Piece Comment

Review of "Peculiar Privilege and the Elegy"


In this piece, Ece Ergadöz takes the listener on a journey to discover what it feels like to be the “other” in society, the one who doesn’t quite fit in. She has a great conversational script, and her voicing is full of energy and curiosity. For a couple of the questions she has answers in a montage format which works well when she’s asking people about their backgrounds, but gets muddled when she asks how people feel about being the “other.” Although I liked the effect of having multiple voices at once, they were hard to understand, so bringing some voices out more would be helpful. I was also more interested in the answers to this question than some of the others, so maybe actually having more of a few students’ answers would have been helpful. It was great that she added actual sound from her Grandmother’s funeral and painted a vivid scene about her feelings surrounding it. I was also a big fan of Ece’s writing style, and one of my favorite lines from her piece is when she remarks that “our commonality (as humans) is our experience of otherness.” I thought it was a very profound realization, and one that’s made me think.