Composer’s Note

One in Four, One in Eight takes its title from the statistic that one in four known pregnancies ends in loss in the US, and one in eight people needs medical intervention to get to the journey of pregnancy. This project is a concert performance that features new music which engages the experiences of infertility and pregnancy loss, building a sonic space to explore the deeply personal, physical, and bodied, which is often externally invisible and socially stigmatized in general conversation.

This piece is a 60-minute concert event which features new music written through the lenses of infertility and pregnancy loss, hybridizing a classical music concert designed to articulate emotional and physical contours of these lived experiences, alongside medically objective content provided by healthcare professionals and scientific research. The composition and concert engage a duality of the deeply subjective experience alongside medically objective content which are forced to co-exist in these arenas.

A large-scale project like this one takes years to put together, with no over-exaggeration. At the beginning, I had imagined that it might take two years to see the piece through from writing to performance, but as I write this note in the project’s sixth year, I have come to recognize—and accept—that so much of what happens in our lives is not on our own timeline. In many ways, One in Four, One in Eight helped me relinquish, or at least come to terms with, the fact that even though I really wanted something and worked for it, factors beyond my own self play necessary roles in how things happen. Further, this piece needed the full six years to grow into what I actually needed it to be. What started out as a vessel for my frustration and sadness became an integral part of growth and grieving, intertwined. 

The piece itself is a monument to that difference between expectation and reality. Many narratives present pregnancy as a purely magical time, a naturally (and easily) occuring process available to anyone who wants to experience it. Infertility and pregnancy loss are severely underfunded and underexplored areas of medical research, despite the considerable percentage of the population impacted by one or both. The experiential learning curve is steep and disruptive; most people don’t know much about either until they’re experiencing it directly, at which point it’s impossible to tune out. In the age of (mis)information, it is easy to be inundated with both valuable and distracting content, and tuning out commodified noise is only getting to be more difficult. By attaching the deeply subjective positioning of music to the staunchly objective and procedural work of medicine, this piece insists that there is room for both human and science in the same space, and it recognizes the complexities of how these two elements co-exist. 

The piece will premiere in May 2025 at the Twentieth International Conference on the Arts in Society.

This project is supported by a grant from the MAP Fund.

This project is supported by the (In)Hospitable Bodies Project at the Center for Arts and Society, Carnegie Mellon University.