Secondary Dominance by Sarah Small (BandCamp)

www.secondarydominance.com

Since writing this music in 2016 (releasing the album in 2024), Secondary Dominance has since become the soundtrack for an auto-fiction documentary / long-form music video that explores trauma’s cellular imprint from a place where art and science intersect. Written and co-directed by Sarah Small and Wade McCollum, and release set for 2025.

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This music found its way here through dreams — seeds of inspiration arrived upon waking — as feeling tones, sound bites, atmospheric memory (and once) as a formed musical melody.

One morning eight years ago, while recording a dream, I couldn't stop referencing a character named Jessica Brainstorm who, then after, appeared in my dreams for months. I didn’t understand who she was. She never clarified her form or purpose, but she was powerful, regularly present, and mysterious.

For years, Jessica Brainstorm was the working title for these dream creations. In bringing this work to audiences, I put Jessica Brainstorm to sleep and awoke Secondary Dominance as a housing for these 13 musical micro-movements.

In tonal music, the tonic (the first scale degree) can be thought of as home, a place of resolution, finality, and the familiar. The dominant (the 5th scale degree) is next in importance; it lures us away from foundation, demands control for a moment in time, creating an instability that begs for resolution back to home. In 18th century music, composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, created structures in which a modulation to the dominant played an important role. This modulation was only possible through the application of what came to be called a secondary dominant, a chord from outside the original key which rearranged the hierarchy and power structure of the original key. Within this new world, the previous home’s dominant is now the new home… until it isn’t anymore when it’s seduced once again by new points of power.

In creating this music, I haven’t aimed to imbue the pieces with secondary dominants. Rather, Secondary Dominance landed as project title because of its relationship to concepts I see scattered all over life, and this relationship excites me:

Like the parent and child, society and citizen, dreamer and the dreamed, artist and creation, we continuously experience moments where circumstance changes so dramatically that our whole universe rearranges itself to relate — be it a rite of passage, a lost love, a new love, a diagnosis, a birth, a death, an awe-filled unexpected revelation…

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Reflecting on this Music

While reflecting on this music, I recognize streams of influence from disparate time periods: I see influence from my childhood; reflections of my mother’s lute playing in her medieval and renaissance Camarata — the crumhorns, madrigal singing, recorders, and viola da gamba echoing from the living room. I hear my father playing solo piano, inventing atonal forms from within his locked studio in the back of the house. I remember moments of my dad sitting by my side as I stumbled through scales and Bach on my tiny 1/4 sized cello. I can identify flickers of 90’s rock: industrial, punk, metal, goth (as a teenager, I danced my face off to NIN, Nirvana, Tool, Fugazi, Alice in Chains, The Cranberries…). There are moments where I notice tiny sonic flickers from very early childhood of silly, playful Raffi singing to me through my white + red Playschool cassette player.

But most clearly, I see influence from Balkan folksong, the music I fell in love with over the last fifteen years while singing and studying with my a cappella trio, Black Sea Hotel. Traditional Balkan folksong is built around the relationship between a drone and a melody, continuously rubbing up against each other, creating a friction-filled dance between dissonance and harmonic resolution. This relationship in music and in life thrills me immensely!

Brooklyn-based composer and singer on Yo-Yo Ma's GRAMMY-winning album, “Sing Me Home”, Small is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, performer, filmmaker, and photographer. Her music synthesizes genres from industrial, Balkan folk and contemporary chamber to Renaissance, rock, gibberish rap, and punk, interweaving electronics, strings, flutes, and densely packed vocals.

SarahSmall.com