Category: Conversations

Tina Davidson: Listening Through The Journey

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Podcasts and Discussions

The story of Tina Davidson’s life, which is the basis of her newly published memoir Let Your Heart Be Broken, is extremely intense but also a rewarding reading experience just like the emotional roller coaster rides in so many of her musical compositions make for very compelling listening.

As she told Frank J. Oteri, “When you write about yourself, you really make yourself incredibly vulnerable, and hopefully you can do that without making other people vulnerable in your life.”

Several weeks ago I started reading Let Your Heart Be Broken, a memoir by the composer Tina Davidson. For many years I’ve treasured the two CDs of her intense chamber music which made me immediately intrigued to learn her biographical details. It turns out the story of her life was far more complicated that anything I could have imagined, although I probably should have imagined as much given the emotional roller coaster rides in so many of her extremely compelling musical compositions.

I shouldn’t give it all away just yet, though be forewarned that there are some spoiler alerts in the recording of my talk with her posted above and in the full transcript of it below. So if you’re worried that reading or listening to the giveaways might ruin the experience of reading the book for you, and it is rewarding reading, I’d strongly suggest getting the book and reading it first before engaging further here.

But my conversation with Tina also took a much deeper dive into some of her musical compositions and her writing process than she would have been able to get into in a book aimed at general readers. However, what compelled me to speak with her was a passage from that book in which she explains why she mostly eschews conventional musical development in her output:

In the classical music tradition, development is a process by which a composer uses the musical material of a piece … Many living composers use development as a chief technique in their music. They push the melodies around and rework them by directly transposing or inverting them. My ear pauses. Why do I feel they stand at the river’s edge, beating their musical material with stones until it is thin, weak, and colorless?
“Music, for me, is like bread. I define the ingredients, actively knead the dough. There is an essential part I cannot do–the rising. I provide the right size pan, large enough so the bread can expand to its fullest potential and small enough so it can use the side of a pan as support. I decide when the bread has risen enough without too much poking around. This is a judgment of my eye, heart, and mind acting together. Rising too much, it will be filled with air and collapse. Rising too little, it will be mean and hard, an impenetrable nugget.

For Tina, as she explained to me when I brought up this passage to her, “That’s the risk you take with your work. You don’t always write great music. You have flops. I have pieces where I go, ‘Oh, boy, I hope they don’t see the light of day!’ I don’t know why. It just didn’t happen. I try not to revise a lot of things. If I have a piece that I don’t love I’ll just say, ‘Okay, next piece.'”

In addition to being like bread, a piece of music is also always a journey and Tina’s hope is that she can ultimately bring the audience along with her on the trip.

It’s about me traveling and hopefully you listening with me through the journey of the piece and that wonderful sense that you can’t actually touch music, you know, it’s so ephemeral. You reconstruct that journey through memory. As you get to the end of the piece, it doesn’t make any sense unless you could remember the beginning. So it’s you as an active participant that really creates the pieces as a whole. I think that composers actually collaborate with everyone. They collaborate with the performers as the performers really inhabit your music and it has to be shaped on their body. And then the audience. You kind of collaborate with them as an extension of receiving it. … I’m not telling them; I hope that I’m eliciting from them their own response. … [W]hen I write a piece of music, I try to articulate where I am the most the best that I can. And what I’ve noticed is that when it’s out there, it’s not that people get me, but they get themselves. And that’s what I love. That it’s almost as if something about my music or that experience resonates with something in them and they can experience themselves. And that’s what I’d hope for.

The ability for people to form their own narratives when they listen to an abstract piece of instrumental music is not quite the same as being able to empathize with an author when reading the details of a first person narrative and Tina is very conscious of the difference in these modalities.

“I think in the beginning of my composing journey, as a young person what I loved about it is I could be anonymous, she acknowledged toward the beginning of our discussion. “I think that as I grew through my 30s and then 40s–I’ve been writing for 45 years–I found I resolved a lot of personal issues and had more courage to come forward and be direct, to say, ‘this is what I’m writing about.’ Certainly I suppose that the memoir is the full circle of that. When you write about yourself, you really make yourself incredibly vulnerable, and hopefully you can do that without making other people vulnerable in your life. And I worked really hard at being honest without calling people names or having judgments about their behavior necessarily.”

I think in the beginning of my composing journey, as a young person what I loved about it is I could be anonymous.

Tina Davidson

When you write about yourself, you really make yourself incredibly vulnerable, and hopefully you can do that without making other people vulnerable in your life.

Tina Davidson

I think in music you get the journey, whatever the journey is. And the journey, to me, is always a story. It’s about me traveling and hopefully you listening with me through the journey of the piece and that wonderful sense that you can’t actually touch music, you know, it’s so ephemeral. You reconstruct that journey through memory. As you get to the end of the piece, it doesn’t make any sense unless you could remember the beginning.

Tina Davidson

I think when you go to a place and you say, “music is a universal language,” you might be putting on a little bit of emperor’s clothing.

Tina Davidson

When I write a piece of music, I try to articulate where I am the most the best that I can. And what I’ve noticed is that when it’s out there, it’s not that people get me, but they get themselves. And that’s what I love.

Tina Davidson

I love the idea of collaborating with the listener. I’m not telling them; I hope that I’m eliciting from them their own response.

Tina Davidson

I had never played a woman composer. Nobody said to me, “Oh, you can’t be a composer, you’re a woman.” But, there was no example of it. So it never occurred to me that I could write music, so that was sort of astounding.

Tina Davidson

The music field has developed a story that hasn’t embraced new work.

Tina Davidson

When we make the art form really accessible to everyone, and we say, “You can do this,” they’re going to be more interested listeners because it will be their art form and they identify with it rather than its boxed art form, or classical music art form. The curative is to allow composition to be embraced.

Tina Davidson

I always felt like I came out of an American experience of composing which was Ruggles and Ives and Cowell and Henry Brant, although he’s Canadian, but then I hung out with people like Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Rzewski. Those composers were really informative to me. They didn’t care about fitting in.

Tina Davidson

You don’t always write great music. You have flops. I have pieces where I go, “Oh, boy, I hope they don’t see the light of day!” I don’t know why. It just didn’t happen. I try not to revise a lot of things. If I have a piece that I don’t love I’ll just say, “Okay, next piece.”

Tina Davidson

When I write I hold the words or the title in my head and I ask the title to inform me as I’m composing.

Tina Davidson

What I think is characteristic of a lot of my music is that breaking open at the end. For me spiritually, at the end of all of your physical limits then you say, "Okay," and your heart just goes up to God. It’s like, "Okay, I’m ready."

Tina Davidson

My job is to do the work and plant the seeds and hope that there will be some outcomes, but I can’t be outcome-driven.

Tina Davidson

What I am really interested in now is what happens to a creative artist when you go through your 60s and you go towards the end of your life. What is creativity? I think we have a lot of fantasies, you know, "Oh, you wrote music until the last dying breath," you know? "He’s dictating the requiem as he’s gasping for air!" But what happens to your creativity as you get older?

Tina Davidson

New Music USA · Tina Davidson Episode #21: Listening Through The Journey
Tina Davidson in Conversation with Frank J. Oteri
March 10, 2023, 11:00 AM via Zoom
Opening and concluding voiceovers by Brigid Pierce
Audio production by Anthony Nieves

dublab — Staying True in the Film Industry

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Chandler Poling - Conversations, Podcasts and Discussions

Dublab Radio DJ Chandler Poling of Studio Soundtracks interviews film composer Chanda Dancy about her musical upbringing, her inspirations, and her creative contributions to the Sony Pictures’ feature film Devotion. Together they discuss the public perception of what a composer is and how Chanda’s work challenges that perspective.

Native Texan Chanda Dancy started composing orchestral works at the age of 12. She has been described as a “phenomenal composer” (Ted Chung, Zacuto: Featured Filmmakers) and “quickly gaining recognition as a foremost black American contemporary composer.” (Anthony Parnther, Conductor, San Bernardino Symphony). Her works are described as “emotionally penetrating” (John Malveaux, Africlassical.com) and “rich” (George Heymont, Huffington Post).

An alumnus of the USC Film Scoring Program, and the Sundance Composers Lab, Chanda is both an accomplished film and television composer with over 18 years of experience and an emerging classical concert composer. Arts Boston named her one of “10 Contemporary Black Composers You Should Know”. She is known for her work on the Sundance award winning documentary Aftershock (Disney/Onyx Collective), the hit Netflix TV Original The Defeated starring Taylor Kitsch, the Korean War era epic Devotion starring Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell, and the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance with Somebody, directed by Kasi Lemmons.

Chandler Poling is the Co-Founder of White Bear PR, a Public Relations firm specializing in Publicity for Composers, Songwriters, Music Supervisors, and Film & Music Festivals around the world.  Throughout his career, Chandler has run successful Oscar, Golden Globe, Grammy, BAFTA and Emmy campaigns securing nominations and wins. His clients have been featured in national and international publications, such as Time Magazine, Vanity Fair, New York Times, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian, LA Times, and Rolling Stone Magazine to name just a few. He created the first ever composer-focused panel at Comic-Con San Diego, the World’s Largest Pop Culture Convention.  These panels are now an ongoing tradition – a platform for composers to discuss their craft and meet their fans. In addition to producing and moderating panels, Chandler has been invited to give lectures on PR for Composers at Berklee College of Music, Royal College of Music, NYU, USC, and internationally in Prague, Amsterdam, Vienna, Krakow, Cologne, Ghent, and others. In Los Angeles, he is a radio DJ for the independent station Dublab where he hosts a monthly program called Studio Soundtracks featuring conversations with music professionals in the film, television and video game industries. He is proud to be part of the founding leadership of The Alliance for Women Film Composers and Vice President of Qweerty Gamers – a non-profit LGBTQ video game advocacy organization.

New Music USA · dublab — Staying True in the Film Industry

dublab — Compositional Curiosities

Posted on November 3, 2022 by Beatie Wolfe - Conversations, Podcasts and Discussions

Web Header co branding (New Musicn USA & dublab) - Beatie Wolfe & Mark Mothersbaugh

Listen to Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and visionary artist Beatie Wolfe talk about the art of composition and other creative curiosities their worlds collide with, including their viral campaign Postcards for Democracy.

Presented as part of ON AIR LA ANNEX, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and “musical weirdo and visionary” Beatie Wolfe discuss the art of composition, building worlds, and how being a conceptual artist can further open up and inform these spaces. Straddling multidisciplines, the pair also revisit Postcards for Democracy, their 2020 collective art campaign in support of USPS, and chat about its impact and how they are still receiving cards today ahead of the next election.

This program is part of New Music USA’s web magazine NewMusicBox “Guest Editor series”, which aims to celebrate a plurality of voices from across the nation and will feature exclusive content written, produced, or commissioned by a rotating artist or organization. The series kicks off with dublab. NewMusicBox, edited by Frank J. Oteri, amplifies creators and organizations who are building a vibrant future for new music in all its forms, and has provided a vital platform for creators to speak about issues relevant to them in their own words since 1999.

The dublab partnership will feature new weekly content from at least 15 different voices through January 2023, presented in conversations, DJ mixes, articles, and live performances all exploring the current landscape of music composition.

The Guest Editor is the first such series in the magazine’s 23-year history and reflects New Music USA’s aim to deepen its impact across the many diverse music communities across the United States. This aim is also demonstrated by NewMusicBox’s ongoing “Different Cities, Different Voices” feature that spotlights music creation hubs across the nation.

New Music USA · Dublab — Compositional Curiosities

dublab – Composing for Film: A Conversation with Emily Rice

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Elyn Kazarian - Conversations, Interviews, Podcasts and Discussions

An altered image of Emily Rice against a blue background with the NMUSA and dublab logos superimposed

New Music USA · dublab – Composing for Film: A Conversation with Emily Rice

For this edition of dublab x New Music USA, join Elyn Kazarian and film composer Emily Rice as they discuss the process behind composing, collaborating with directors, finding your own voice, and ways to build a strong financial foundation. The first hour of the program will include a 30 minute mix of songs from various film scores composed by women.

Tracklist

“Life As A Carer” – Rachel Portman
“Eviction Notice” – Pinar Toprak
“Something to Believe in Again” – Pinar Toprak
“Main Title” (The Shining) – Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind
“Rocky Mountains” – Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind
“Defeated Clown” – Hildur Guðnadóttir
“Gallery” – Hildur Guðnadóttir
“Northwest Neighbourhood” – Emily Rice, Ro Rowan
“Smoke” – Lesley Barber
“Manchester Minimalist Piano and Strings” – Lesley Barber
“Coco’s Theme” – Kathryn Bostic
“Rising” – Morgan Kibby
“When We Were Boys” – Morgan Kibby
“Ronsel Leaves” – Tamar-Kali
“But For Love” – Tamar-Kali

dublab – Natural Soundscapes

Posted on October 6, 2022 by Mark Frosty McNeill - Conversations, Podcasts and Discussions

Dublab co-founder Mark “Frosty” McNeill visits Griffith Park to chat with Noah Klein, co-founder of the Floating collective which hosts a weekly series of roving soundscapes and soundbaths activated in unique and natural spaces. During the course of their conversation, Klein discusses his personal musical practice, history of community organizing through the lens of music, deep love of nature, and dedication to creative placemaking.

Launched during the thick of the Covid Pandemic, the Floating series was just what Los Angeles needed—an invitation to come outside and hear the city in new ways. Through a weekly series of roving soundscapes and soundbaths activated in unique and natural spaces, the Floating collective have opened up Angelenos’ ears and spirits to the wonders of the environments around them.

These all ages happenings are generous affairs both for the audience and performers who are encouraged to embrace the indeterminacy of outdoor performance and expand into the infinite potential of the moment. Floating succeeds in merging the ambience of the city with the intentionality of sonic artistry and as collective co-founder Noah Klein puts it, “Finding the threads between soundscape and landscape.”

dublab co-founder Mark “Frosty” McNeill sat down with Noah Klein to discuss his personal musical practice, history of community organizing through the lens of music, deep love of nature and dedication to creative placemaking. Their conversation took place under a canopy of trees at Trails Cafe, in Griffith Park over a chickpea salad sandwich and cold beverages.

New Music USA · Natural Soundscapes

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen): The Landfill of Meaning

Posted on August 10, 2022 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Interviews, SoundLives

Beyoncé’s latest album Renaissance made international headlines last week when Australian disability advocate Hannah Diviney called out one of the album’s songs, “Heated,” for using an ableist slur in the lyrics and Beyoncé subsequently agreed to re-record the song without that word and replace the track. Earlier this summer, the electronic music community was up in arms when an advance promotional video for that album made for British Vogue showed the pop icon scratching an LP with her fingernails. It turns out that it is a performance technique created by San Francisco-based experimental artist Victoria Shen, who performs under the moniker Evicshen, and she was not credited. But soon after the outcry, the appropriation was acknowledged and Shen was offered an apology. Both of these stories show that even if Beyoncé’s creative team is not always completely careful choosing all the details, they are paying very close attention to how people are reacting to her work on social media. And in Shen’s case, it actually gave her a new level of notoriety.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen) and her needle nails. (Photo by Caroline Rose Moore, courtesy Victoria Shen.)

“The fact that my work was able to reach a much broader audience than I would have been ever able to have, even if it wasn’t credited at first, I think, is kind of amazing,” Shen said when I spoke with her over Zoom a few weeks ago during her residency at Wave Farm. She also pointed out that the concept, while visually startling and aurally fascinating, is perhaps not the most radical idea. “It’s just kind of like a natural thing. I also used to do nails, so this is a kind of thing where you think somebody would have done this already. It’s sort of low hanging fruit. But of course it takes both someone who used to do nails professionally and does electronics that had to make the bridge.”

As I would soon learn upon digging deeper into Shen’s creative output after she was first mentioned to me by my New Music USA colleague Ami Dang, who also creates electronic music and is a huge fan of Shen’s work, the needle nails technique is just one of many new approaches to making sounds that Shen has used in her performances and sound installations. After hearing and watching a segment of her extraordinary Zero Player Piano, in which disembodied piano strings and hammers are positioned along an ascending staircase and triggered remotely, I knew I had to talk with her.

“That was the gateway into more physical, electro-acoustic things I’m interested in now,” Shen explained. “To me, it was definitely a Modernist strategy … Something that’s self-reflexive. Something that is medium-specific. Like: what is a piano? How far can you push it to its logical conclusion while still maintaining we’re still arguing that it is within the medium of piano?”

Although some of her work can sound quite austere at times, Shen is ultimately suspicious of Modernist aesthetics. “I do like the Modernist kind of mission,” she admits, “but I know that it ultimately fails because all value divides contextually, arbitrarily. It could go in one eye and go out another, or it could be worth something based on some arbitrary factor which is like some institution assigns value to it. Or some kind of cultural capital gets ascribed to it. That’s bullshit. And we all know that, so how can we use things that are hyper, or super full of meaning, I call it the landfill of meaning. I use that in some recognized tactical way. I think I try and create this interface between non-meaning, that which is noise, and that which is over filled with meaning, and then take that interface, that line, and mine that for different conclusions as to how we derive our sense of value.”

Shen is also ambivalent about whether or not she is a composer, even though all the sounds she makes are completely her own, often including all the devices she uses to make them.

“I’m not a composer, I think mainly due to the fact that I don’t work with other people. I think composers really shine when they’re able to provide a set of instructions for other people to execute their work. … I think I’m much more of an improviser than a composer. I think part of composition, at least traditionally, is all about having a pre-packaged work being shipped out and executed, realized anywhere. And so for that, you want to control expression of your piece. You want to control the space in which it takes place. And it’s all about control, control, control. To me, it’s sort of the McDonald’s of sound.”

As for Beyoncé, Shen remains a fan though she doesn’t imagine that the two of them will ever collaborate.

I really doubt that she even knows I exist. I think her PR person knows I exist, but that’s as high as it goes. … I would just love to play at her mansion, to play a pool party or something with needle nails, it would be great.

Victoria Shen carefully scratching a home made record with audio playback styluses affixed to her fingernails during a performance.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen) during a performance on February 23, 2022. (Photo by Matt Miramontes, courtesy Victoria Shen.)

I just like being able to put in different sounds together at the same time. So Chinese opera, ltalian opera, swing music.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

I’m a very technical person, but everything I do is by feel and not by the interest in pure math or manipulation in numbers or anything like that.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

My identity is something that is completely inescapable. I do like the Modernist kind of mission, but I know that it ultimately fails because all value divides contextually, arbitrarily. It could go in one eye and go out another, or it could be worth something based on some arbitrary factor which is like some institution assigns value to it. Or some kind of cultural capital gets ascribed to it. That’s bullshit. And we all know that.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

I think I try and create this interface between non-meaning, that which is noise, and that which is over filled with meaning, and then take that interface, that line, and mine that for different conclusions as to how we derive our sense of value.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

The rules of music are also arbitrary. So anything that exists outside of these rules is considered experimental or noise. But that’s the freeing thing; there are no rules here.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

In anything that I’ve released on vinyl, on tape, on Bandcamp, digital, I think I’m playing the role of composer with those pieces. But otherwise, I’m not a composer, I think mainly due to the fact that I don’t work with other people.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

Part of composition, at least traditionally, is all about having a pre-packaged work being shipped out and executed, realized anywhere. And so for that, you want to control expression of your piece. You want to control the space in which it takes place. And it’s all about control, control, control. To me, it’s sort of the McDonald’s of sound.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

I always loved experimental music. I was listening to a lot of noise rock and IDM and even psych-folk stuff in high school. But harsh noise was something that was cracked open for me by Jessica Rylan.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

I like to dance a lot. I don’t necessarily consider what I do in my performances as dance, but it could be considered movement.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

For me there has to be some kind of grounded-ness, some kind of gold standard. And the gold standard I think for us is always going to be the human body.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

This is why I think improvisation is so good. It’s because you’re risking it all. With composition you can feel really safe because you have an expectation and that expectation is met. If it’s not met, if it’s underwhelming, then oh well who cares, right? But risk and the position of possible failure I think is very important. ... Failure happens all the time! I’m like, oh I have an idea, it’s spur of the moment improvisation. Let me try this out. Uh, will it fail? Sometimes. Is it embarrassing? Maybe. Move on. You know, but I think that is a point that is compelling for people.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

I did not grow up with records. My earliest memory is listening to Peking Opera on a cassette tape with my mom and we were splitting the ear buds. I wasn’t around records. I had some records, but never really messed with them.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

I would just love to play at her [Beyoncé's] mansion, to play a pool party or something with needle nails, it would be great.

Victoria Shen (a.k.a. Evicshen)

Victoria Shen in conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Via Zoom on Tuesday, July 19, 2022 at 4:45 p.m.
Transcribed by Julia Lu and Frank J. Oteri.
Introductions by Bridget Pierce. Audio production by Anthony Nieves.

Susie Ibarra: Hybrid Culture

Posted on July 7, 2021 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Interviews, Podcasts and Discussions, SoundLives

A week before I finally had a chance to have an extended conversation with multi-genre composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra, she performed at Roulette–her first concert with a group in front of a live audience since the pandemic shut everything down around the world. To say it has been a challenging 16 months for everyone is a tremendous understatement, but for Ibarra–whose artistry has been so deeply shaped by collaborations with other musicians–it could have proven stifling. And yet, this strange period has been remarkably productive for her.

Thus far this year, she has released two albums. First, Talking Gong, a spellbinding New Music USA-funded debut album of her new poly-stylistic trio with Claire Chase and Alex Peh. Then Walking on Water, a deeply moving homage to the victims of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsumani created in collaboration with visual artist Makoto Fujimura which uses the sounds of water as a central musical element. Both of these albums were recorded in studios over the course of last summer as COVID-19 cases were raging; musicians were tested before each session, remained masked whenever they could, and maintained physical distances. Susie Ibarra was also able to continue another strand of her output, her remarkable series of solo percussion explorations. An extraordinary performance she gave in a surreally empty hall at William Paterson College back in February is thankfully still available to stream. And a few months before that, in December 2020, she launched the Composers Now Impact series of composer presentations with a fascinating audio-video stream about her music.

Obviously we talked about these unprecedented times in which we are still living; it’s pretty much impossible not to talk about it. But we also talked about a wide range of other topics during the hour we spent together over Zoom. The very first time I ever heard Susie Ibarra, she was part of the legendary David S. Ware Quartet alongside Matt Shipp and William Parker. So I was eager to find out more about how she found herself in her 20s as part of this legendary free jazz quartet as an equal partner in what many aficionados consider to be some of the most enduring music of the late 1990s. I was also curious to learn more about her stint playing with the New Jersey indie rock band Yo La Tengo and the collaborative improvisatory trio Mephista she performed in with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and laptop artist Ikue Mori.

We were all just happy to be in the room and back into our practice of attending or performing concerts. I really missed that a lot.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

I played that performance the day before one of my dear mentors passed away. Milford Graves passed the next afternoon. I had a kind of spiritual visit from him while I was playing and in one piece, I ended up playing some rhythms that he had directly taught me.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

Putting gender to instruments has always been a strange thing for me, ‘cause it has affected all of us as human beings. And it’s all these inanimate objects that we culturally have put gender on.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

When I hear younger generations, and their voices, and how they’re able to voice this politically right now, and socially, I’m really happy and hopeful. In my generation, I think there are certain things that just weren’t even touched or addressed.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

It wasn’t that I was buying albums. I had some, but I wasn’t a giant collector. I wanted to go to the live performances.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

I was just so happy playing music. It's the best way to keep growing and learning.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

Sometimes when we were playing pieces, you don’t know who’s making what sounds. I love that actually, ‘cause we were all really integrated in playing that music in the moment.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

It was never like: "Susie, you can’t do this because you’re a woman." I didn’t come from that culture. So I feel really lucky. … But I certainly got schooled on how society saw it.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

I grew up with a hybrid culture. So it’s what I know. I don’t know anything otherwise. … I love that aesthetic that everybody has their own thing that’s really special and it’s different.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

I love rehearsals in any situation. It’s great when you get a lot of players that just want to play, and we want to play and see how it’s going to grow.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

At one point, I was living the winters in the Philippines. It was like having two lives.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

We felt that particularly with water rhythms, listening to climate change, we are personally inviting the listener in to have a more personal experience and to connect, because everybody’s had a connection to water.

Susie Ibarra, composer & percussionist

An undercurrent that runs throughout Susie Ibarra’s career trajectory is that many of the activities she was engaging in–performing in genres such as free jazz, particularly as a drummer–were unusual for a woman back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Her memories about that era were particularly illuminating:

“Having been a young musician, I definitely went through it, like with the naivete of all of a sudden having to wake up to that–wow, oh, the world is like this. Because I was raised by a very strong mother. She was a doctor and grew up in World War II in Manila. She’s very bright. She skipped three grades. She graduated from med school when she was 22. It was never like: ‘Susie, you can’t do this because you’re a woman.’ I didn’t come from that culture. So I was really lucky. Really lucky. Because in that particular style, whatever genre of jazz it is, it’s very socially difficult to a point where you think: Well, I can be empathetic and supportive to issues that are going on, but I also know that what my life path is is different than other people who are born into their life paths. So I also can’t just take on giant, heavy stones on my back that are not going to serve a purpose or be useful for anything. So initially, I think I just loved so much a lot of this music and playing, and I was also raised in a certain way. I didn’t see it that way. But I certainly got schooled on how society saw it. And then it’s the question of: do I want to accept that, or do I want to not accept that.”

Another thing that has given her tremendous strength and perseverance has been her immersion into her Philippine heritage. As she would later learn when she began to spend time absorbing the myriad musical practices in the Philippines, percussion instruments were traditionally played by women. So the way that cultures have gendered certain musical instruments is by no means universal. However, being born in California, raised in Houston, and coming of age as an artist in New York City, no single cultural force has exclusively shaped her approach to making music.

“I grew up with a hybrid culture, so it’s what I know,” she explains. “I don’t know anything otherwise. … I love that aesthetic that everybody has their own thing that’s really special and it’s different.”

New Music USA · SoundLives — Susie Ibarra: Hybrid Culture
Frank J. Oteri in conversation with Susie Ibarra
June 18, 2021—Noon EDT via Zoom
Via a Zoom Conference Call
Additional voiceovers by Brigid Pierce; audio editing by Anthony Nieves

Ricky Ian Gordon: My Way of Enveloping a Story

Posted on May 5, 2021 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, NewMusicBox, Podcasts and Discussions, SoundLives

For the past 20 years, Ricky Ian Gordon has been creating works for the stage—operas, musicals, or one-of a-kind music/theater hybrids—and getting them produced one after another, seemingly without a pause. But 14 months ago, fresh off from the PROTOTYPE production of Ellen West and with two new works about to open—Intimate Apparel at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis with New York City Opera—plus a revival of The Grapes of Wrath at Aspen in the works, everything came to a screeching halt as the world went into lockdown due to the pandemic.

“They didn’t even take down the set of Intimate Apparel,” Ricky exclaimed when we spoke over Zoom. “Michael Yeargan’s set is there. Cathy Zuber’s costumes, Jennifer Tipton’s lights, everything’s in place. We just have to get back in the theater. We’ll open the theater again.”

But since everything has been on hold for over a year now, he has taken a break from madly finishing new scores. Instead, he has focused mostly on other things—writing poetry, a candid essay about his teenage obsession with Joni Mitchell which was published in Spin, and he’s now furiously at work on a book-length memoir that will be published in 2022 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.

“I couldn’t get behind writing music and anything that relies on performance during a period when there was not going to be any performance,” Gordon explained. “It just felt like the wrong direction. And also the whole Zoom music thing, like operas on Zoom, just doesn’t interest me that much. … But we’re all fickle, and if suddenly it was a form that was about my work, then I’m sure I’d turn around on it, ‘cause I’m 12-years-old inside.”

I actually decided I’m going to take a break from notes for a little while.

Ricky Ian Gordon

I’m the guy who writes hybrid.

Ricky Ian Gordon

It’s better to open a house on Madame Butterfly than on a brand new opera that is going to ask new things of this space.

Ricky Ian Gordon

By the next time you see Pacific Overtures, it might be for like kazoo and French horn.

Ricky Ian Gordon

If I could go back and have another life, I would be reading 24 hours a day.

Ricky Ian Gordon

If you want to be a librettist, you have to be attached to the events and the stories.

Ricky Ian Gordon

Because the AIDS crisis was in the center of my life, I was constantly writing for people who were dying.

Ricky Ian Gordon

There is no such thing as history or then and now.

Ricky Ian Gordon

The role of art in society and the role of the artist in society may in fact be more balanced when we return to normal, because death is way more clearly imminent.

Ricky Ian Gordon

It’s somewhat surprising that Ricky Ian Gordon didn’t jump on the virtual music bandwagon, since for years he’s been involved in creating works for the stage that redefine possibilities and break boundaries. But he also excels at creating work that is emotionally direct and has an immediate impact with audiences, so it makes sense that he’d be skeptical about creating something designed to be experienced by isolated individuals in front of computer terminals. And what inspires him more than anything else is the narrative arc of a great story, whether it’s a John Steinbeck novel, passages from Marcel Proust, a poem by Frank Bidart about a patient of an early 20th century psychiatrist suffering from anorexia nervosa, or the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. While most of his stage works are based on events from the distant past, these stories are very much in the present for him.

“Is Grapes of Wrath any less resonant now than it was then?” he asked at one point in our talk. “The entire world is one big refugee crisis. One big drought. One big food shortage. One big government saying: it’s not my fault. The Grapes of Wrath could have been written yesterday! When we wrote 27 about Gertrude and Alice, what was the zeitgeist? Gay marriage. And this is like the original gay marriage. These two women were calling themselves husband and wife before World War I. It all feels like it’s happening now. … I never feel like I’m back in time. … I just feel like … I’m making myself available for those stories. Then I feel like they sort of explode through me. There is no such thing as history or then and now. There’s only the current moment and what seems to be my way of enveloping that story.”

Thankfully, though he has had numerous productions put on hiatus, Ricky Ian Gordon has not suffered great hardship during the past year as have so many others who have lost loved ones or have gotten sick themselves. But he is also a war-scarred survivor of the AIDS crisis which claimed tons of people dear to him, most significantly his partner Jeffrey Michael Grossi, whose death inspired his deeply personal adaptation of Orpheus and Eurydice and his poignant monodrama Green Sneakers. The lessons Gordon learned from that horrific time inform his outlook on where we as a society are right now.

“It was a very intense time,” he recalled. “Because the AIDS crisis was in the center of my life, I was constantly writing for people who were dying … We live in a very divided country right now, but I just can’t imagine we’re not all gonna be affected by this. … The role of art in society and the role of the artist in society may in fact be more balanced when we return to normal, because death is way more clearly imminent. … How do you incorporate that into a new world where at any moment you could get a pandemic and everyone could be killed? What does art mean then?”

New Music USA · SoundLives — Ricky Ian Gordon: My Way Of Enveloping A Story
Frank J. Oteri in conversation with Ricky Ian Gordon
April 19, 2021—1:30pm EDT via Zoom
Additional voiceovers by Brigid Pierce; audio editing by Anthony Nieves

Pamela Z: Expanding Our Imaginations

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, NewMusicBox, Podcasts and Discussions, SoundLives

The only thing that is almost as exciting as watching and listening to a multimedia performance by Pamela Z is to hear her talk about it, which she does for almost an hour in a fascinating conversation that spans a wide range of topics including: creating and performing during the pandemic; her artistic beginnings as a singer-songwriter and how she transitioned into an experimental composer; a difficult encounter with TSA agents; dealing with constant changes in technology; and her obsession with old telephones.

Although Pamela is a composer who is mostly focused on creating new sounds by new means, it was extremely interesting to hear her describe her occasional frustration with the ephemerality of so many of the devices on which we all have become so dependent.

At one point she exclaims, “There are a lot of people in the world who all they care about is changing things. They don’t get attached to something. They really think everything is oh so yesterday, so six months ago. That is not compatible in a way with becoming virtuosic on anything. Building an instrument that you can become virtuosic on without having to pause every few minutes to update it and then change all of the things that no longer work with the update and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I always jokingly say: ‘Wouldn’t it be weird if you were a violinist or a cellist or something and every six months somebody would show up at your house and take your cello away from you and say, Here, this is the new cello, and you need to learn to play this one. And by the way, we’ve made the fretboard a little narrower because you don’t need all that extra space?’”

And yet, those technological changes and sometimes the strange glitches and disconnects that result from them have informed so much of this San Francisco Bay Area-based maverick’s creative work. Attention, a work she created for the Del Sol String Quartet, will forever change your perception of telephones ringing. Baggage Allowance will make you rethink your next airplane trip when it is safe to take one again. She hopes Times3, her sonic installation created for the 2021 Prototype Festival to accompany a walk around Times Square that has now been extended through April 30, 2021, “cues people into the thought of expanding their imagination to past, present, and future of whatever place they’re in.”

The time we’re living through right now is turning us all into filmmakers.

Pamela Z

One of my least favorite things is to see somebody making the awkward effort to make their performance visual just because they think that’s expected.

Pamela Z

I’ve actually been telling people that if they do have the chance to go and listen to the piece in Times Square that I also encourage them to have another listen to it, not in Times Square.

Pamela Z

I suddenly woke up one day and realized that the music I was playing for a living did not resemble what was on my turntable.

Pamela Z

I spend just as much time going to visual art museums and galleries as I do going to concerts.

Pamela Z

Wouldn’t it be weird if you were a cellist and every six months somebody would show up at your house and take your cello away from you and say, “Here, this is the new cello, and you need to learn to play this one.”

Pamela Z

Nothing dies on the internet. Well, except Flash.

Pamela Z

Pamela Z’s quest for new solutions which create problems that are also an integral part of the resultant work also informs her brand new Ink, a work which includes some surreal reflections on how musicians interact with notated scores which will be premiered by the San Francisco-based chorus Volti in an online performance on April 24.

Aside from learning more about all of these one-of-a-kind compositions, it’s a delight to hear all of her stories since, as anyone who has experienced her work already knows, she is an extremely engaging storyteller. Our time together over Zoom was a non-stop adventure except for, perhaps appropriately, the occasional internet connection hiccup which we mostly were able to fix in post-production editing.

New Music USA · SoundLives — Pamela Z: Expanding Our Imaginations
Frank J. Oteri in conversation with Pamela Z
March 16, 2021—4:00pm EDT via Zoom
Via a Zoom Conference Call between San Francisco CA and New York NY
Additional voiceovers by Brigid Pierce and Jonathan Stone; audio editing by Anthony Nieves

Judith Lang Zaimont: The Music She Has to Write

Posted on March 3, 2021 by Frank J. Oteri - Conversations, Cover, NewMusicBox, Podcasts and Discussions, SoundLives

Judith Lang Zaimont has been active as a pianist since she was five. She performed on national television at the age of 11 and began her studies at Juilliard at age 12. But despite her deep love for music from the very beginning, she realized early on that she hated practicing, playing the exact same thing again and again. One day, while sight-reading through some music by Chopin, she had an epiphany. The constant variations in his music meant he also hated playing the same thing again and again. And it suddenly dawned on her that her constant desire to play something new meant that she was a composer.

That endless search for something new still fuels Zaimont’s creativity many decades later. She is defiantly unwilling to be typecast for creating music in a particular style, which makes her music always a welcome surprise. But it has also proved challenging for her in terms of typical opportunities for composers.

“I have very particular ideas or thoughts about commissions,” she explained when we chatted over Zoom in early February. “They open doors. But they always come as a result of knowing past music by the person. And if you are not a one-groove individual artistically, if you have many parts to yourself, then you could open a door you’ve never opened before in a new piece. … We suffer a little bit, if you’ve been at this for a while, from being branded thus or such. And artists are not their brand. If you relax into that groove, beware.”

For Zaimont, composing music is always a work in progress, an ongoing journey of discovery and reinventing oneself. It has also made her very critical of her own work over the years which has led her to take works she no longer thinks are worthy out of circulation.

“The world doesn’t need those pieces,” she exclaimed. “I’m constantly going back and making sure that what I put forward is the best that I can do under the circumstances.”

Thankfully, however, there are quite a few pieces that she does still acknowledge and many performers acknowledge them, too. While so many composers are lucky if a piece they’ve written gets a performance and a recording, several of Zaimont’s works have been recorded multiple times which is, after all, how music becomes repertoire. And that is her goal since her music is deeply informed and inspired by the canon of classical music repertoire. Among the pillars in her catalog are six symphonies, two piano trios, a hefty piano sonata, and two string quartets—at least that she still acknowledges (believing that she only fully grasped the string quartet medium in her 60s). She has also composed a formidable Judaic sacred service, perhaps her most significant choral work although it has yet to be recorded in its entirety.

Yet despite Zaimont’s deep immersion in European musical traditions, her music is very much American. She has composed several rags and the rhythms and harmonies of jazz and various American popular music genres have seeped into her own compositional language, so much so that they’re not influences per se, but rather additional vocabulary that she has mastered and incorporated into her own ever-evolving sound world.

I have a super appreciation of the performer’s entry point...

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

I think a long time about how the music is going to be notated.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

I always want horizons that don’t fence you in.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

All of my pieces solve puzzles.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

I have tried not to be branded.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

I do charts of other people’s periodicities. I did all the development sections of all the Beethoven sonatas.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

My father used to come to all my concerts and applaud like crazy. And then he’d get this funny look on his face, like maybe he didn’t understand the music.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

Ned Rorem once wrote that a composer has three arrows in his quiver, and he shoots them over and over again. I took that as a challenge.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

If each piece isn’t a struggle to do, you’ve got to question how valid it is.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

Nobody ever told me that any women wrote music. Did it stop me? No.

Judith Lang Zaimont, composer

Early on in her career, Zaimont was also a major champion of other female composers, both contemporaries and women from earlier times, editing an important series of volumes of critical studies of their music.

“Nobody ever told me that any women wrote music,” she remembered. “Did it stop me? No. I knew I was born to write music. Didn’t matter to me. … But I saw there was a whole cohort of women who were writing music. I started to learn the history of music that had been written in times past by women. … These people were not in the history books. They were not there. Generations of the present moment weren’t knowing about them. The world needs to know about what they have accomplished and appreciate it. I got letters from some of the standing composers whom we profiled in the critical appraisals sections of the books to thank me for finally having been able to engender these really critical articles dealing with the stuff of their music. Not who they were as a person. Whether they were married or had children, how old they were. That they were women in a man’s world. None of that. Deal with their music. That’s why I did that. I set my own creative work aside to do this because somebody needed to step up and do it. … I’m very grateful to the music that these people wrote, that it is now in the world.”

But don’t call Zaimont, as she described it, an “adjective” composer.

“The thing I don’t like is being a column B composer. I don’t want to wait until you get adjective before the world composer. Before you think Judith Lang Zaimont. Think of me right up there. I sit at Chopin’s—just behind Chopin, I can’t sit at his shoulder. I sit back there a ways. But I’m on the stage.”

New Music USA · SoundLives — Judith Lang Zaimont – The Music She Has To Write
Frank J. Oteri in conversation with Judith Lang Zaimont
February 2, 2021—4:00pm EST via Zoom
Via a Zoom Conference Call between Maricopa AZ and New York NY
Produced and recorded by Brigid Pierce; audio editing by Anthony Nieves