Her hands are demonstrative. When Laura Elise Schwendinger talks about getting down to work, her hands mime the rolling up of sleeves. As she describes a violin composition, they play an imaginary violin in a manner that almost conjures it visible. Whenever she sits back up after doubling over in one of the delighted full-body laughs that consume her, they sweep her blond hair back over her ears and push her glasses back up to the bridge of her nose. It is as if the contemporary composer, in depriving her hands of the piano keyboard and whatever manuscript she is working on at the moment, has let them off-leash. They are restless, rambunctious, as if they can’t wait to return to the service of Schwendinger’s creative impulse.
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