How Does The Tunnel Structure?
Lecture Performance
NIDA Art Colony, LT, January 2026
I will be using these words to talk around the subject. I will then use my violin to address the subject.
The invocation ‘there are no words’ leaves us begging. When there are no words we are often given images and sounds. The image provides a representation of the truth, and the sound creates.. what? A feeling? If it’s powerful enough maybe - but what is powerful? Does it reach into your belly? Does it hold you still?
This particular sound was crafted over there (points west), and is replayed over there, there (points to head), and here (points to body), and now, and then, and now and then.
The movement of this sound is important to me. In a moment this sound will be moving around this room, bouncing off the walls, going into your ears, and dying into your bodies. We cannot see it moving but it does it, trust me. The sound will move around this room in the same way that my words now are moving around the subject.
I first learned how to play these notes on the violin, when I was maybe 13 or 14. I learned how to be expressive on my instrument with this sound - I did exercises for the fingers on my left hand. These exercises helped me to control the exact kind of shaking motion I would need to produce a certain kind of wobble in the pitch of a note.
When learning the violin you are generally taught how to produce a beautiful singing tone. To achieve this you need to combine the correct amount of bow pressure with bow speed, as well as where the bow is on the string. It took me a while to feel confident using tone in my voice and in my words, but I learned how to use tone on a violin much earlier.
What happens when your first emotional engagement with this subject was through learning to play the sound that is meant to represent it? If I’m honest, nothing happened. I learned to play this sound in tune, I got it sounding good.