Freund: Use Your Inside Voice

Use Your Inside Voice (2014) is an admo­ni­tion well used by ele­men­tary school teach­ers and par­ents (and grand­par­ents) when the kids are get­ting a bit too bois­ter­ous. I used it as a note to myself, deter­mined to try some­thing dif­fer­ent from the high-energy super-extroverted sharply pro­filed music I find myself drawn toward. And it occurs to me that soci­ety as a whole might need to be reminded to use our inside voices — it might make it eas­ier to lis­ten to and reflect upon what we are say­ing to each other. So this piece, Use Your Inside Voice, is not ter­ri­bly loud or blaz­ingly fast or mys­te­ri­ously quiet or remark­ably insis­tent, though the lit­tle mantra heard in the harp at the open­ing never dis­ap­pears for long. My hope is that in the con­text of this “Mod­er­ate Music” the sub­tle har­monic shad­ings, touches of instru­men­tal color, lilt­ing refrains and strands of earnest lyri­cism in the piece will speak to the lis­tener beguil­ingly and lucidly through­out its mod­est 8-minute length.