Counterstream Radio is your online home for exploring the music of America’s composers. Drawing upon New Music USA’s substantial library of recordings, our programming is remarkable for its depth and eclecticism. The station streams influential music of many pedigrees 24 hours a day. Keep listening and discover the sound of music without limits. Click here to open Counterstream Radio.
Eve Beglarian pays tribute to Fran Richard, Honorary Board member at New Music USA, Founding Director, Vice President of Meet the Composer, and former Vice President and head of ASCAP’s Concert Music department, who passed away on February 8 at the age of 87.
Fran is sorely missed by Board and staff, past and present, at New Music USA, and by the music community she championed and cherished. We hope you enjoy learning about Fran’s extraordinary life and work through Eve’s words. At the bottom of the page, you will also find a video that was made for a virtual tribute to Fran that New Music USA organized last March, where many composers shared their personal experiences of Fran’s incredible support.
— The New Music USA Team
Eve Beglarian (left) with Fran Richard (second from left) in 2016. Photo by Annie Watt.
I met the amazing Fran Richard in the early 1980s, soon after I arrived in New York City aiming to make my way as a composer. She hadn’t yet taken the helm of the Concert Music Division at ASCAP: she was working with John Duffy at Meet the Composer, the predecessor of New Music USA.
It’s hard to characterize how different the world of new music was in those days. Meet the Composer — then a young organization — was a breath of fresh air in a pretty pallid and constricted musical life. What we call “new music” had retreated into isolated tiny hideaways, where different sorts of music were performed for fellow aficionados and hardly ever visible in the wider culture. The simple idea of paying composers a fee to be present at performances, to introduce their work and actually interact with the public, was pretty thrilling. And the range of composers that were given these opportunities was completely transformative: that “jazz” and “classical” and “experimental” composers were treated as equally vital and necessary contributors to the art was a seemingly revolutionary claim, and one that Fran asserted every day, in every statement and every decision, big and small.
While Fran’s background was deeply rooted in the European classical tradition — she was a cellist, a musicologist, and a conductor by training — she always supported the homegrown American version — from her early days at Meet the Composer through her many years at ASCAP. Even though her ASCAP office was right across the street from Lincoln Center, that bastion of the safe and middlebrow that (with tiny exceptions) it has been for so long, her support was for music where the stakes are high, where the risks are meaningful, where the possibilities are wide open. She was more open to wildness in all its forms than her establishment position would indicate. Her standards were high, and she certainly did not suffer fools gladly or countenance fatuity in any form, but her definitions of excellence, of talent, of imagination were as capacious, as expansive, as those definitions could possibly be. Fran loved the messiness, the risk, the terror, involved in making something new, and having her as our advocate was a great gift.
Fran Richard at the 2015 ASCAP Concert Music Awards. Used with permission by ASCAP.
And Fran was an INCREDIBLE advocate. She went out to all those hidebound institutions, all those conferences and seminars and meetings where new music could easily be overlooked or neglected or shunned. And day after day, week after week, year after year, she stood up for us, testifying to the importance of what we do. New music, and the composers and performers who make it were vital and central to every single day of her life.
We all have our stories about Fran: those amazing lunches sprinkled with liberal amounts of vodka and expletives and cigarette breaks, where you felt like you were at the center of a movie of the artist’s life, a way of living that most of us didn’t and don’t experience on a regular basis! And there was nothing better than her post-concert congratulations. I think of how many premieres she heard, how many concerts she went to, but when she talked with you afterwards, it was never pro-forma, never perfunctory, never phoned in.
It was great to celebrate with Fran, but it was pretty incredible to grieve with her as well. She deeply understood that most of us composers can be fragile, a bit unsteady now and again. We do fall apart sometimes. Her ferocious warmth and loyalty and wisdom gave comfort to many of us, through many challenges. The loss of a family member, the collapse of a relationship, the failure of a much-anticipated project: Fran was there for me through the hard times, and I will carry her support and her faith in me and my work with me forever.
My guess is that the flowering we have seen in the last thirty or forty years in the world of new music in this country, the vast improvement in the health of our field: from Bang on a Can to Music Alive; from all the young composers she supported through the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Awards who grew up to become Missy Mazzoli and Conrad Tao and Clarice Assad and Huang Ruo and uncountable others who make the vital and varied and beautiful work that defines our time — we are all lifted up by the generosity, the vision, and the fierce and steadfast love that Fran Richard gave us all her life.
Fran Richard and Leonard Bernstein at Bernstein’s 70th birthday party, held at ASCAP in 1989. Photos used with permission by ASCAP.
Fran was known for her passionate support of composers and the impact she had on them at pivotal moments in their careers. At a virtual tribute to Fran organized by New Music USA last March, many of the composers who attended credited Fran with changing their lives. Fran’s unwavering commitment to composers extended through all areas of her life, including her long tenure as a Board member of New Music USA. If you would like to learn more about how you can support the composers and music community that Fran so dearly treasured, please click here.
The Other Minds Archives hosts thousands of audio and video recordings, rare photographs, and ephemera documenting the history of 20th and 21st century experimental music, including interviews and musical recordings by such new music luminaries as George Antheil, Anahid Ajemian, John Cage, Henry Cowell, Laurie Anderson, Anthony Braxton, Conlon Nancarrow, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, Nicolas Slonimsky, Pamela Z, and Frank Zappa.
Other Minds is a leading proponent for new and experimental music in all its forms, presenting a yearly festival, radio broadcasts, and podcasts; commissioning new works; and releasing new recordings on the Other Minds Records label. Other Minds’s archives have been growing steadily since the inaugural Other Minds Festival in 1993. Along with the organization’s documented concert history, Other Minds became a steward for other media collections over the years after embarking on a long-term preservation project that began in 2000 with the acquisition of the KPFA-FM Music Department collection. Other Minds has to this day continued its efforts in the archiving and preservation of audiovisual material in its collections, placing emphasis on public access by making material available through the OM Archives website and other institutional portals.
To coincide with the launch of the new Other Minds Archives website on January 26, 2024, Other Minds’s Program Associate Joseph Bohigian sat down with Charles Amirkhanian, Executive and Artistic Director of Other Minds, and Adrienne Cardwell, Other Minds’s Archivist, to talk about the history and contents of the OM Archives.
L to R: I Wayan Sadra, Larry Polansky, Jim Tenney, Laurie Anderson, Roger Reynolds, and Pauline Oliveros working on the manifesto on censorship at the Composer-to-Composer Festival in 1990 in Telluride, CO. Photo by John Fago from the OM Archives.
Joseph Bohigian: The collections of the Other Minds Archives began with a donation of 4,000 audio tapes to Other Minds from KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California in 1999. How did Other Minds come to be in possession of those tapes, and what was on them?
Charles Amirkhanian: Jim Bennett, who was the then manager of KPFA, wanted to clear out a room to use for another purpose and I had a lot of the tape recordings of music programs in that particular room. The original idea was that the programs should go to the Pacifica Library in Los Angeles, but they really didn’t have the capacity to process them at the time and Jim wanted to get them out of the building at ASAP. So he called me and said, “Would you want to have these for Other Minds for any purpose?” and my head started spinning and I thought, well, I don’t want those tapes to be put in the alley for the garbage man to pick up so I’ll think of what to do with them right away. I called my friend Scott Atthowe, he started a business years ago to help collectors who had more paintings than they had walls in their homes to store their paintings in temperature controlled buildings, and I said, “Do you have any storage space that we could have to put these in while we figure out what to do with them?” and he said he would be glad to move the tapes into a space that somebody had just vacated. So we authorized Atthowe’s services to move the tapes into the storage facility and then we realized we had a huge problem. There were no shelves in there and we needed shelves because there were so many tapes that it would fill 300 linear feet of reel to reel boxes of tapes. So, little by little, we were able to put them in a sort of order and then we started applying for funds to digitize the tapes, which comprised recordings of interviews, concerts, original works that were produced at KPFA that had never been released commercially, poetry readings, happenings. The tapes were eventually, after being digitized, donated to UC Santa Cruz and all the tapes are there in their special collections.
JB: What kind of music was KPFA programming when it started broadcasting in 1949?
CA: There was a Music Director who was a folk music person named Rolf Cahn and another person, Americo Chiarito, who were very involved in both folk music and classical music. Those were the two dominant styles that were heard on the station when it went on the air. The Music Directors following Chiarito starting around 1950-51 were Robert Erickson, who was a highly respected composer who eventually founded the Music Department at UC San Diego, and Alan Rich. The Music Directors from 1950 to the time I left in 1992 were all either composers or music critics, so there was a tendency to do a lot of music of living composers, which of course was very unusual at the time, and people in Europe, who were used to this sort of thing, started seeking out KPFA when they came to the West Coast and they would go into the station and do interviews, one of them being Pierre Boulez in 1957. Alan Rich was at a party at somebody’s house and he recognized Boulez and invited him to come to the station and called a bunch of composers to have them come sit in on the interview and the interview turned out to be very contentious because the people doing the interview were all of the Roger Sessions school of listening where you have to listen from the beginning and your memory plays a part in what you hear and if you are attentive and you can follow the development of a kernel from the beginning of the piece 30 minutes later to the end, you win. But Boulez had a different idea which is that you have these sound objects and one follows the other and you don’t really rely on memory to make sense of it in the same way, and so they had a blistering discussion and fortunately we got a copy of it before Alan Rich died, and it’s now in the Archives.
JB: When did you start working at KPFA as Music Director?
CA: I started in 1969. I had been working at a record store in San Francisco called the Sea of Records and a couple of customers who would come in and ask me for advice on what was new were Robert Hughes, the composer who founded the Cabrillo Festival, and John Rockwell, who later went on to be a New York Times music critic. They both advised me that this job was open and I should go apply for it, which I did. They offered me the job, but said I’d have to do it on a temporary basis for 6 months, and I said no, I can’t do that. I would lose my job at the record store. If you if you want me, tell me so and I’ll take the job, but I want a month off because my wife Carol [Law] and I had just gotten married and we hadn’t had a honeymoon, so we’re going down to Mexico City to see somebody we haven’t met before. So we went down to Mexico in our Volkswagen Bug that broke down three times and met Conlon Nancarrow, who was living in more or less glorious isolation in a nice district of Mexico City called San Ángel. He was the composer who had done player piano roll music where you could take a blank player piano roll and punch holes in it and get the piano to do anything that a human couldn’t do. I’d heard this music at Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco as an accompaniment to a Merce Cunningham dance. I got his phone number and called this man and he said he would maybe see us if we got to Mexico City, but he wasn’t sure. So we go down there and went to this house and we rang the doorbell and nothing happened for about 3 minutes. We didn’t realize we were ringing the bell of a walled in house and there was a driveway about 200 yards long and Conlon had to come from his house and walk slowly down this gravel path to let us in. We just loved talking with this man and listening to his music and I decided that one of my first programs on KPFA when I got back was going to be about him. So I asked him if I could interview him and he said, “absolutely not.” So this is the beginning of my radio career. I’m turned down before I even start.
Conlon Nancarrow seated at his piano roll punching machine in 1969. Photo by Charles Amirkhanian from the OM Archives.
JB: Your documentation of that trip is available on the Archives, but do you have any place to start for someone interested in Nancarrow?
CA: The Speaking of Music event that he did at the Exploratorium in San Francisco is there and that would be one good place to start if you’re interested in hearing more about him.
JB: Another person who’s featured in the Archives is the violinist Anahid Ajemian, and the January 26th launch coincides with the 100th anniversary of her birth. Who was she and what is her significance to 20th century music?
CA: She was the only classical instrumentalist who would play John Cage and Alan Hovhaness in 1944, 45, 46. She and her sister Maro Ajemian had graduated from the Institute of Musical Art, which later became Juilliard, and they were well-versed in Schumann and Beethoven and all the classics, but they had a particular interest in the personalities that they were meeting in New York, composers like Cage and Hovhaness and later Lou Harrison who were not supported by the establishment. They were doing things that were kind of outside the bounds of the mainstream movements of the time in modern music. The fact that they gave the first Town Hall performances of Alan Hovhaness and John Cage were significant because that legitimized those two composers for the general public, and suddenly when her sister Maro started playing the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano by John Cage, the reviews were very, very positive, if you can imagine, for an instrument that sounded very peculiar because there were erasers and screws and other objects placed directly on the strings and it made the piano sound like a Gamelan or a percussion orchestra rather than a classical instrument. That was one thing. The other thing is that Anahid married George Avakian, who was a jazz producer at Columbia Records, and he was one of the first people to really give serious attention to jazz album production. George insisted on treating them the way the classical composers were treated, so you would have Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five in a collection that would be bound with a spine and there would be program notes on the inside cover of the album describing or praising the content of the music, and that was a big deal at the time. Later, in the 50s, they did a series of public concerts called Music for Moderns where they would invite Henry Cowell and Mahalia Jackson to be on the same program. I mean, this was just not done. To this day, I think of them as kind of precursors of Other Minds because we do the same thing.
Anahid and Maro Ajemian rehearsing at home ca. 1950s. Courtesy of Anahid Ajemian from the OM Archives.
JB: How has Other Minds acquired new collections for the Archives since that initial donation from KPFA?
Adrienne Cardwell: I would say it always seems to come by way of Charles. Someone says that they have something that may be of interest and it turns out that it usually is of interest for us to retain or it resonates with other material. Relâche for example, we were solicited by their co-founder Joseph Franklin.
CA: Relâche is a new music group in Philadelphia and they had a lot of recordings of their concerts, but no place to put them. Some libraries are just reluctant to take on material that’s just audio, but we’re happy to do it if it fits with our mission.
JB: Why is it important to preserve these materials?
CA: It’s so important to hear people speaking about their own music in their own voice. It’s not the same as reading about it in a book or not having the information either in a book or on audio. Once it’s lost, it’s lost. These are not records from a record company that made 5,000 of them. These are primary research documents. There is no other copy. Once they’re gone, they’ll never resurface. It’s better to err on the side of preserving things than just letting them go.
AC: I think another important part of that is having cultural reference points to various eras. You can compare the development of not just music but art and literature to what was going on in the world at that time. I find that really interesting in a lot of the tapes and especially KPFA programs, where you get a sense of what’s going on in the world from a more countercultural perspective than you would on a lot of the commercial stations.
CA: The fact that KPFA was doing this from 1949 to 59, before any of the other Pacifica stations went on the air and did the same thing, KPFK in Los Angeles went on the air in 1959 and WBAI in New York in 1960. These were stations that also started doing programs on contemporary music, which was definitely non-commercial and never would be aired on commercial stations, so for the vast majority of the public, it didn’t exist. What happens between 1949 and 59 is that there becomes a base of people who have a certain knowledge of an art form that nobody else had in other parts of the country. Therefore ensembles that played this kind of music felt supported. There was a scene developing here that is exemplified by the San Francisco Tape Music Center and various other organizations that sprang up. Something called the Composers’ Forum. The fact that there have been a lot of important developments in music that emanated from San Francisco is not an accident, it’s partly a function of the existence of a radio station which broadcast these developments. The fact that the beat poets were in San Francisco and the jazz scene here was very vigorous. The fact that the orchestras and chamber music organizations were recognizing the importance of playing contemporary music is I think partly a function of KPFA’s existence. I think it’s also important to remember that the entire minimalist music movement was launched here on the West Coast. Terry Riley and La Monte Young were students at the UC Berkeley Department of Music. Steve Reich was studying with Luciano Berio at Mills and Terry’s 1964 performance of In C at the Dancers Workshop/SF Tape Music Center, favorably reviewed by nationally prominent music critic Alfred Frankenstein, sparked public awareness that something was afoot here. This change of focus, from slow-developing thematic evolution then in vogue to microscopic concentration on a few individual notes in repeated phrases, launched a long-lasting stylistic revolution that has proven to have longer staying power than impressionism, neoclassicism, or serialism. I just know that it couldn’t have happened anywhere else. Of course, composers mostly had to move to New York to market their careers, but the lack of an overbearing traditional approach here gave people a freedom to invent. That was a prerequisite, and that freedom is reflected in some of the eccentric program content you’ll find in the OM Archives.
JB: Are there any collections or topics on the Archive that will likely be unfamiliar to people but interesting to check out.
CA: There’s a lot of information about sound poetry, which is a genre that’s a crossover between music and literature. There are practitioners who are musicians and went into speech and speakers who were poets and went into the musical aspect of delivering the poetry. That was a genre that was not taken seriously in the music world for a long time, so it developed on its own and it dates to the Dada and Surrealist and Futurist poets of the early part of the twentieth century. Then there’s the radio events. These were events that we started in 1969 where I would invite an artist to use as much airtime as they wanted, but they had to do something that involved the listener going away from their radio at home and doing something else. In other words, a kind of happening that involved activity. They’re pretty amusing and they’re worth investigating. Then there are individual artists like Ivan Wyschnegradsky or George Antheil or Annea Lockwood. These are people who are not household names, perhaps, but there is a lot of concentrated activity around their music that happened as a result of either my interest or the interest of somebody who was working at KPFA or at Other Minds.
Portrait of George Antheil. Courtesy of Böski Antheil from the OM Archives.
AC: Some of the material came from artists who now have a bigger name, but back then maybe they sent a reel to KPFA for broadcast, something new that they had just made that wasn’t commercially released. It’s like a never-ending history lesson. Some of my personal favorites are the photographs that we have, a lot of which come from Charles’s documentation over the years of traveling and interviewing and meeting with all these other artists.
JB: What will visitors to the new website be able to do in terms of searching and creating their own collections of materials.
AC: If you register as a user, you can have what’s called a “light box” where you can save things and organize them for future reference. You can create your own private collections and share them with other users, which could be useful for people in educational settings. There are advanced search options that will help tailor things toward what you’re looking for.
JB: In addition to all this historical material, will documentation of Other Minds’s activities over the past 31 years also be available on the new website?
AC: We have everything that has been documented through audio and video, as well as photographs and all the programs. We have a vast collection of the iconic OM festival photographs taken by John Fago.
CA: John Fago is photographer who uses a Leica, a very quiet rangefinder camera. John lives with composers when they’re in residence at events and he becomes part of the furniture, so you forget that he’s there taking photographs of you interacting with other people. His photographs are very striking in that they’re black and white and he likes to take pictures in which there are at least 5 hands showing, like people gesturing, so you can tell a Fago photograph. Usually somebody is doing this and they’re not looking at the camera and they’re not posing. They’re doing something where they’re caught in the action. He has been present when we’ve had some of the most amazing composers in the world here. Those photographs alone are a unique addition to the OM Archives website.
—January 17, 2024
L to R: Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Jon Jang, Julia Wolfe, and Trimpin at Other Minds Festival 1 in 1993. Photo by John Fago from the OM Archives.
In Pittsburgh we live and breathe every day amongst the ruins of the furnaces in which the foundations of this great nation were forged. The people of this city tell stories about their fathers and grandfathers working at these furnaces; the hell on earth upon which the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago were born. (I highly recommend my teacher Leonardo Balada’s Steel Symphony to get a sense of what these places sounded like.)
Through the 1970s and ’80s, as the steel industry moved abroad, the city shrank and had to reinvent itself. Today, it likes to picture itself a high-tech university hub. And this intersection: this cross-pollination and tension between Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Google, Duolingo, Carnegie Robotics; the descendants of the Polish, Irish, and Czech immigrants who were murdered at the Homestead Massacre; the black Pittsburghers that were displaced from the jazz mecca that once was Hill District; and the immigrants (like myself) who happen upon this beautiful city to pursue some version of the American dream—this is the canvas upon which this city’s artists create.
Pittsburgh has a wealth of both jazz and classically trained performers. It also has an outstanding number of music organizations and ensembles. The city is still relatively affordable, and has a strong DIY arts and music community.
I immigrated here back in 2011. I would’ve never guessed that twelve years later I’d find myself entrenched in a loving community of DIY artists, classically trained musicians, local bands, jazz performers, poets, activists, and beautiful friends.
I finished graduate school right before the pandemic hit. Like many others, I felt the inertia of my career come to a stand still as the world shut down. The past three years I’ve been getting back into the rhythm of applications and performances, and renegotiating the value of my art and my career in the larger context of my life, my home, and the current state of the world.
I think one of the biggest challenges many composers like myself face is getting our name out there when we don’t live in a major coastal cultural hub, and aren’t enrolled in the best known doctoral programs. There is a lack of access in the new music community. If you don’t have the money to attend music festivals early on in your career, you will miss out on vital connections to propel your career forward. Speaking out and finding ways to make this career path something feasible for all people of all socioeconomic backgrounds is something I’m passionate about.
In this piece, I mix freestyle rap with the renaissance dance form ‘la folia.’ I love deconstructing traditional musical forms. In this piece, each instrument moves through the harmonic structure of la folia at a different rhythm, creating a sonic fractal. So: Freesyle+Folia+Fractal.
other:
My friends Gizelxanath Rodriguez and Ben Barson started Afroyaqui Music collective a few years ago. I really admire their ability to mix art and political activism in a unique jazz-fusion sound. The group is incredibly inclusive, having featured performers from every continent playing instruments from around the world.
Mai Khoi
Mai Khoi
I am an artist-activist from Vietnam. I began my musical career as a pop star, rising to fame after winning the 2010 Vietnamese Television Album and Song of the Year Awards. But when I began pushing against government censorship and involving myself in politics, I was banned from performing in public, detained and interrogated by the police, and ultimately forced to flee to the United States. I arrived in New York City in 2019 as a resident with SHIM:NYC and moved to Pittsburgh one year later as an Exiled Artist in Residence at City of Asylum. Although the pandemic initially made it difficult to connect with other artists, once pandemic restrictions were lifted I immediately found so many talented and open-minded musicians to work with. I have made Pittsburgh my home ever since.
Pittsburgh’s new music community is friendly, welcoming, and supportive to musics and musicians of all backgrounds. Although we have a small population we have a lot of music lovers who always come out to shows. I have helped found an organization called the Pittsburgh Sound Preserve, which hosts an every-other-week Open Improvisation Lab free for members of the community and sponsors various other concert series highlighting creative music throughout the city. I love performing at venues like the Space Upstairs, City of Asylum, and the Government Center, as well as more DIY spaces like James Simon Studio, Telephone, and a variety of unique house concert stages. Pittsburgh’s low cost of living has even made it possible for me to afford a house of my own, in which I’ve been able to set up a small studio, hold rehearsals, and cook Vietnamese food for my friends and bandmates. But my favorite part about Pittsburgh is the people. Our community always comes out to support one another’s shows, and new projects and collaborations happen all the time. Pittsburgh is a college town, so we have a lot of young people alongside families who’ve lived here for decades. It’s very diverse, and in my experience, it has been the most welcoming and friendly city to immigrant artists like me.
Not everything is perfect. I still struggle to find gigs post-pandemic, and I still struggle with the language barrier and the different working culture. But I’m grateful to organizations that have supported me, including City of Asylum, 1hood Media, the International Free Expression Project, and New Music USA. With those resources, I have been incubating an autobiographical, multimedia stage show called “Bad Activist” alongside fellow Pittsburgh artists Mark Micchelli, Cynthia Croot, and Aaron Henderson. I hope to bring “Bad Activist” on tour very soon, so that more people can learn about my story and experience the creative energy coming from my new, adopted hometown.
Music picks…
Mai Khôi Chém Gió: “What To Do” from Dissent
Afro Yaqui Music Collective: “Sister Soul” from Maroon Futures
Reza Vali
Reza Vali
I came to Pittsburgh with the purpose of pursuing studies at the University of Pittsburgh. After successfully obtaining a Ph.D. in composition and music theory in 1985, I taught at the University of Pittsburgh for three years. The year 1988 ushered in a new phase, as I was invited to join the School of Music at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor of Music. My time at Carnegie Mellon University extended for 33 years, culminating in my eventual retirement as the Professor Emeritus of Composition in 2022.
Pittsburgh’s distinct character is characterized by several defining factors that set it apart from other places. First, its origins shaped by European immigrants infuse the city with an ambiance reminiscent of Europe. The architectural design and overall atmosphere lend Pittsburgh a unique European feel. Secondly, the city’s expansive green spaces, adorned with tree-lined streets and abundant parks, create a refreshing urban environment. This, coupled with a notably lower cost of living compared to major cities like New York City, contributes to a quality of life that combines affordability with a close connection to nature.
Moreover, Pittsburgh thrives as a cultural hub, mirroring the amenities found in larger metropolitan areas. It boasts an array of offerings, including symphony orchestras, ballets, operas, contemporary music, jazz, and more. Notably, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, esteemed as one of the nation’s finest orchestras, finds its home within the city’s confines.
While Pittsburgh’s artistic and cultural landscape is vibrant, navigating financial support for individual creative projects has presented its challenges. Philanthropic resources tend to favor larger institutions, leaving independent initiatives with limited funding opportunities. In this context, I express profound gratitude to my colleagues at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, whose generous support facilitated the realization of my musical aspirations. Their backing, manifested through four commissioned works, resonates as a testament to the city’s collaborative spirit and artistic camaraderie.
However, the period encompassing the COVID-19 epidemic proved to be an immensely challenging phase for me and many of my colleagues. The cancellation of numerous concerts of mine left me grappling with a profound sense of disappointment. The isolation that ensued meant that my interactions with fellow musicians were limited to the digital realm. The very essence of musical existence was compromised as we found ourselves devoid of pivotal elements – the shared rehearsals that foster creativity, the electrifying energy of live performances, and the irreplaceable connection with our audience. While the internet emerged as a vital tool during this time, facilitating virtual collaborations and performances, it became glaringly apparent that it could never truly substitute for the richness of the physical world and the genuine connections it fosters.
After navigating through the challenges of the pandemic, Pittsburgh is now reemerging into a thriving hub of musical activity. I am eagerly anticipating the opportunity to collaborate once more with numerous exceptionally talented musicians, joining forces to cultivate fresh artistic energies together.
Music picks…
Reza Vali: Segâh, Double Concerto for Persian Ney, Kamancheh, and Orchestra
Khosrow Soltani, Persian Ney
Kian Soltani, Persian Kamancheh
The Segâh Festival Ensemble, Conductor: Daniel Curtis.
Performed on January 15, 2016 at the Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh as part of the Segâh Festival of Persian and Turkish Music.
The Segâh Festival of Persian and Turkish Music was organized by the Center for Iranian Music and supported by the School of Music of Carnegie Mellon University, the Iranian Students Organization, the Turkish Students Organization, and the Hoppa Project. The conductor, Daniel Curtis, is the Director of Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Music Ensemble.
And here is one of my favorite Pittsburgh artists, my former teacher and jazz legend Nathan Davis…
Amy Williams
Amy Williams
I moved to Pittsburgh in 2005 to teach composition at the University of Pittsburgh. It felt “right” from the beginning, not just because it was 75 degrees and sunny on the February day that I interviewed (I’ve since learned that wasn’t typical). When I was teaching at Northwestern from 2000-2005, the new music scene in Chicago was really taking off. I was immediately performing (I am a pianist as well as a composer) and hearing my music in venues from Evanston all way down to Hyde Park. I was a little nervous about moving to a city that was much smaller—afraid there wouldn’t be the same kind of cultural activity and opportunity. But I was wrong about that. The smaller size meant fewer hurdles to entering new scenes and spaces. “Hi! Who are you? Welcome!”—is the predominant attitude—and that is not the case in every comparable city.
I encountered many tremendously talented composers who were also highly entrepreneurial in their efforts to program new music. These individuals have transformed the new music culture, perhaps more than institutions. David Stock (who died in 2015) started the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble in 1976 to support the exciting range of music being created by Pittsburgh composers. My colleagues at Pitt, composers Eric Moe and Mathew Rosenblum, founded the Music on the Edge series 30 years ago to bring superb international ensembles to Pittsburgh and to host major events such as the Beyond Microtonal Music Festival. The Sound Series at the Andy Warhol Museum, established in 2004 and curated by Ben Harrison, blurs genres in its aesthetically diverse programming. City of Asylum and the Kelly Strayhorn Theater are important spaces for multi-disciplinary programming. There is cutting-edge dance, theater, opera, film, and a burgeoning DIY scene with a growing number of alternative spaces.
You can’t talk about Pittsburgh without recognizing the legendary jazz tradition shaped by giants like Billy Strayhorn, Erroll Garner, Ahmad Jamal, and Mary Lou Williams. That tradition remains active and influential through organizations such as the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival, and the annual Jazz Seminar at Pitt. The Pittsburgh Symphony is a world-class orchestra that has supported the creation of new works over the years. When the PSO premiered pieces by five local composers (including myself) in 2014, there was a palpable excitement in the audience to cheer on the “home team.”
Pittsburghers truly love Pittsburgh. And so they stay. Which means that they invest in the community, they create powerful cultural experiences and develop deep personal relationships. The relatively low cost of living helps emerging artists and there is a solid base of foundations that support cultural programming. That being said, more can and needs be done to make the arts accessible to broader audiences and demographics.
Pittsburgh is the city of bridges (and they’re not all yellow…). I see this as a metaphor for the music scene. There are distinct areas (communities, genres, spaces) that are clearly defined and have rich histories. But there is always a bridge to move from one area to another—through collaboration, conversation, reaching out to others.
Music picks…
Mary Lou Williams “Cloudy”
(Ed. note: Amy Williams’s orchestra piece Flood Lines references the 1938 flood in Pittsburgh and ends with a near quote from Mary Lou Williams’ tune “Cloudy”—also from 1938. You can hear an excerpt of a performance of it by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Manfred Honeck, here.)
Emily Cook
Emily Cook
I first moved to Pittsburgh in 2012 to attend graduate school at Duquesne University. I grew up in rural western Illinois and arrived in Pittsburgh after studying at Lawrence University in Wisconsin and spending several months living in Chicago. Before I had started to consider graduate programs, Pittsburgh was utterly off my radar—I have David Bell, my clarinet professor at Lawrence, to thank for steering me to Duquesne and to the city.
After I began to learn my way around my new home (literally—I distinctly remember getting terribly lost on Pittsburgh’s winding, poorly signed streets several times while trying out different routes on my commute to school), I fell in love with Pittsburgh—the topography, the rich and varied musical culture, the city’s scrappy personality, and the warmth and generosity of so many of the artists I had the opportunity to study with and work alongside.
In my experience, Pittsburgh’s music scene offers a really exciting mix of artists and audiences who are lifelong or long-term residents and more recent transplants, drawn to Pittsburgh to study at one of its several excellent (but very different) university music programs or for work. Pittsburgh has a strong sense of musical history and musical identity, but the constant arrival of new voices and ideas within a relatively small scene (compared to that in New York, for example) helps balance that sense of tradition with a healthy dose of flux.
In terms of the “new music” scene specifically, one unique aspect is the extent to which there is crossover between the streams associated with “classically trained” musicians whose background primarily involves working with notated music and musicians primarily working with improvised, “experimental” music. The dialogue between these genres has certainly helped expand the artistic practice of many musicians, like myself, who come from that “classical stream,” and I am grateful for the generosity that several musicians in Pittsburgh’s more experimental spaces showed me when I was newly exploring this side of my artistic practice.
While my orchestral work and my family have meant that I’ve spent considerable time outside of Pittsburgh in recent years, one of the things that continues to tie me to the city is Kamratōn, a new-music ensemble now in its ninth season, for which I serve as artistic director. Kamratōn was really the brainchild of our violinist, Jennifer Sternick, but it was born out of a lot of conversations among several women who regularly crossed paths through our freelance work. Not only did we want an excuse to play together more often, we also wanted to try to create a work environment that reflected our values. After solidifying our personnel and developing an identity as an ensemble, our programming has often focused on improvisation and the performance of non-traditional scores, with a particular emphasis on presenting works by emerging Pittsburgh-based composers and works by women.
The pandemic gave me and many other musicians the space to think more carefully about the value of live performance, the challenge of combining a career in music with a role as a parent or caregiver (particularly when faced with the collapse of many support systems for caregivers during the pandemic), and the need to advance equity in our field, considering not only what is being performed, but who makes curatorial decisions and how people are compensated for their work. However, I’ll address this question on a personal note: the pandemic arrived a few years after I began experiencing symptoms of what I now know is a genetic condition and an autoimmune disease. Dealing with these health issues already had me doing some serious soul-searching about my future as a professional musician when Covid-19 put a sudden stop to my performance work. At that point in my life, finding a “why” was a challenge, but I ultimately emerged from that period with a renewed sense of purpose and enjoyment in my work. The experience really brought home the important role that musical performance can play in creating spaces for people to be in community together. I have no illusion that I’m always successful in this regard, but the possibility of community is really what I’m trying to create through my artistic practice, whether I’m preparing for an orchestral performance, composing or improvising, or exploring potential programming for Kamratōn.
I immigrated here back in 2011. I would’ve never guessed that twelve years later I’d find myself entrenched in a loving community of DIY artists, classically trained musicians, local bands, jazz performers, poets, activists, and beautiful friends.
Marina Lopez
Pittsburgh's new music community is friendly, welcoming, and supportive to musics and musicians of all backgrounds.
Mai Khoi
While Pittsburgh's artistic and cultural landscape is vibrant, navigating financial support for individual creative projects has presented its challenges. Philanthropic resources tend to favor larger institutions, leaving independent initiatives with limited funding opportunities.
Reza Vali
I was a little nervous about moving to a city that was much smaller—afraid there wouldn’t be the same kind of cultural activity and opportunity. But I was wrong about that. The smaller size meant fewer hurdles to entering new scenes and spaces. "Hi! Who are you? Welcome!"—is the predominant attitude—and that is not the case in every comparable city.
Amy Williams
In terms of the “new music” scene specifically, one unique aspect is the extent to which there is crossover between the streams associated with “classically trained” musicians whose background primarily involves working with notated music and musicians primarily working with improvised, “experimental” music.
Emily Cook
Listen to our Spotify playlist for Different Cities Different Voices which now features music from 9 different American cities….
Life can be unpredictable at times, and that is how I came back to playing baritone saxophone after twenty years of the horn collecting dust in my attic. It was the most unlikely course of events, but I am a firm believer that those are the times to make adventurous choices. I had no idea how life-changing that “sure, why not?” moment would be and how it would end up being one of the most rewarding choices of my life.
I would like to say that the opinions I am about to express are about my personal journey and how I feel about my own evolution and self-discovery. I am fully aware of the amount of discipline it takes to execute a piece of sheet music to perfection, and I still quite enjoy hearing others perform that music. However, I am not exploring that side of my practice at this time.
I started my love affair with the baritone saxophone when I was still in diapers. My mother tells a story of how I sat down in front of this giant saxophone when I was a toddler and refused to move until the band left the stage. Every time she tried to remove me I threw a fit. Legend has it, we were there for 3 applications of sunscreen. Ten years later I found my way to the horn again, playing it through middle school and high school.
I was the best student; I practiced daily and loved pursuing the perfection of different techniques. I consumed sheet music and explored all sorts of composers and genres. I was little Lisa Simpson, with the perfect grades to match. I picked up playing piano and working with hand percussion. I did have an area of weakness, as I could not wrap my head around the concept of improvisation.
After I left high school, I got a non-music-related scholarship. Like many young adults in that transitional time, I decided to be an adult and focus on my future career path. One day, I put my horn in its case and did not return to it.
I ended up marrying a musician and helping him with his career. His process of creating music mystified me. He would stare off into space, and from that void, he would find a song. This creation from seemingly nothing, as a person who was always pinned to sheet music, was nothing short of magic to me. I watched his band swell to success and then implode on itself. I watched the loss almost destroy him.
After the breakup of his band, we decided to travel to Nashville to find him a partner for creating new music. We discussed the dream candidate for a counterbalance, a multi-instrumentalist with a background very different than his own. Someone who was possibly classically trained would pull his self-taught indie blues body of work in fresh and exciting directions. In retrospect, I should have realized that I fit all the qualifications.
It seemed we had struck out on finding someone different enough. However, we did win free tickets to the Bonnaroo Music Festival during that trip, and at Bonnaroo I watched my husband refill his creative well. We found an EDM act featuring a saxophone, Goldfish, and remarked on how a sax could be an interesting instrument to bring into his writing. Still, I was oblivious to how this related to me. A writer for MTV.com stumbled upon us while he was working on a new song in a camping area, leading to her writing about a husband and wife music duo she met at the festival, which was odd as I hadn’t played an instrument in 20 years.
We then elected to launch him as a solo act, since it’s not often you have MTV’s blessing as an artist with no released music. Six months later I received a message on Facebook from a person wanting to book the duo that was featured in the MTV article. He was scouting for acts to play in Austin during SXSW. The catch was every act on the bill had a female musician. Not wanting to give up the opportunity, I decided to come back to music and join my husband on stage.
I had 8 weeks before I was expected on stage and I had several things stacked against me. I had not played in 20 years and my embouchure was gone, but also I had no idea what I still remembered about playing a horn. My husband not only didn’t write sheet music, he also didn’t know how to read it. I had crippling stage fright and a fear of heights. When I opened my case, half my pads fell out of my horn – they’d completely dried out from 20 years of extreme temperatures in my attic.
After breaking the news to my partner that he had a new partner, we went about trying to figure out how I could understand this world of music written by ear. Over the two weeks that the horn was in the shop for repairs, I learned how the music he wrote existed in repeating patterns. The dynamics that are associated with verse, chorus, and bridge. To learn how to play his music, I had to learn the logic that went behind creating these pieces. In the past, I never considered how a composer created a work, I just made sure I counted my rests and executed every note as it was written.
Although I know it may make some people cringe, we ended up creating a shorthand that served as a middle ground where we could communicate with each other. We both knew the notes by name and used a transposition chart so I would know to play an E on my E flat horn when he needed the note he knew as a G on his guitars and keyboards. My ability to read sheet music was foggy and slow, and it felt right to learn in this new notation. This new method required me to feel the rhythm by singing my parts and required me to understand where my parts fit into the wholeness of the piece. This was my first experience with grasping how each instrument danced with each other.
My part for “Ain’t Worth the Dime”
After 8 weeks of working almost every day in this space, I had a part come to me while Chris was playing guitar. That was the first time I wrote my own part for anything. It was simple, gentle, and most importantly completed the song. It just came to me, my fingers just naturally went to those notes, and I could already hear how this countermelody would fit in the song.
During the pandemic, I spent seemingly endless days creating music with Chris as a way to cope with the isolation and anxiety of the shutdown. I lost the concept of what time it was, what day it was, or when the last time I ate was – but I rediscovered my love for other saxophones, pianos and synths, and hand percussion. I made the unreasonable purchases of a kalimba and a 1923 Conn New Wonder bass saxophone, neither of which I regret. We discovered using instruments in untraditional ways and explored manipulating sounds we recorded while urban exploring to create incredible textures and synth patches.
Music saved me during that time, and I think being able to give those two months of undivided attention to exploring the craft is how I became the artist I am today. When I was younger, I used music to show off how precise I was; how practiced and accurate each note could be executed. Now I am a different musician. I find myself thriving in grace notes and falls. I understand and live in the messiness of the composition, and my voice is a response to the other instruments in the piece. I use songs to share my story. Music has become a deeper level of connection with my partner, private conversations we choose to share with the world one song at a time.
At some point, I gave up on worrying if at my age I was too old to be trying to break into the indie music game with a baritone saxophone. The stage fright and fear of heights faded as well. We are building a diehard fanbase, signed music for representation for sync, and recently joined the Recording Academy. We are finding ourselves stepping into music festivals and events.
This has been a wild adventure of self-exploration and artistic expression. I think back and see how easy it would have been to not step up and take that chance. I see the effects it has had on my physical and mental health, I have recaptured that sense of joy I had lost. I now see how important music can be and I play every chance I get. So many people close the chapter of performing after school, and find it so intimidating to return back. I feel lucky that universe kept nudging me back to music. I hope this finds someone that needs that same nudge and this inspires them, so they can have music in their lives as an adult. It really is a different experience the second time around.
I had no idea how life-changing that "sure, why not?" moment would be and how it would end up being one of the most rewarding choices of my life.
Veronica Wirges
I was little Lisa Simpson, with the perfect grades to match.
Veronica Wirges
After I left high school, I got a non-music-related scholarship. Like many young adults in that transitional time, I decided to be an adult and focus on my future career path.
Veronica Wirges
A writer for MTV.com stumbled upon us while he was working on a new song in a camping area, leading to her writing about a husband and wife music duo she met at the festival, which was odd as I hadn't played an instrument in 20 years. ... Six months later I received a message on Facebook from a person wanting to book the duo that was featured in the MTV article. He was scouting for acts to play in Austin during SXSW.
Veronica Wirges
In the past, I never considered how a composer created a work, I just made sure I counted my rests and executed every note as it was written.
Veronica Wirges
After 8 weeks of working almost every day in this space, I had a part come to me while Chris was playing guitar. That was the first time I wrote my own part for anything.
Veronica Wirges
At some point, I gave up on worrying if at my age I was too old to be trying to break into the indie music game with a baritone saxophone.
Veronica Wirges
So many people close the chapter of performing after school, and find it so intimidating to return back. I feel lucky that universe kept nudging me back to music.
This is one of the most difficult things I have ever had to write in my life. After nearly a quarter century of continuous work (more than half my adult life) as the Editor of NewMusicBox and also eventually as Composer Advocate for what was originally the American Music Center and which in 2011 became New Music USA, I am resigning from my full time work here to devote more of my energies to being an educator. I have accepted a full time faculty position as Assistant Professor of Musicology at The New School’s College of Performing Arts (which includes The Mannes School of Music).
Back in the 1990s, I was one of the myriad aspiring composers in New York City (where I grew up) and, after getting a Master’s Degree in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University (which I did after teaching English as a Second Language in NYC public high schools for several years, my first job after my undergrad studies at Columbia), I balanced my compositional activities with a four-day-a-week day job at a music publicity office in order to pay bills. The roster of clients there included Meet The Composer (whose founding director John Duffy became something of a mentor to me and who at one point gave me his entire LP collection) and the Finnish recording label Ondine (which frequently collaborated with an organization called the Finnish Music Information Centre, which is how I learned about the International Association of Music Centres [IAMIC], before I even knew there was an American Music Center, even though it was then just four blocks away from where I had been living for most of my life). But the American Music Center (AMC) would soon become the most important place in the world for me.
While working for that PR firm, I had written a handful of articles for various publications and created repertoire lists of contemporary music that I distributed to programmers at NPR-affiliated radio stations, a personal project for which I was not paid but for which I was written up in Billboard magazine at one point. As a result of some AMC board members knowing about me through some of these activities and the more official ones that were part of my “day job,” I got on the radar of Richard Kessler, a visionary who had been recently appointed AMC’s Executive Director and who wanted to completely transform the organization from a passive library to an active advocate for new music in the United States. Central to his vision was for AMC to host a newly created web magazine exclusively for American new music and he wanted to bring on someone to come up with a format for this thing and to then serve as its “Editor and Publisher.”
I met with him even though I had absolutely no experience in publishing, had only written that handful of articles, and did not know all that much about this relatively new thing called the internet other than using AOL and surfing UserNet comments about contemporary music. (It was the ’90s afterall.) But it must have been clear how passionate I was about contemporary music and how willing I was to always defend it and evangelize for it. He ultimately offered me–and I unhesitatingly accepted–a full-time job (5 days a week, often much more than that) at a lower salary, put my own music on the back burner to some extent, and began work at the American Music Center on November 16, 1998. For most of the last nearly 25 years, I considered it a dream job–a vital role in the ecosystem of contemporary music in the U.S.A. and something that could raise the profiles of all the extraordinary people involved in making this music in all its wild varieties, which was far more important to me than focusing just on my own music.
I believed strongly, and still do, that practitioners should be the people who speak and write about this music since they have the most intimate knowledge of it, the greatest passion for it, and need their own outlet to disseminate information about it. I also believe that the strength and significance of NewMusicBox in our field is because by design it is a collaborative project and, for most of the time I have served as its titular Editor, I was thankfully mostly not alone in my endeavors, always working non-hierarchically with others who frequently had more strength than I did proofreading, juggling various pieces of content to always maintain a balance, keeping us on track with deadlines, and on and on. This first quarter century of NewMusicBox would never have been possible without the efforts of Nathan Michel, Jennifer Undercofler, Molly Sheridan, Amanda MacBlane, the late Randy Nordschow, Trevor Hunter, and Alexandra Gardner who were as devoted to NewMusicBox while they were part of it as I have remained all these years. There were also a great many interns, some of whom I have still stayed in touch with and not all of whom I can remember (for which I apologize). But I want to at least give a shout out to Sam Birmaher, Anna Reguero, Aurelian Balan, Jonathan Murphy, and Daniel Kushner for the high level of work they did while involved with NewMusicBox as well as to Johanna Keller, founder of the Goldring Arts Journalism program, the first master’s program of its kind to teach journalists to cover the arts, who sent interns our way every summer until she retired. I almost forgot to mention some of the web design artisans I realize in retrospect that I frequently frustrated with my often not very practical ideas, among them Stacie Johnston, Lisa Taliano, and Eugene Takahashi who once during a phone call with me at 2 A.M. claimed that he would have to invent a four-dimensional internet to do some crazy thing I’d asked him to do. NewMusicBox has been at its most effective when a small team of people worked on it together, brainstorming (and sometimes even passionately arguing about) who and what to feature and why, as well as getting in the weeds and carefully copyediting and coding every word, photo, audio, or video file that was then disseminated to the general public.
And it’s been quite a ride as anyone who has ever ventured into our quadranscentennial content stream would hopefully agree. I’ve been proud of so much of what we’ve published from artist/writers based all over the country and am grateful to everyone who has ever written for us. I’m also glad that all this material is still available for people to read online now and hopefully in perpetuity. And I hope that this content will continue to be constantly refreshed with new content curated by future NewMusicBox editors who will also always insist on pushing the envelop. Of course, since they’ve been a hallmark of NewMusicBox since its inception and I have been intimately involved with most of them, I’m proudest of our in-depth conversations with significant members of our community which were originally called “In The First Person,” subsequently rebranded as “NewMusicBox Covers,” and which have continued to this day, now as SoundLives podcasts. I treasure every one of them and hope that others will continue to do so as well. What many people may not realize is that the back stories of these one-of-a-kind encounters were sometimes as intense as the edited talks we published. I’ll never forget Randy and I showing up at Ornette Coleman’s Midtown loft, entering his unlocked apartment, and waiting for him to appear there nearly half an hour later, but then immediately plunging into a heady conversation about sound being a way to express emotions more than being a vibration. Or Glenn Branca refusing to put out his cigarette directly underneath a no smoking sign, despite Alex’s and my own visible discomfort in the rehearsal studio where we were recording which had no ventilation. (He had refused to let us come to his home.) Or Maryanne Amacher wanting to take a sample of my blood and mix it with hers for an audio project. (You can’t make this stuff up.) Or, to give a more recent example, Pamela Z describing putting a trunk full of bones through airport security (it was a prop for a performance) and my worrying the whole time that the internet was going to suddenly drop during our Zoom before the punchline (since it’s frequently spotty in my neighborhood and kept going in and out that day); thankfully it didn’t!
However, last year when I was asked to develop my own curriculum for an undergraduate contemporary music history class I would then teach at The New School as an adjunct and told that I could and should cover all genres of music, it was an offer–like the offer to create a web magazine for contemporary American music and then be responsible for maintaining it–I couldn’t refuse. As luck would have it, I was asked if I’d be interested in teaching that class by someone who had already changed the course of my life once and was inadvertently about to do so again, Richard Kessler, who is now the Executive Dean of The New School’s College of Performing Arts and the Dean of the Mannes School of Music. We had had some contact with each other over the many years since he left AMC, but I truly had only a glimmer of awareness about the range of activities going on there. I was wowed by a 2017 performance of Robert Ashley’s Dust by Mannes students just three years after Ashley died. The following year’s Mannes Orchestra world premiere of Julius Eastman’s only recently rediscovered second symphony in Alice Tully Hall was a watershed event. I’d hear from time to time that someone significant in our community was teaching a class there which made me more curious. After doing some deeper digging I realized that many of my personal musical heroes from the past also had ties to either Mannes or The New School, or both, either as faculty or students, or both–e.g. Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Henry Cowell, Johanna Magdalena Beyer, John Cage, Bohuslav Martinů, and salsa pioneer Larry Harlow (who got an M.A. in philosophy there!), to name just a few of the music folks. Needless to say I wanted to be a part of it too somehow, though it was incredibly humbling, so I again said yes.
Thus far I’ve taught three sections of that music history class and last semester I was additionally assigned a graduate seminar on minimalism and postminimalism which I also developed from scratch, talk about deep dives. It’s been hard work, though it has been completely worth it because I feel I’ve had a really huge impact on many students and the students I’ve taught there thus far have been a constant source of inspiration to me as well. But leading such a double life was ultimately not sustainable. So when I learned from an email message sent to all the part-time faculty at The New School that there were nine full time faculty positions that were open, I interviewed for a position (something I hadn’t done in 25 years!) with representatives from all the divisions in the College of Performing Arts. I learned earlier this month that they hired me. Having a full-time faculty position will hopefully give me even more opportunities to develop curricula for which my goal, just like at NewMusicBox, is for it to always be as broad as possible.
But that doesn’t mean I’m retiring from the contemporary music scene. Far from it. I still plan to be heavily involved both in the United States and abroad, wearing nearly as many different kinds of hats in it as I always have (even though I will always refuse to wear corporeal hats). I will still serve as Vice President of the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) and, in late November, will be attending the ISCM’s first-ever World New Music Days festival on the African continent, which has been in the works for several years. And in late December, I will be at The Midwest Clinic International Band, Orchestra, and Music Conference in Chicago and then at the Chamber Music America conference in New York City in January, as per always, and will also attend as many new music concerts as time allows wherever I am. I plan to explore other avenues for writing about music whenever and wherever as well. And I also plan to write some more of my own music, something I managed to do a fair bit of again during the worst phase of the pandemic, but which, because of all the other stuff I’ve been doing, has become harder to find time for during our current seemingly (let’s hope) post-pandemic era.
I gave this essay the title “Waking Up From a Dream Job” which might be interpreted by some as tragic or, at the very least, terribly melodramatic. That is not my intent. Partly I just love a catchy title, and so I couldn’t resist coming up with one (that I hope is) for one last time on this site. (Actually there are few other pieces of content by other writers I’m editing that are still in process, so it’s not exactly the last time; stay tuned for those.) Admittedly it does feel like waking up after an extremely long and amazing dream. But even though I rarely get a full night’s sleep and don’t plan to anytime soon, I still have many other dreams to dream and hope to continue to dream along with others about this crazy thing that for a lack of a better term we still and will probably always call new music. May it never be boxed in.
Back in the 1990s, I was one of the myriad aspiring composers in New York City ... and I balanced my compositional activities with a four-day-a-week day job in order to pay bills.
Frank J. Oteri
I learned about the International Association of Music Information Centres [IAMIC], before I even knew there was an American Music Center, even though it was then just four blocks away from where I had been living for most of my life.
Frank J. Oteri
I had absolutely no experience in publishing, had only written that handful of articles, and did not know all that much about this relatively new thing called the internet other than using AOL and surfing UserNet comments about contemporary music. (It was the '90s afterall.)
Frank J. Oteri
I believed strongly, and still do, that practitioners should be the people who speak and write about this music since they have the most intimate knowledge of it, the greatest passion for it, and need their own outlet to disseminate information about it.
Frank J. Oteri
The strength and significance of NewMusicBox in our field is because by design it is a collaborative project.
Frank J. Oteri
NewMusicBox was at its most effective when a small team of people worked on it together, brainstorming (and sometimes even passionately arguing about) who and what to feature and why, as well as getting in the weeds and carefully copyediting and coding every word, photo, audio, or video file that was then disseminated to the general public.
Frank J. Oteri
When I was asked to develop my own curriculum for an undergraduate contemporary music history class I would then teach and told that I could and should cover all genres of music, it was an offer--like the offer to create a web magazine for contemporary American music and then be responsible for maintaining it--I couldn’t refuse.
Frank J. Oteri
I still plan to be heavily involved in the contemporary music scene both here and abroad, wearing as many different kinds of hats in it as I always have (even though I will always refuse to wear corporeal hats).
Frank J. Oteri
Even though I rarely get a full night's sleep and don't plan to anytime soon, I still have many other dreams to dream and hope to continue to dream along with others about this crazy thing that for a lack of a better term we still and will probably always call new music. May it never be boxed in.
Frank J. Oteri
Oteri is still mesmerized by the tesseract which was the original logo of NewMusicBox. (Photo by Trudy Chan.)
“There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.” ― Martha Graham
Let’s face it – the world of contemporary concert music has never been as diverse and engaging as it is presently. As someone who grew up during the age of Serialism versus Minimalism, I feel so fortunate to be exposed to music being written today that connects with and welcomes an ever-broader and larger audience. This music has inspired me to create my own music and to release the composer within myself.
Background
From my youngest performing days, I have been attracted to new music, and to the idea of working with living composers and seeing their musical language come to life. As a student violinist, the majority of repertoire I studied and performed was exclusively the music of others, of the great composers of the past; even then, I felt that the creation of music (composition and improvisation) were lacking in my musical development. Later, working with significant composers including David Diamond, Charles Wuorinen, and Jacob Druckman, I was captivated by these brilliant minds, and struggled to understand their creative concepts. More often than not, however, I was intimidated and too overwhelmed to attempt to create my own music. As my career progressed and I worked with noted conductors, performers, and composers, I began to understand rather more of the creative process in terms of conceptualizing and writing music. With the advent of the neo-tonal, rhythmically-driven compositional style prevalent starting in the late 1990’s, I was inspired and empowered to start writing. With each composing project, I learned a great deal, especially from the failures and challenges.
Inspiration
The big question is how to find the inspiration and courage to compose music. No matter how little training or “talent” we have, something speaks to us to foster the need to create. A book that addresses this eloquently is The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham, a novel based in part on the life of artist Paul Gauguin. The main character is a middle-class office worker with absolutely no training or talent, only possessing an intense drive to create. Despite the criticism of just about everyone, and even acknowledging himself that his work is terrible, he doggedly continues. In the process, he grows into one of the greatest painters, with his originality earned from his relentless quest to create, borne on the wings of failure, criticism, and unceasing work.
In looking at role models around us, we can find inspiration and motivation in two types of composers: those who inspire by their greatness, and others who encourage by doing, no matter what the level.
Incentive for composing music can also be fostered by a sense of connection with the world, of giving voice to social justice, of contributing to positive change. Being a part of a larger meaning can fire our creativity and give us the courage to create something new.
“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” — Arthur Ashe
Begin
First of all, it is important to know oneself, to acquire an understanding of who you are; an excellent way to start is with a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). Strengths and weaknesses are those characteristics within us, while opportunities and threats are positives and negatives that come from our environment. Identifying more of our qualities can help us find greater connection in music. Whether starting to compose as a teenager or as a senior citizen, life experiences play a great role as well. As an instrumentalist or vocalist, accumulated knowledge is a tremendous asset; use your musical skills to launch your composing. My writing started almost exclusively with works for violin, then expanded to string quartet and string ensemble, then winds, orchestra and piano, and voice.
Two other vitally important factors that help growth are curiosity and criticism. Unquenchable curiosity cannot be taught, but is inherent in fostering the desire to learn and grow. While sometimes difficult to accept, criticism from those who you respect is so very important to growth. Whether it’s a technical suggestion from a colleague on a different instrument, or the advice of an established composer or teacher, feedback can be very useful.
Still don’t know how to begin? Start small – even writing short sketches, bits of phrases or motifs, or harmonic progressions can help give momentum. Prominent composer Augusta Read Thomas begins her composing by singing gestures – vocalizing her ideas and then notating them. Another strategy is to work starting from the outside in – begin with an idea of the overall framework of the piece, and work inwards from that (from movements, to sections of movements, to structures of the sections, to phrases within the structures, to notes within the phrases, to spaces between the notes).
Image by Nejc Soklič (via Unsplash)
Composition Strategies:
Discipline – Build your muscles by scheduling time to compose; this means that sometimes you won’t feel inspired, and may be slogging along, but adhering to a regular schedule can help build the skills needed to write more effectively.
Failure – Don’t be afraid to fail – trust in your ear and your innate musical sense. We all have many strengths to contribute to effective composing, but if we don’t risk failure, we may never realize our potential.
Invent – Reserve time for creative searching; whether experiencing nature, looking at art, or accessing human emotion, invent your own connections with sound and meaning.
Steal/copy – Whether It’s Bernstein from Copland or John Williams from Mahler, many great composers have been directly influenced by others. Don’t be afraid to use other works as inspirational springboards, while avoiding plagiarism.
Originality – Where is art now? Does it matter? Ask yourself what you want your music to sound like and have the courage to realize that vision. Some years ago, I had a student who only wrote homophonic, Classical-era music; he received criticism from many, but kept going, listening to his inner voices, and today has moved forward to a unique and well-rounded style.
Write for yourself – As a performing musician, you are free to view composition as a “hobby”; that is, release yourself from the binds of convention or expectation.
Leap – Risk trying something new: different instrumentation, forms (or lack of form), or different harmonic and musical languages.
Have fun – Revel in the joy and fulfillment of creating music in new ways, no matter the “perceived” quality. If you are writing music, you already are a composer, perhaps not an experienced or professional one, but a musician with something to share.
As someone who grew up during the age of Serialism versus Minimalism, I feel so fortunate to be exposed to music being written today that connects with and welcomes an ever-broader and larger audience.
Scott Flavin
More often than not, however, I was intimidated and too overwhelmed to attempt to create my own music.
Scott Flavin
No matter how little training or “talent” we have, something speaks to us to foster the need to create.
Scott Flavin
In looking at role models around us, we can find inspiration and motivation in two types of composers: those who inspire by their greatness, and others who encourage by doing, no matter what the level.
Scott Flavin
Unquenchable curiosity cannot be taught, but is inherent in fostering the desire to learn and grow.
Scott Flavin
We all have many strengths to contribute to effective composing, but if we don’t risk failure, we may never realize our potential.
Scott Flavin
Where is art now? Does it matter? Ask yourself what you want your music to sound like and have the courage to realize that vision.
Scott Flavin
If you are writing music, you already are a composer, perhaps not an experienced or professional one, but a musician with something to share.
Scott Flavin
********
Violinist, Conductor, Composer, and Writer Scott Flavin is Professor of Violin and Conducting at the University of Miami Frost School of Music. He is Resident Conductor for The Henry Mancini Institute Orchestra, is on conducting faculty at Eastern Music Festival, is violinist in the Bergonzi Piano Trio, Concertmaster of the Symphony of The Americas, and regularly performs around the world. He has written four produced plays, has written a book as well as regularly-published articles, and his compositions have been heard across the country and on radio and recordings. His recently composed works include:
Madoff Songs, for baritone, violin, piano Reverberations, for 5 violins Fragment(s), for string quartet Astoriana, for solo violin Appalachian Sunrise and Dance, for solo violin
Growing up in Soviet-era Lithuania, where people were often afraid to express their real feelings, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė discovered early on that music was safer than language and that it could enable her to express her innermost feelings without self censoring. It ultimately led her on the path to becoming a composer whose music is performed all over the world. Although Žibuoklė now divides her time between a democratic Lithuania and the United States, her formative experiences have led her to explore a sonic vocabulary, which though frequently inspired by nature and always deeply emotive, is completely abstract and open to multiple interpretations.
“Music is enough; not only enough, it’s more than enough,” she explained to me during a Zoom conversation last month. “It surpasses words; it surpasses the meaning of words because it can go to unknown places and unexplainable places. The beauty of music is that if you are telling some story, some inner story that you don’t want to reveal the details of, you could still tell the story and the listener would relate to that story. … [T]hey create their own story in their minds because nobody’s telling them what to think. But they have the emotional components that come up, like physiological and psychological reactions to the sounds that they hear.”
This approach to narrative is an ideal modus operandi when creating an orchestral composition or a piece of chamber music, and Žibuoklė has made significant contributions to both of these idioms which have resonated with audiences both in the concert hall and on recordings. Horizons, a 2013 symphonic tour-de-force, has been performed in multiple cities and has been recorded twice. Starkland’s recording of her enhanced piano trio In Search of Lost Beauty was described by Richard Whitehouse in Gramophone magazine as “one of the most significant releases thus far” on that label, praising her music’s “potency.” Last season, soon after the Finnish label Ondine released the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra’s recording of her haunting 2019 Saudade, a work inspired by the death of her father as well as her immigration to the USA, the work received a performance by the New York Philharmonic causing Zachary Woolfe in The New York Times to describe her orchestral writing as “intriguingly agitated.” Bang on a Can’s record label Cantaloupe Music recently released her 2020-21 Hadal Zone, an immersive sonic experience for a quintet of low-ranged instruments and electronics evoking the bottom of the ocean. But how does this play out when composing vocal music?
In our talk, Žibuoklė described her reticence to use words when she first received a commission to write a work for the choir Jauna Muzika in 2010 from the annual Gaida Festival, the most prominent new music festival in Lithuania. After feeling more drawn to the vowels of words in certain texts than the actual words, she ultimately decided to eschew text and set only vowels.
“When I made that choice of not using language, I felt, once again, very liberated,” she admitted, which makes perfect sense considering her life’s experiences. “Music was the way to have that freedom and music was the way to express myself in an absolutely free way and nobody could stop me from that. … That sense of freedom, I think, stayed with me to this day. That’s why music is so precious to me. And that’s why I don’t want to use narratives and text because I feel they would put me into some kind of perceptional prison.”
That first choral work, The Blue of Distance, which was subsequently performed and recorded by the San Francisco-based choir Volti, has led to two others thus far: Chant des Voyelles, which was commissioned by Volti in 2018, and Aletheia, a 2022 work created in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which was premiered by the Latvian Radio Choir during last year’s edition of the Baltic Music Days. All of these pieces were without words although that does not prevent her from conveying a visceral narrative, as she acknowledged in describing Aletheia. “I was thinking … about voice being the first and the very last instrument that we might have in our lives and all those people in the war, how they still have their voices with them and they could express themselves in this rage or scream, even as they are being killed.”
However, Žibuoklė confessed that the piece she is working on right now, a half-hour song cycle for female voice and orchestra, will actually have words. “Yes, I know, it’s quite unusual for me, but I must say I’m enjoying working with it, although I have mixed feelings about how I feel about text. But I will insert some vowel singing without text because I can’t go without it. But it’s this text by this very, very old female poet from more than 4,000 years ago called Enheduanna. … It’s fascinating how the poetry that was composed such a long time ago still contains the same subject matters that are very much today’s topics, like war and migration of people and environmental concerns and catastrophes and gender bending identities. It’s just incredible how all the issues remain the same over and over.”
From that silence that I hear in the world then comes the inner experience which resonates with that. You have to calm down in order to even perceive those sounds, because if you are too turbulent inside, if there's a lot of agitation or a lot of thought processes that are happening, it's very hard to hear anything, because all you hear are your own thoughts.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
I was composing my own melodies and then telling stories about how I saw the world. At some point, all those words disappeared. I don't know why. Then only music remained, and I didn't need a text, I didn't need lyrics anymore. I thought that music is enough; not only enough, it's more than enough. It surpasses words; it surpasses the meaning of words because it can go to unknown places and unexplainable places.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
The beauty of music is that if you are telling some story, some inner story that you don't want to reveal the details of, you could still tell the story and the listener would relate to that story. But they relate in their own way and in a way they create their own story in their minds because nobody's telling them what to think.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
How many stories we can tell in like 10 minutes or 20 minutes--the density of material becomes the flow of time. So if we give a lot of material, then the time kind of quickens, and the perception becomes that we experience a lot of things. Maybe some of them don't make sense. If we give a lesser amount of stories, maybe it's just one line, or one narrative, then the time can slow down...
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
I must say I'm very curious how long pieces are. So when I hear something at the concert before the beginning of the piece, I look at the watch because I want to know how long the piece was, because I want to know if my inner perception of that piece was accurate.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
My inner compass is directed at that experience of erasing time, of erasing self, erasing all the limits that we have of time and space and dimension. But do I achieve it? Sometimes I think I do, but not for long.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
No court in the world will say this music is about destruction or some horrible things or something that wasn't allowed by the Soviet mentality and regime. In a way, music was a safe place, the safest place, because in everyday life, we had to think what to say, what not to say when you are talking to somebody and there was always this editing that was happening in the mind and editing of information.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
That concept of freedom was so crucial in my mind as I was growing up and I knew that I will never give away that freedom that I create for myself. So music was the way to have that freedom and music was the way to express myself in an absolutely free way and nobody could stop me from that.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Music is so precious to me. And that's why I don't want to use narratives and text because I feel they would put me into some kind of perceptional prison.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
You mentioned Ustvolskaya and that ability to compose whatever you want. It didn't mean that people would be playing your music or the music would be performed. But what was important was that you were able to do it, just to prove to yourself that you have the agency, you have the independence, and you can do whatever you want, at least on paper. And if nobody sees it, if nobody hears that, that's okay, because that's a second step.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
When I started composing I wasn't so eager that people would start playing my music right away because I wanted to keep it for myself for a very long time. And then at some point, I felt ready to give it to the world. I felt ready to give it to others because I had to know myself first.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
When I got a choral commission, I was thinking I need a text because that's what everybody does, right? I was looking at multiple texts in English, in Lithuanian, then I thought maybe in Latin. I started writing down the excerpts that resonated with me. Then I was thinking how to put it into music and I started thinking, "What if I could use only vowels of sounds, but not entire words?" I wrote down vowels from the excerpt that I liked. And then I was thinking: So why am I doing this? I could just use vowels or syllables, whatever I want. Why do I have to extract them from the existing text and then say, "Oh, the basis of this piece is this text, but I'm using only parts of the words that are vowel-based."
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
I was thinking also about voice being the first and the very last instrument that we might have in our lives and all those people in the war, how they still have their voices with them and they could express themselves in this rage or scream, even as they are being killed.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Being a musician and composer, I must say I prefer music without visuals ... If there's an additional video component or some kind of visual component, sometimes I just want to close my eyes and listen to the music.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Because I am in New York, I become a little bit exotic also to Lithuanians, because I live elsewhere, right? And then because I am from elsewhere, I am exotic to the American audiences. It allows me to be of both places, but at the same time of neither. ... Maybe I do have the best of both worlds. But in other ways I don't because wherever I go, I still don't feel like I'm just in that place...
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Somehow that difficult time for everybody became unbelievably successful for me. And I don't know what the recipe of it was. But I think maybe because there was no outer life happening, I was able to really focus my mind on a single thing and that single thing was music.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
After the pandemic, we all want to experience life in a kind of catch up and to have more experiences faster than we are used to. So the slowness of time is less appealing right now to us as it would have been maybe before the pandemic.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
It's rather through the experience than through words or through direct messages and saying do something about it. But yes, of course, do something about it would be the message.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
It's fascinating how the poetry that was composed such a long time ago still contains the same subject matters that are very much today's topics, like war and migration of people and environmental concerns and catastrophes and gender bending identities. It's just incredible how all the issues remain the same over and over.
As your father, I want to welcome you to this world. I understand that you are only 16 months old, and so your ability to fully comprehend this letter may take some time. But, I wanted to write this now, while your mother’s pregnancy, your birth, and the newborn and infant days of your life are still so fresh in my memory. So much joy and suffering has already happened that I fear I will intentionally or unintentionally block out all the bad memories, and in the process, lose the opportunity to save the good ones. Or maybe I’ll just simply forget everything—the bad and the good—with the natural passage of time.
As I now attempt to bring you up to speed, to capture your essence in words, I feel overwhelmed: there is both nowhere to start and anywhere I could start. How do I write about you?
Writing about you is as hard as writing about music. What if you yourself were music? What would you be? You would be a formless soundscape of abrupt shifts and prolonged repetition, never truly starting or ending. You would be a vast array of mighty sounds that shake the earth, alongside others that are too soft to hear or even feel, yet somehow know are there. You would be an absurdist comic opera of bizarre gestures that never follow any logical syntax, yet somehow make sense through their consistency of use. You would be the saddest song on earth, filled with the fear of death itself, yet at the same time, a triumphant chorus that can inspire the will to live. Your music would be a series of paradoxes: your duration both long and short, your speed both fast and slow, your emotions filled with happiness and sadness, comfort and pain. But how do I write about this? How can you ever be captured?
The answer is I can’t. You are a beautiful thing that cannot be recorded. What I can offer, however, to you, and to anyone else who happens to read this, is a glimpse into my life as your parent, and how it has transformed my musical practice into something richer, more purposeful than I could have ever imagined.
I will start from the beginning of this journey, when your mother was pregnant. It is not my place to speak on her behalf, or share any details personal to her, but I will share my own fundamental shift during this period: it was the first time I truly prioritized my daily schedule around the life or death needs of another person. On a basic level, the months of pregnancy allowed me to build in a certain level of flexibility to my work flow. The inconsistent start and end points to my work sessions did not negatively affect my long term projects, and in some ways, enhanced and added meaning to them. While it would be nice to spend as much time as I want every day on my art, the forced breaks and unexpected interruptions often allowed me the chance to solidify my ideas and strengthen my artistic convictions. With limited resources, is this really what I want to be spending my time on? I would ask myself. Does this note actually work here, or is it a clever way to show off, to prove something to someone? Is this the music I want to be writing, and is this the type of piece I want to make people listen to with their own equally precious time? I began to really ask myself these tough questions, often. And believe it or not, your in utero needs helped me ask them more urgently than I ever had before.
And then you were born. Those early screams were some of the most gut-wrenching sounds I’ve ever heard in my life. We had to bounce, feed and change diapers day and night in order to soothe you, sometimes successfully, but most often, unsuccessfully. Most often, your voice of suffering was heard. No matter the sound buffer, white noise machines, music, vacuum cleaners, running bathwater, or noise canceling headphones, your voice would still find its way to our ears, piercing our soul and breaking our hearts. The soundtrack of life was relentlessly stressful–even the moments of silence carried an ominous expectation of the screams to return.
But there was some respite in the night. As unhealthy and unsustainable as it was, the hours of my shift with you, from 9:00pm-5:00am, were peaceful oases, in near silence and near total darkness. I sat there awake, with my phone at the dimmest setting and a piano keyboard set to the lowest volume. The only consistent light came from the small red dot on the keyboard’s on/off switch, and a small blue light that indicated the white noise machine was plugged in. You would not let me lose contact with you, so I stayed with one hand on your chest, belly or arm, and propping most of your body on my lap. With my one free hand, I would take shorthand notes on my phone’s notepad, only once an hour or so, with the screen dimmed to the lowest light setting. And I would play the piano with the same hand, only once every 15-30 minutes to check the sound of a note or chord, at the lowest possible volume. It was during this time that I realized how slow the world can move when you are forced to sit awake in silence and darkness for so many hours. Spending an 8-hour night with a single note or chord felt like an eternity, yet in the end, was just one day. Hearing you cry for 5 minutes straight felt like hearing you cry for a whole year, yet in the end, it was just 5 minutes. Perhaps it is because, for you, 5 minutes did feel like a year.
Needless to say, my musical practice changed so deeply during these newborn months. Before you came along, I practiced music efficiently: to achieve as much as possible in as little time as possible, treating time as part of the challenge. But since you came along, I now make music to pay tribute to the abundance of time, and how vast and endless any single sound has the potential to be. Surprisingly, this has made me more efficient.
As you grew older, your naps became more regular. And you became more interested in music. You’ve never been good at falling asleep, so when you fell asleep to music for the first time, I thought it was a miracle. Amidst the speakers blasting Yellow Magic Orchestra, and as I danced with you in the carrier, dancing hard and occasionally running to add my own live synth part to the recording, your head finally drooped over. Once you were asleep, I tried to turn the music down, or turn it off, or even just change to something different, but every time I tried, you would squirm and wake up. Nothing could change in your auditory experience before or during your nap. You couldn’t fall asleep in silence either–the smallest creak would startle you. Loud, danceable music provided the secret ingredient to your delicate balance for a peaceful nap.
This is what was playing the first time you fell asleep to music, and many times after…
You responded to the piano similarly. Abrupt changes in dynamic, articulation or range would wake you. Your naps taught me how to make music at the piano that develops gradually over long periods of time without ever changing too many variables at once. From these lessons, I now have a deeper appreciation for music with long and sustaining resonances, fixed or slowly changing pitch sets, and repetitive, subtly shifting rhythmic groupings.
This is a recently completed piece that works with the same soundscapes you liked as a newborn…
Your naps have also taught me how to listen to music carefully and more fully. Where I would have simply listened to one song or one piece by an artist I decided to look up, I now actively brainstorm in live time other artists, songs and albums that might relate to one another in sound profile. This new habit, thanks to you, has opened my ears to a wider range of music that spans time, place and genre, and a stronger ability to draw special sonic connections between them. Who would’ve thought that Selena Quintanilla is sonically similar to Dolly Parton? Or that Coldplay fits nicely with John Luther Adams’s Become trilogy? Or that drummer Tony Allen can smoothly lead into guitarist Tommy Guerrero?
These days, If I find a sound world I particularly like, and you seem to like enough, while you sleep, I will listen to the full album, and often, multiple albums in a row, sometimes even the complete works or complete discography of an artist. For example, on one such day, I went from knowing only one song of Selena Quintanilla, to listening to her complete discography in chronological order, extending my focus far beyond the day’s need for a nap. I would go as far as to say that, through your sleep habits, you’ve given me a deeper, more grounded patience for the unfolding of music itself.
Then, you began to figure out that you have a body. You started to open your eyes and really see things. You started to move your head up and down and side to side. You started to reach with your hands and flail your legs and twist and turn your torso until you rolled over. You propped yourself up onto your hands and knees, rocking forward and back. Then, you replaced your knees for your feet, and you used your hands to claw and pull yourself up. You stumbled and tried again, and tried again, and again and again. You hurt yourself countless times, but you never stopped trying (I really couldn’t believe you never stopped trying). And finally, you let your hands go and held the air with your arms, like a conductor without a baton, swaying to some imaginary music, while the music swayed with you… When you first stood up, I was horrified and worried for you. But when I think back to the memory now, it makes me so happy.
As soon as you stood on your own two feet, you started to dance. No longer did you ride along in a carrier to our dance moves, perhaps against your will, but instead you now had your own crazy dance moves to invent and share. Any new discovery, from squatting, to spinning, to jumping, you made it your own when dancing. When music anywhere came on, your body would respond, almost as if it was involuntary. You’d throw up one hand and bob your head whenever you heard a car with a subwoofer pass by. You would dance to music that wasn’t meant to be music, like a jackhammer on the street, or a thud from a neighbor’s wall.
You did the same with pitch. Whenever you heard me playing a subtly shifting, sustained texture at the piano–one of the same that helped keep you asleep as a newborn–you would sing along loudly until you matched an overtone (Ab4 and A4 were your favorite notes). The vacuum–the same one we used desperately to keep you from crying–was your singing companion, as you glissed up and down your vocal range, singing as loudly as possible, as I turned it on and off and on again.
You heard music, and your body heard it too, in virtually any sound with rhythm or pitch. You inspired me to make all sorts of wild noises with my mouth, voice and body that I would never have imagined to be a worthwhile listen. You inspired me to make music with anything and everything. In a sense, you freed me from my own sense of good and bad, right and wrong, when it comes to musical sound. I knew this to be true in theory, but never had I fully lived this mindset in everyday life until you came along and gave it validation.
All of these memories will be cherished for as long as I can remember them. And the weirdest part is that you probably won’t consciously remember any of it. It must be scary to first find out that so much has happened to you without you remembering it happening. Perhaps it is for the best that you won’t be weighed down by your earliest struggles.
Just as you have no choice in what you remember, I may not have a choice in what I forget. Perhaps it is also for the best, for me to not forget. I feel like my music will never be the same again, because of what I’ve learned while being your parent in these earliest years. I want this letter to be my expression of gratitude for you and to recognize how much you have already given to me, without even knowing it. I want you to know that, while parenthood has already been immensely difficult, your life has given me a whole new set of tools as a musician that have helped me further my craft, and take my work into new and exciting directions.
And even greater of a gift than any single tool or discovery, you have given new and deeper purpose to my music. I write music now with a sense of care and personal responsibility to the listener that I did not fully feel until now. You taught me and continue to teach me how to truly care for another, which I now believe is the most fundamental part of being both a good musician and a good person.
There is both nowhere to start and anywhere I could start.
Shi-An Costello
What if you yourself were music? ... You would be an absurdist comic opera of bizarre gestures that never follow any logical syntax, yet somehow make sense through their consistency of use. You would be the saddest song on earth, filled with the fear of death itself, yet at the same time, a triumphant chorus that can inspire the will to live. Your music would be a series of paradoxes: your duration both long and short, your speed both fast and slow, your emotions filled with happiness and sadness, comfort and pain.
Shi-An Costello
Does this note actually work here, or is it a clever way to show off, to prove something to someone? Is this the music I want to be writing, and is this the type of piece I want to make people listen to with their own equally precious time?
Shi-An Costello
Spending an 8-hour night with a single note or chord felt like an eternity, yet in the end, was just one day. Hearing you cry for 5 minutes straight felt like hearing you cry for a whole year, yet in the end, it was just 5 minutes. Perhaps it is because, for you, 5 minutes did feel like a year.
Shi-An Costello
Before you came along, I practiced music efficiently: to achieve as much as possible in as little time as possible, treating time as part of the challenge. But since you came along, I now make music to pay tribute to the abundance of time, and how vast and endless any single sound has the potential to be. Surprisingly, this has made me more efficient.
Shi-An Costello
Your naps taught me how to make music at the piano that develops gradually over long periods of time without ever changing too many variables at once.
Shi-An Costello
Who would've thought that Selena Quintanilla is sonically similar to Dolly Parton? Or that Coldplay fits nicely with John Luther Adams's Become trilogy? Or that drummer Tony Allen can smoothly lead into guitarist Tommy Guerrero?
Shi-An Costello
When music anywhere came on, your body would respond, almost as if it was involuntary. You'd throw up one hand and bob your head whenever you heard a car with a subwoofer pass by. You would dance to music that wasn't meant to be music, like a jackhammer on the street, or a thud from a neighbor's wall.
Shi-An Costello
You inspired me to make music with anything and everything. In a sense, you freed me from my own sense of good and bad, right and wrong, when it comes to musical sound. I knew this to be true in theory, but never had I fully lived this mindset in everyday life until you came along and gave it validation.
Shi-An Costello
I write music now with a sense of care and personal responsibility to the listener that I did not fully feel until now. You taught me and continue to teach me how to truly care for another, which I now believe is the most fundamental part of being both a good musician and a good person.
I’ve been a violinist for forty years and I have made a living from it since completing school twenty years ago. I’ve also been afflicted with chronic neurological Lyme Disease and co-infections for thirty-three years, and boy oh boy, does it get in the way. So, how do I deal with it, you ask? Well, write a trio about it, of course.
I started learning the violin just before my fifth birthday through a Suzuki program in New Jersey. My teacher was Louise Butler, a Suzuki guru who studied with the Sevcik student, Scott Willitts. (I have autographed photos of Willitts, Suzuki, and Sevcik on my walls, among many others.) Playing the violin was fun and easy for me in those days. Mrs. Butler kept jumping me up to the next class, like skipping grades, and she eventually encouraged me to audition for the pre-college division at Juilliard. I refused; Saturdays were for baseball, skateboarding, and general mischief. I then studied with Janina Robinson, a Persinger student (autographed photo on the wall), Lewis Kaplan, a Galamian student (if you have an autographed photo of Galamian, please give it to me), Hall Grossman at Interlochen Arts Academy, Linda Cerone at Cleveland Institute of Music, then Fritz Gearhart at University of Oregon.
When I was about twelve, the difficulties began. First it was insomnia and depression. Pain showed up in my left shoulder at Chautauqua when I was fourteen, obviously from playing the violin so much. At fifteen, while the depression and insomnia intensified, the pain migrated to my neck and then down my spine. My parents brought me to every doctor they could find: chiropractic, physical therapy, acupuncture, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, and countless orthopedists, one of whom wanted to operate on disks L1 and L2, because they appeared to be deteriorated. It wasn’t a sure thing, so we chose not to. When I was sixteen, I was wearing a giant hard plastic brace that strapped around my abdomen from armpits to waist and had a team of shrinks prescribing pills. Playing the violin was no longer fun or easy. I started to feel like I could never get warmed up; stiff muscles got in the way of accuracy, and playing became laborious. When I’d perform, I’d shake all over, which my peers and teachers attributed to being nervous. The violin had long since become my raison d’être, so I forged ahead.
We found a notable doctor in New York City who’d written several best-selling books about how back pain was usually psychogenic. I had a few meetings with him and he said I fit the bill; I had Tension Myositis Syndrome. I’d received a PTSD diagnosis a few months earlier because of an accident my brother had, so this made sense. He said deteriorated disks are common and usually not painful. The protocol? Acknowledge that the pain was created by the unconscious mind to distract the conscious mind from the bad things that are too painful to face and do it regularly enough that the concept becomes fixed in your unconscious. We believed him.
Over the next decade or so, my back pain got worse and worse, as did the other symptoms. In my twenties, I developed tendinitis in my left wrist, as so many violinists do. I saw several doctors and was told to stop playing for two weeks, which was heart-breaking. After two weeks off, not only did the pain not subside, but it then showed up in the right wrist. At this time, I was living in Sacramento, playing concertmaster of the Sacramento Philharmonic and California Musical Theater, teaching at UC Davis, and running Sacramento School of Music, which I’d founded. I saw lots of doctors at the hospitals of UC Davis, Stanford, and UCSF; spine centers, sports medicine, pain management, hand surgeons, etc., etc. Many didn’t know what to tell me and passed me off to somebody else. Others blamed it on stress. One doc told me that I had a stenosis in my neck which might be causing the issue.
I decided to call up my former college teacher, Linda Cerone, for advice. The next day, she informed me that I could come and see the neck surgeon in Cleveland who’d recently operated on the concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, and that he’d make room for me to come any day the following week. That’s exactly what I did. This doctor agreed with the stenosis diagnosis but said operating may or may not relieve the pain. I then flew to Chicago to see a very notable doctor at Northwestern who was famous for helping musicians. She said sure, I had tendinitis once, but it’s now a chronic pain disorder originating from the mind. Following that, an osteopath in California did some acupuncture on my neck and fifteen minutes later the pain in my wrists began to burn, then my arms went partially numb.
By this point, from age fifteen to twenty-nine, I’d probably seen over thirty practitioners for these chronic ailments that never seemed to heal. Most of them mentioned stress or other psychological conditions as the culprit and/or excessive violin playing. A few of them threw around the vacant term, “fibromyalgia.” Bewildered and scared, I decided to stop playing the violin until I healed. I found a body worker in California who was popular with musicians. His diagnosis was the same, so I started weekly sessions with him, combining massage with his arm-chair psychology. Whenever I was in pain, I was instructed to identify what my headspace was at the time, acknowledging that I’d created it myself.
During this time off from playing, I continued to teach. The Sacramento Philharmonic was very supportive, giving me all the time to get better that I needed. A smaller orchestra that I also played concertmaster for, was not. The conductor of that orchestra fired me because I missed a year of concerts. I filed a grievance with the musicians’ union and got the job back. After twenty months of not playing the violin and experiencing no improvement on my pain, I needed to go back to work. Most places were happy to have me back and I was thrilled to be there. That little orchestra was different. While I had unanimous support from the musicians, the conductor really stuck it to me: avoiding eye contact, refusing bows after solos, adding spontaneous solos the day before the concert to throw me off, and playing other games. I withstood this for the next ten years, still not knowing what was really wrong with me.
Throughout my thirties, all the symptoms increased. I developed tendinitis in my elbows and my knees and neither healed. The pain and muscle spasms from those injuries increased and migrated, eventually meeting up with the pain and muscle-spasms in my back and neck. I developed vertigo, brain fog, and tinnitus. One day, when I was thirty-seven, I was standing in the bathroom, too exhausted and dizzy to get in the shower. I started thinking about how easily I’d been injuring myself and how nothing ever seemed to heal. That’s when it hit me; I must have a systemic disease and this psychogenic diagnosis was bullshit.
I went to my doctors at Kaiser and exhausted all the available options. They tested me for every auto-immune disease they could. There was one day that they took out eighteen tubes of blood. The result was always, “good news, you’re perfectly healthy!” My dad said he thought I might have Lyme Disease. When I mentioned it to the Kaiser doctors, they refused to test me for it because I’d never found a tick on myself. I kept insisting, so they finally tested me. Negative. More good news.
A couple more years wore on, riddled with fatigue, depression, pain in every inch of my body, vertigo, headaches, brain fog, rashes, testicle pain, tinnitus, gut issues, metabolism issues, diarrhea, light sensitivity, sun intolerance, allergies, nerve pain, numbness, etc. Some days I could barely move. I had trouble getting places, especially in the morning.
One day, when I was thirty-nine, my friend Robin said she’d mentioned me to her nutritionist. The nutritionist suspected that I had Lyme Disease and encouraged me to call her. This doctor explained that the mainstream Lyme test, which Kaiser uses, is terribly outdated, often showing a false negative. She administered the newer tests and Eureka, I was positive for several infections! To be sure, I confirmed this diagnosis with Lyme experts up and down the West Coast. They all agreed it dated back to when I was about twelve years old. It was amazing to know that all along, my collection of ailments was caused by this disease. I’d previously been trained to believe that I’d caused all this myself; for decades, when I felt pain or other symptoms, it was accompanied by guilt and self-loathing, and it wasn’t easy to undo this.
The Lyme disease spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi, is an obligate parasite that cycles between ticks and vertebrate hosts. In this rendering, immunofluorescent antibodies were used to identify spirochetes that express outer surface protein D (yellow and red) and were merged with an image of all the spirochetes labeled with an anti-B. burgdorferi antibody (green). Credit: NIAID (via Flickr).
Lyme Disease specifically refers to Borrelia burgdorferi, a bacterial infection contracted from a tick bite. Lyme is also an umbrella term for the forty-five other infections that are often contracted along with Borrelia. In addition to Borrelia burgdorferi, my tests showed Ehrlichia, Bartonella, Babesia, Relapsing Fever, Epstein Barr, and others. Each Lyme victim has a unique collection of these infections that wreak havoc on the individual’s immune system, causing dozens of symptoms that are often misdiagnosed.
We’ve all heard about the bulls-eye rash followed by a few weeks of antibiotics. Well, those are the lucky people. Many victims never know they were bitten, developing symptoms slowly over many years, with doctors attributing them to other conditions. When these infections go untreated, they become chronic. The bacteria burrow deeply into the victim’s muscles, nervous system, gut, and brain, protecting themselves with a biofilm and functioning like a virus. Standard treatments include supplements, detoxing, and antibiotics. There are also more experimental and invasive treatments, some of which aren’t legal in the United States. In some cases, these treatments bring short or long-term relief to patients, while many of us go on with little or no relief. Insurance companies still reject the existence of chronic Lyme because the treatments are expensive and often endless.
For five years, I tried everything my Lyme doctors wanted me to do, none of which were covered by insurance. There were days when I would take up to eighty pills. I developed “pill fatigue,” which caused me to gag the instant a pill touched my mouth. I tried various elimination diets. Towards the end of these efforts, I was on three intense antibiotics simultaneously for about nine months. An interesting thing happens when you attack Lyme with antibiotics. The Lyme actually fights back, causing the patient’s symptoms to grow exponentially worse. It’s called “herxing,” coined by Dr. Herxheimer. For most patients, this lasts a few weeks, but for a few of us, it lasts indefinitely. I did four different stints of antibiotics. Each time, the “herxing” never subsided and we had to abandon the treatment because it became dangerous. I did all the standard treatments over the course of five years, then a little over a year ago, I gave up. I decided to live my life the best I could with the diseases until a better treatment or cure is discovered.
For the past fifteen years, I’ve been living in Berkeley. I’m still Concertmaster for the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera, Concertmaster for West Edge Opera, Principal 2nd for the Berkeley Symphony, I teach violin at UC Berkeley, and I play much of the season with SF Opera. I play an enormous amount of new music. Every note I play hurts, though. Every step I take is awful. Every time I turn my head or redirect my eyes, the room spins. I sleep horribly, it takes me an hour to get out of bed, and some days I can barely walk. The disabled placard in my car helps a little. All the shakes I get when I perform are because Lyme is entrenched in my nervous system. When the “fight or flight” kicks in, which it does for all performers, my nervous system can’t handle it, causing a seizure. The brighter the stage lights, the worse the reaction is. I’ve learned that this is due to Lyme attacking my brain and eye muscles. I’ve controlled it with medication all these years so that I can get through performances. One day I didn’t take those meds and the concert was halted by an audience member because they thought I was having an epileptic seizure.
How does the disease specifically affect my violin playing, you ask? Well, the muscle stiffness keeps me from playing as accurately as I know I can and there’s always pain. There were a few days here and there when a Lyme treatment gave me relief for a few hours, and I experienced what health feels like. Once in Seattle, after cleaning out my blood with ozone, I felt all my muscles and joints relax, the oppressive fatigue lifted, and I ended up running down the street in tears of joy, like I was in a corny movie. A second ozone treatment did the opposite, so I’ve been afraid to try it again. A couple of times, while taking antibiotics, the symptoms dissipated briefly and I could get around the violin accurately with ease, feeling like I was Heifetz. It never lasts, though.
What the audience hears from me is not Dan on a good day, by the way. There aren’t any good days. The audience hears Dan struggle through each note, trying to create beauty through pain, pretending that it’s okay. Symphony and opera concerts are often excruciating for me due to the constant playing, particularly in restrictive tuxedos under hot lights. A few of the Lyme doctors, when reviewing my test results, couldn’t believe that I still played the violin. But I’m still obsessed with music and the violin is still my raison d’être. I’m fortunate and grateful to have had so much support from my family, friends, colleagues, and a few good doctors.
I first dabbled in composition when I was in high school. However, since the music field is fiercely competitive and my abilities as a violinist were decent but not amazing, I decided to forgo composition to put all my time into being a violinist. Twenty-five years later, a girlfriend asked, “Do you do anything creative?” “Uh, I’ve played the violin day in and day out for thirty-six years,” I replied. “Yeah, but you just play other people’s music, right?” Astonished and horrified, I explained the art of perfecting one’s ability to play an instrument, develop a unique tone and style, and interpret the masterworks. I then realized she was kind of right… I only played other people’s music. Ouch. My first attempts back in high school were pathetic, but after all, music composition is a craft that needs to be learned and developed just like anything else, right? It occurred to me that it’s okay to compose music that isn’t great, or even good. In fact, it’s perfectly acceptable to compose music that nobody likes. This was liberating. I began composition lessons with Cindy Cox, my colleague at UC Berkeley, and got bitten by the bug, so to speak. To date, I’ve composed eighteen pieces and am currently working on a string quartet. And surprisingly, there are a few people who like my music!
During Covid, I created The Bow and the Brush, a project of commissioning and composing new music inspired by paintings and sculptures. When the pandemic shutdown began, and we were all stuck at home, like so many musicians, I spent my time playing solo pieces on my violin. I felt happier than most because I did this while looking at the dozens of paintings on my walls, collected over many years. Combining the two was an inevitability. I began composing pieces inspired by these paintings, then commissioning my favorite composers to do the same. The feelings I experience when viewing a painting or hearing music seem to be generated from the same place, and therefore feel connected. In my mind, the colors of paint relate to the colors of tone, and the texture of brush strokes relate to the articulation of bow strokes. In the 2022-23 season, I’ve been performing these new solo violin compositions across the United States and Europe, accompanied by projected images of the art. An album of fourteen of these pieces was recently released by MSR Classics.
“Ehrlichia,” Rhapsody in Discomfort #6 came about when Paul and Vicky Ehrlich, my compatriots in Trio Solano, asked me to write a piece for us to play. As close friends, we’d discussed Lyme often, amused by the coincidence that Ehrlichia, one of the diseases under the Lyme umbrella, was named after the Nobel Prize-winning physician, Dr. Paul Ehrlich (of no relation to the violist in Trio Solano). Composing a piece on this topic, with the title Ehrlichia, was a no-brainer, as they say. Originally, it was supposed to be funny but morphed into something that people took seriously, including me. I composed Ehrlichia during the shutdown. It’s a little different from the other twenty-nine compositions in The Bow and the Brush because the music is inspired by my disease and the painting was created afterwards. The artist, Nancy Schroeder, is a member of the Lyme Art Association, and suffers from chronic Lyme Disease as well (Lyme Disease is named after the city of Lyme, Connecticut, where it was first discovered in 1975).
Are there other Rhapsodies in Discomfort? Oh my, yes. Initially, the title was a humorous cop-out. It’s much easier to compose a piece with little structure that is mostly ugly than a piece that is beautiful or makes sense. My first composition, “Borderline Phantasia,” Rhapsody in Discomfort #1, is for solo violin and it’s really not good. You’ll never hear it. Then came Rhapsody in Discomfort #2 “Where’s My Monet,” which is a very silly trio for two violins and cello, illustrating my deep sadness at not owning a painting by Claude Monet. Rhapsody in Discomfort #3 “Covids Я Us” is a noisy solo violin piece that involves detuning the strings and improvising while coughing. Rhapsody in Discomfort #4 “The Lump in My Throat,” is an improvised solo violin piece where I drag the bow across the instrument from scroll to tailpiece, while tapping a repeated rhythm on the body. “Timeless,” Rhapsody in Discomfort #5 is the first Rhapsody in Discomfort that I expect to be taken at least a little bit seriously. It was inspired by a set of sixteen sculptures made from antique metronomes by Sean O’Donnell, all commissioned by Arc Gallery in San Francisco. An early example of The Bow and the Brush, Timeless is a juxtaposition of chorale-like melodies created through extended techniques on the violin, over a sound collage created by countless metronomes ticking away. Ironically, the very devices used to establish time, dissolve it. I made a video of it in Arc Gallery that you can see on YouTube.
Then we have this story’s namesake. Beginning with a pizzicato tick bite, “Ehrlichia,” Rhapsody in Discomfort #6 brings the listener through the tribulations of a Lyme Disease patient. The repeated Rondo theme, representing the disease traveling through the body, is a fast moving, feverish collection of broken scales in C minor. Each digression loosely represents a different symptom experienced by the victim, and each return of the Rondo theme mutates as the disease develops. Traditional harmonies, tonal clusters, and extended techniques combine to create feelings of discomfort, exhaustion, confusion, fear, and hope. The prevailing aura of the composition is one of foreboding. Toward the end of the piece, the viola introduces intravenous antibiotics with a sequence of inappropriate C major chords. The violin takes over these chords, hammering them relentlessly in syncopation over the loudest and most aggressive statement of the Rondo theme yet. This juxtaposition represents the onslaught of antibiotics and the reactionary “herxing” of the disease. The cacophony resolves into sublime exaltation, portraying the alleviation of symptoms, followed by a passage of blissful calm and relief. Unfortunately, relapse is right around the corner.
InterMusic SF gave us a grant to record Ehrlichia and make a video. Trio Solano made the audio recording with Swineshead Productions, LLC in Hertz Hall at University of California Berkeley, the use of which was donated to the project by the music department. We commissioned Nancy Schroeder to create her painting, then made a video with Tritone Media in a patch of Tilden Regional Park that resembled the scene of Nancy’s painting. This video was shared on YouTube and created a buzz, bringing catharsis to thousands of Lyme patients, as well as prompting articles and blogs within the Lyme community. We’ve received hundreds of comments from victims who thanked us for creating this, and it thrilled us. Many said that it sounds the way they feel. It’s also brought catharsis for me. I know it’s a cliché, but I expressed the pain, and I felt better; and the audience responded. Whenever we perform it, I explain what the piece is about, although I don’t tell the audiences that I have Lyme. Many audience members tell me that “they don’t usually like modern music,” but with my explanation before the performance, they find it riveting. Both the composition and Trio Solano received Silver Medals from Global Music Awards in 2022. Ehrlichia is the only composition of mine that has received this kind of interest. The audio recording from this video will be included on the album, The Bow and the Brush Volume 2, which will be released by MSR Classics in 2024.
This article is the first time I’ve gone public about my disease. Coincidentally, I’m not the only disabled member of Trio Solano. Paul Ehrlich, the violist, suffers from focal dystonia, which attacked his bow arm beginning about fifteen years ago. Vicky Ehrlich, the cellist, had surgery on her hand a few months before we recorded Ehrlichia. The upcoming album will include a new trio being composed by Michael Panther, a San Diego-based saxophonist and composer who suffers from spina bifida. Michael and I have been friends since high school. Perhaps celebrating artists with disabilities will be an ongoing venture for me? And yes, since you asked, I plan to compose more Rhapsodies in Discomfort and encourage you to do the same.
My teacher ... eventually encouraged me to audition for the pre-college division at Juilliard. I refused; Saturdays were for baseball, skateboarding, and general mischief.
Dan Flanagan
Playing the violin was no longer fun or easy. I started to feel like I could never get warmed up; stiff muscles got in the way of accuracy, and playing became laborious. When I’d perform, I’d shake all over, which my peers and teachers attributed to being nervous.
Dan Flanagan
In my twenties, I developed tendinitis in my left wrist, as so many violinists do. I saw several doctors and was told to stop playing for two weeks, which was heart-breaking. After two weeks off, not only did the pain not subside, but it then showed up in the right wrist.
Dan Flanagan
From age fifteen to twenty-nine, I’d probably seen over thirty practitioners for these chronic ailments that never seemed to heal.
Dan Flanagan
Many victims never know they were bitten, developing symptoms slowly over many years, with doctors attributing them to other conditions. When these infections go untreated, they become chronic. ... Insurance companies still reject the existence of chronic Lyme because the treatments are expensive and often endless.
Dan Flanagan
I play an enormous amount of new music. Every note I play hurts, though. ... All the shakes I get when I perform are because Lyme is entrenched in my nervous system. When the “fight or flight” kicks in, which it does for all performers, my nervous system can’t handle it, causing a seizure. The brighter the stage lights, the worse the reaction is. I’ve learned that this is due to Lyme attacking my brain and eye muscles. I’ve controlled it with medication all these years so that I can get through performances.
Dan Flanagan
A couple of times, while taking antibiotics, the symptoms dissipated briefly and I could get around the violin accurately with ease, feeling like I was Heifetz. It never lasts, though.
Dan Flanagan
I decided to forgo composition to put all my time into being a violinist. Twenty-five years later, a girlfriend asked, “Do you do anything creative?” “Uh, I’ve played the violin day in and day out for thirty-six years,” I replied. “Yeah, but you just play other people’s music, right?”
Dan Flanagan
It occurred to me that it's okay to compose music that isn’t great, or even good. In fact, it’s perfectly acceptable to compose music that nobody likes. This was liberating. ... To date, I’ve composed eighteen pieces and am currently working on a string quartet. And surprisingly, there are a few people who like my music!
Dan Flanagan
Ehrlichia, one of the diseases under the Lyme umbrella, was named after the Nobel Prize-winning physician, Dr. Paul Ehrlich (of no relation to the violist in Trio Solano). Composing a piece on this topic, with the title Ehrlichia, was a no-brainer, as they say. Originally, it was supposed to be funny but morphed into something that people took seriously, including me.
Dan Flanagan
It’s much easier to compose a piece with little structure that is mostly ugly than a piece that is beautiful or makes sense.
Dan Flanagan
Beginning with a pizzicato tick bite, "Ehrlichia," Rhapsody in Discomfort #6 brings the listener through the tribulations of a Lyme Disease patient. The repeated Rondo theme, representing the disease traveling through the body, is a fast moving, feverish collection of broken scales in C minor. Each digression loosely represents a different symptom experienced by the victim, and each return of the Rondo theme mutates as the disease develops.
Dan Flanagan
This video was shared on YouTube and created a buzz, bringing catharsis to thousands of Lyme patients, as well as prompting articles and blogs within the Lyme community. We’ve received hundreds of comments from victims who thanked us for creating this, and it thrilled us. Many said that it sounds the way they feel. It’s also brought catharsis for me. I know it’s a cliché, but I expressed the pain, and I felt better; and the audience responded.
Dan Flanagan
I plan to compose more Rhapsodies in Discomfort and encourage you to do the same.
Yesterday, after almost a month of rain and floods here in California — unreal and biblical — Jeremy and I enjoyed several hours of very welcome sunshine. What struck us was how much life there was everywhere, a testament to how the earth wants to grow, to exist in health, to be a paradise even after the stresses humans have imposed on it. We found groves of matsutake mushrooms that are currently drying in front of our fireplace, and I fried up cat’s ear leaves (a bit like sweeter dandelion greens) for dinner. New yarrow, lavender, and Cleveland sage went into bedtime tea for little old lady me, and magenta and purple potatoes that had been washed out of their wine barrels by the storm are on the counter now, waiting to be baked. The ground has a spongy spring to it, no longer brittle and hard from our years-long drought. The dogs have been boinging around, no longer cooped up inside, loving all of the fresh smells and chasing insects.
That was yesterday. For most of the month before, as Jeremy was frantically diverting water flows on our Boonville property to minimize damage to our structures, including our new fire break pond, I was laid up with my first, and hopefully last, slipped disc. The timing couldn’t have been worse, to really see how out of shape I am when a couple hours of gardening put me in such straits. In these fires we’ve been suffering the past six years, the very young, the very old, and the disabled have been the ones to perish first; I had my first frightening glimpse of physical vulnerability as being able to evacuate quickly, to carry scared pets or precious belongings, to be mentally alert and not distracted by pain, is an imperative. I also felt much guilt that Jeremy, exhausted and covered in mud, had to help me out of bed, take care of meals, and scan the weather reports for lifts in the rain so he could drive whatever roads were precariously open to get me meds.
A scary powerful brain-chemistry-changing (!) muscle relaxant got me feeling better and I’ve been cautiously doing back exercises, with a view out my large studio windows to our valley, thinking: I want to be able to walk and run on that land, even if it’s burning or flooding, but hopefully, neither of those. I’ve since formed a small women’s group to walk several days a week, and I think we might even pump a little iron when our garage gym is complete. This is in addition to two neighborhood fire safety groups we belong to, an active local foods group, and of course, the local youth music program we’re trying to encourage through GLFCAM. Formerly pretty solitary when I was still a Bay Area urbanite, the reality of the climate crisis has had me creating more local community than I have ever done. That’s not necessarily comfortable for me but I think the crisis will only be effectively addressed en masse, including with our immediate neighbors.
I owe you music, but I’ve held your attention long enough and will send that along another time. Have a beautiful and safe week, all!
The earth wants to grow, to exist in health, to be a paradise even after the stresses humans have imposed on it.
Gabriela Lena Frank
I want to be able to walk and run on that land, even if it's burning or flooding, but hopefully, neither of those.
Gabriela Lena Frank
Formerly pretty solitary when I was still a Bay Area urbanite, the reality of the climate crisis has had me creating more local community than I have ever done.
Gabriela Lena Frank
I think the crisis will only be effectively addressed en masse.
