fever dream AMANDA GOOKIN
September 9, 2022
Dear sister,
Thank you for reaching out and for your honesty and bravery in sharing something so personal.
I am honored by your openness and trust.
I’ve had my own nightmarish experiences with mental health that really tore my life apart, and I only recently figured out what was really going on. Depression hurts, but with professional help, it helped me find myself, connect all the tiny parts of me that were long forgotten and ignored.
Finally, I became me. All of this is to say, I understand, and I’m glad you’re starting to feel better.
I feel you, and I hear your pain.
To me, you are more than just the work you do, and this project has been more than just the product of the piece or the performance. I believe OUR music, yours and mine, speaks through our brokenness, and therefore our collaboration has a very special meaning.
I like to believe that each season of life brings new challenges but also opportunities for abundance, and I hope that this new season brings you everything you need to get to where you want to be. Take very good care of yourself, please. If you need anything or anyone, I am here.
Love,
Your sister
YOU ARE THE WATER
you are the water asks for perpetual, vibrant, joyous motion throughout. Organized as a series of overlapping fragments, this solo cello work engages the artist to improvise and build sonic worlds out of shards of material. The title acts as both instruction and metaphor, inviting the cellist to move beyond the score into a flow state where soundscapes shift continuously, organically.
INTI FIGGIS-VIZUETA
inti figgis-vizueta is a composer who works to reconcile historical aesthetics and experimental practices with trans & Indigenous futures. Described as an “ever-intriguing, rising new music star” (LA Times), whose “arresting…sparse, beautiful” (NPR Classical) work brings “a sense of true dramatic stakes” (New York Times), inti has been commissioned and performed by leading artists including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Attacca Quartet, Rothko Quartet, and Roomful of Teeth, among many others. inti is the recipient of the 2026 United States Artists Fellowship, and her debut album, Music for Transitions, will be released on New Amsterdam Records in 2026.
THE THINNESS OF
The Thinness Of depicts our internal landscape of static, noise, hypercontrolled states, and inner dialogue that manipulates our shifting perspectives and sense of reality. It remarks on the idea that the lives of women in society are filtered through the expectations and perceptions of others—a layered complexity at the core of every interaction. We strive to be understood and communicate clearly with one another, but often need to filter our thoughts and intentions to be considered easily digestible. Constantly told how we should act, speak, and think, we are left with conflicting ideas of our reality and the spaces we occupy in the world. I wanted to create a sense of intimacy and vulnerability, exposing the internal dialogue of the performer through Martine Kinsella Thomas’ text The Thinness Of, commissioned for this piece, and the sound worlds within the body of the cello.
CAMILA AGOSTO
Camila Agosto is a composer and interdisciplinary artist based in New York City whose work spans acoustic and electroacoustic music, installation, and sound sculpture. She is drawn to the ways sound holds memory, shapes emotion, and sparks connection—often building immersive sonic environments that invite deeper listening and reflection. Her music explores the sonic potential of acoustic and electronic instruments, combining extended techniques, tactile electronics, and embodied approaches to performance that highlight the human element of live music-making. Commissioned and performed by leading artists and ensembles, her work has been featured at venues and festivals across the U.S. and internationally.
THE THINNESS OF TEXT
BY MARTINE KINSELLA THOMAS
light through distance. now focus in, up close. nothing but light, overcome, overpowering, overwhelming, thermonuclear fusion happening right now in the plasmic spheroid, coming through clear from how far.
the dark whittles down to clarity. what holds together. what is inner. what is real, what distorts the message, what do you concede, & what will not translate? shed it. forget the loss, keep clear & ask to be understood. against the star-thin edge between you & darkness & how can meaning come through. through the body of darkness above. through the body at hand, the body at a glance, the body submerged within cloud or water or space, membranes, equilibrium, & what can be exchanged between or across tell me what can come through?
fusion, luminous, coming clear from thousands of miles. through distance the thinness. the plasmic spheroid. from unknown miles, unknown distance. dark whittling down to clarity. whittling down to the interior. it will not translate.
AND and AND
And and And explores a kind of distilled, stripped-down truth that rings through the sonic nuance of human speech sounds and disassociated language fragments. It strums heartstrings and guides ears along a poetic path forged by the abstraction of language, absent its original context, and steeped in the oddly emotional music of an earnest woman’s speaking voice. Weaving and dancing in conversation with the voice-like cello, it’s asking more than answering – leaving us to fill in our own blanks, form our own conclusions, construct our own truths, and insert our own clauses between a surplus of conjunctions.
PAMELA Z
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist making works for voice, electronics, samples, gesture-activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), MoMA (NY), the Venice Biennale, and Dakar Biennale. She has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles (including Kronos Quartet and Eighth Blackbird). Her awards include the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MIT McDermott Award, the Guggenheim, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
AND AND AND TEXT FRAGMENTS
FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH JOURNALIST ASHLEY HAHN
Who do you recognize
Who sits close to you
Who you can see and hear
Who I don’t speak to very often
And who is us
Where did I grow up
Where did I learn to drive
Where do I go for holidays
Where was I born
Where do my parents live
Where do I live now
Now maybe it’s nothing
It’s very hard to concentrate
Who are we
I think... I mean
All day long
To be that distracted
And I And memory
And this other woman
And they were all happy
I like old things
I have no explanation for how I would’ve known that
I mean I wanna have lunch
I mean I think
I’m a writer
Every year
Fight fight fight first
Flight flight flight first A newspaper The light was actually very beautiful from this window A very dear friend And and and
All on this one weekend And decline
Discipline Duplicate Growth and
Harder
He and his
How many tabs I have open
I think
In that moment
Not kidding
Of course
Once a year
Research
So... so
Stories
Profoundly distracted
I mean, I think
I mean I mean
Formal training is nice
We who change and And and and and and I mean
Decline discipline
I mean who who who who who who who who...
BREAK FREE
Break Free unfolds as a journey through the inner struggles I have learned to hide—those quiet storms held beneath a composed exterior. This work reflects the heavy, looping labor I endure every time I process my trauma. To liberate myself from this internal hamster wheel is only possible through compassion, tuning into my wounded self, and listening to the deafening roar beneath the silence that I truly begin to break free.
SEONG AE KIM
Seong Ae Kim is a Korean-born composer based in New York City. Her recent works have been acutely focused on amplifying self-truth and giving voice to social justice concerns. Through her creative work, she seeks to tell her own stories of past breakthroughs and to cultivate safe spaces for collective listening—spaces in which vulnerability can be shared, and human connection can emerge. As a passionate advocate for social justice, she lends her compositional voice to encourage marginalized and voiceless communities to speak for themselves and to confront practitioners of social injustice, particularly those who perpetuate racial discrimination and immigrant scapegoating.
TIED
Tied was composed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and shortly after the birth of my child, which also coincided with a rather serious personal mental health crisis. At the time of its composition, I found it difficult to do much of anything other than perform the basic functions of my life (mostly my teaching job and childcare), and thus Tied is a somewhat direct line to my mental state and energy level at the time. A series of awkward false starts and broken melodies, it is the sound of someone who just simply can’t “do it.”
SARAH HENNIES
Sarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY, whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues, including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, fellowships in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2016 and 2025, was a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and the Composer-InResidence at the 2025 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival She performs regularly as a soloist and in a duo with the bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause and is an Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
FLIGHT
I wrote Flight with cellist Amanda Gookin in mind. A dear friend and career-long musical collaborator, Amanda is a force of creativity, inspiration, resilience, and whimsy. I wanted to write a piece that expresses these various characteristics within a singular solo form. The image of flying reminds me that even when challenges enter our lives, we have the capacity to soar in our creativity and imagination, and to allow dreams to take flight. In fact, it’s essential in order to thrive and move through difficulties as humans. The piece opens with a contemplative drone and melodic commentary, as if one is pondering quietly on their own, and then bursts into a perpetual motion that shows off the range of dynamics and emotions the cellist can portray.
JESSIE MONTGOMERY
Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness. Her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post), and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Jessie is a frequent and highly engaged multidisciplinary collaborator. Jessie served as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence from 2021–2024 and is the recipient of the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, Sphinx Medal of Excellence, Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year.
September 6, 2022
7 months before the world premiere at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY
Dear sister,
I wanted to thank you for your patience with my delay on FMP 3.0. I owe it to you to be open and honest about why I have been so behind.
I am a very private person outside of my professional life and online presence, but I wanted to share that I’ve been struggling with crippling depression over the past two years, and it’s impacted my creativity and drive to a degree I’ve never experienced before in my life. What started as weeks then became months, and ultimately years, of numbness and despair. I’ve been here before, and I’ve always just clamped down and pushed through it. This time, it took me down, and I’ve gone into hiding, avoiding the pain and shame of it all.
Thank you for your kindness, understanding, and patience with me. I can’t wait to bring your amazing commission to life.
Love, Amanda
fever dream
Produced by Jessica Meyer
Engineered, Edited, Mixed, and Mastered by Mike Tierney
Recorded at Shiny Things Studio, Brooklyn, NY, April 2026
Album Artwork and Design by Janet Roy
Photos by Julia Comita
Props Design by Tim Ferro
Makeup by Brenna Drury
PERFORMER CREDITS:
Track 2: Camila Agosto and Amanda Gookin, voice
Track 3: Ashley Hahn, voice
My deepest gratitude to the FMP 3.0 commission sponsors Jill Steinberg, Keith Ewing, The Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund, National Sawdust, and The Park Avenue Armory.
Forward Music Project 3.0 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).
3.0
