For Instruments

for instruments is Weston Olencki’s personal reflection on their recent instrumental music. Beginning with formative experiences in a Southern drum corps, the essay traces Olencki’s path from trombonist to composer, a turn that opened up new ideas about the relationship between performers, instruments, and their historical contexts. Instruments are more than tools for making music, they write. Instruments are sites of cultural inscription—charged objects shaped by and shaping the bodies, traditions, and technologies that engage with them.

Alongside these views, Olencki describes their impulse to make music about more than just itself. In 2020, during the pandemic, they moved from New York City to rural Vermont. The change not only reminded them of where they grew up, but also prompted a deeper involvement with themes of regionalism and nostalgia, leading them to consider the intersection of folk practices and experimental forms, like imagining bluegrass as a system of algorithmic composition.

The essay is rounded out by a detailed review of works from 2020-2025 for antique organs, banjos, saxophones, fiddles, and marching band percussion—often animated by electro-mechanical or computer-controlled processes. Throughout, meaning is found both in the physicality of the sound and the stories embedded in the objects that produce it.

Part material history, part autobiography, for instruments resists singular narratives, embracing ambivalence, instability, and the entanglement of past and present. Olencki’s music moves fluidly across disciplines, geographies, and temporalities, rejecting fixed categories in favor of a practice that, in their words, seeks the “tethers in between.”

Weston Olencki is a musician and composer, originally from South Carolina, living and working now in Berlin.

Specifications

• 36 pages
• 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches
• Saddle-stitched; risograph
• Edition of 150
• March 2025