In exploring ideas, I shared with Amy X Neuburg a text that I was considering setting in a composition – photographer Diane Arbus’s 1962 application for a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. In this single typewritten page she eloquently and poetically defines her then-revolutionary aesthetic, that the commonplace habits, rituals and social spaces of everyday life hold a meaning and importance that will only be understood in the future, because “they will have been so beautiful.”

Amy and I felt that Arbus’s writing and the aesthetics of her extraordinary body of work would be a compelling organizing principle for our project. We decided to commission a stylistically diverse set of eight composers, who would each compose a song-length work for Amy and the Electro-Acoustic Band, which would soon celebrate its 20th anniversary. The works would be in some way inspired by Arbus’s celebration of the commonplace and of the “ceremonious and curious.” Each composer was asked to select or create one or more photographic images and find or create a text connected in some way to the image, and to use these as the basis for their composition. Amy and I would each write a new piece with the same guidelines, to make it an even ten.

—Paul Dresher

Walking in Diane Arbus’s footsteps, as Paul and Amy asked, is quite a challenge: find an image, a ceremony of the everyday, then write the song it inspires. Where should I start? I guess from where I always do, right after breakfast. Write some, stop, write some more, stop. Wonder if it will be brilliant; dread that it will be stupid. Then remember that it will be neither. Just work ahead like any other day. And feel so lucky that there’s someone in my life who can remind me of that. A huge thank you to Paul and Amy for bringing this wildly variegated collection into being. I’m so proud to be part of it. I hope Arbus would be pleased.

—Conrad Cummings