Song
Text, Audio
2026
Ask your friend to give you a sentence
Lydia Cornett
Find a Way to Make Them Sound
In the fall of 2026, we invited artist Joan Jonas to develop a public program with us, rooted in her distinctive approach to teaching. The event brought together artists, writers, improvisers, and musicians who responded to Joan’s work and approach to artistic translation. Among them, filmmaker, composer, and artist Lydia Cornett contributed a newly commissioned sonic composition, Find a Way to Make Them Sound.
In the artist’s words:
Find a Way to Make Them Sound is inspired by the artistic translation and shapeshifting of Joan Jonas’s practice. Throughout her course reading text, words move between naming things and describing actions, creating a sense that language itself can be transformed into physical or sonic material.
The composition begins with recordings of ordinary household objects and actions: a ringing telephone, typing, a glass vase, a ballpoint pen. These familiar sounds are gradually animated and transformed, becoming insect-like sounds and eventually a kind of insect music. The spoken words of Jenny George’s poem, voiced by Amber Elison Hall, then begin to bring a narrative to the sounds we have heard. As the voice becomes increasingly distorted, the words themselves dissolve into new sonic forms, and my violin gradually takes over.
In the final section, as the poem arrives at the lines, “I’ve exhausted my cruelty. I’ve arrived at myself again,” a dense symphony of looping violin sounds is interrupted by a solitary whistle. The whistle and violins gradually transform into synthesized birdsong, ending the piece with another act of translation: an artificial sound becoming something organic, and back again.
*****
Course reading text from Joan Jonas:
Capsules
Craters
Empty mossoles
Cacti
Bed
Webs
Pool
Voats
Cones
Funnels
Bones
Stills
Gins
Draws
Tubes
Theatres
Cars
Springs
Flumes
Trees
Others
Find a way to make them sound.
Blowing
Bowing
Rubbing
Scraping
Tapping
Moving
Fingering
Breaking
Burning
Melting
Chewing
Jiggling
Wearing
Swinging
Bumping
Dropping
Orbiting
Creaking
Caressing
Bouncing
Jerking
Flipping
Levitating
Hating
Skimming
Ignoring
Talking
Singing
Whistling
Walking
Snapping
Cracking
Snoring
Boring
Praying
Loving
Spraying
Bowling
Channeling
Freezing
Squeezing
Frying
Exploding
Poking
Screwing
Lowering
Shaking
Impeding
Dancing
Others
Abstract
“Find a Way to Make Them Sound” is a sonic composition by Lydia Cornett—a filmmaker, composer, and artist—in response to teaching notes by artist Joan Jonas. The response was created on the occasion of Ask your friend to give you a sentence: Joan Jonas and Friends, a public program at Skowhegan NYC on Wednesday, September 23rd in which artists, writers, improvisers, and musicians were invited to respond to one of Jonas’s course readings using her workshop method.
People
Lydia Cornett
Joan Jonas