Music for Heart and Breath is a series of compositions that use involuntarily moving organs of the human body (specifically the lungs and the heart) as performance parameters. There are no time signatures: the tempos and rhythms are always governed by either the heart rates or the breathing rates of the individual players. In the case of the latter, the performers are instructed to play directly in sync with their own or another player’s individual breathing (playing at the speed of their inhalations, their exhalations or both). To enable the players to hear and play in sync with their own heartbeats, they wear stethoscopes and, naturally, generally play quietly. That, in combination with the natural variation between the performers’ heart rates, results in a delicate musical “pointillism”: starts and stops that are somewhat staggered, melodies that repeatedly align and then fall out of sync with the rising and falling of individual pulses.
The idea is less about “performance” in the traditional musical sense and more about attempting to translate directly into music the quiet internal rhythms of the body, using the naturally varying tempos inherent within each musician to guide and shape the dynamics of the pieces. Music for Heart and Breath requires that the performers let go of their regular approach to musical interpretation and phrasing, replacing it instead with a commitment to following the subtle rhythmic “instructions” of the body.
This kind of performing can yield a subtlety, a spaciousness and a uniquely fragile style of interplay between performers and musical score that always fluctuates and never repeats itself: each piece is a distinct, gentle collision of notes, dynamics, timing and shifting harmonies that, literally, has new life breathed into it every time it is played. (Richard Reed Parry, 2014)
