored the work Steven and I had made together. My music certainly falls miles short of Herrmann’s, but it perhaps shares a similar—if not the same—formal interest: a series of discrete events made continuous, held together by Steven and I touching the furthest edge of the furthest frame of the thing. We had a sense of what we could enclose and what we needed to keep open to maintain a capacity to gesture toward the always disappearing horizon of the play: the shaky ground—both aesthetic and actual—we found ourselves standing on that year.
Steven’s dad died that summer and he took up running—a huge surprise to anyone who knows him. I remember talking to him on the phone that summer, shortly after he had settled into the news himself. My life uprooted just a few months later. But what we had built—the gift of a profound creative partnership that knew that inside of what it held was a whole infinity—had somehow spared us from what otherwise would be certain ruin. Doctor Vysarius marks our friendship, many friendships with all those who helped to make that thing what it was and is. And for that, it is a tremendous blessing that I will treasure until the day I die.
–Jeremy Geragotelis