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Composer inti figgis-vizueta creates music that carefully balances experimentation and practicality. She likens her compositions to plants which have the ability to grow and change when different people perform them.
“We’re able to continue to revisit them and see how they’ve changed,” she explained when we met over Zoom in mid-June. “I’ll hear people come back and play something that I haven’t heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we’re just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving–it’s very strange.”
inti’s openness to collaboration and belief in interpretative agency has made her music particularly attractive to soloists and ensembles ranging from Andrew Yee and Conrad Tao to Roomful of Teeth, Ensemble Dal Niente, and even the Kronos Quartet who asked her to compose a piece for their 50 for the Future Project.
“I remember hearing about this project and being like, ‘God, I wish I could do that, but I’m never going to be in this thing,'” inti remembered. “It was kind of a short turnaround … I went through all of the other pieces that were up, because this project had been going on for five years and there was a gamut of pieces. There were ones that were so hard. Maybe a graduate string quartet could do it, with a lot of practice. To like very beautiful and simple and quite lyrical pieces with a 16th note pulse or something. … I ended up kind of going from this really complicated score to this very simple score of a single stave that everyone was reading from. … How it happens over time can be determined by the ensemble.”
Over the past few years, inti has gravitated a lot toward string quartets and percussion ensembles, two groups that might seem at oppositive ends of the sonic spectrum to some composers but not to her. “I do feel like there’s a certain level of a kind of shared musicality, a shared sense of tone and timbre and attack and all of these things that contribute to a group mentality of how to kind of play with and affect texture in like all of their kind of individual ways.”
But she is also interested in vocal music and has begun exploring it again after a hiatus of several years where she was mostly focused on instrumental music.
“I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn’t always feel that with vocal ensembles,” she acknowledged. “Then this year and last year has been this kind of a big resurgence of that in my music and in some ways, it’s teaching me things all over again, which has been really, really fun. … I get to kind of luxuriate a little bit in the quality of two people singing together, actually using all of the complexities of a word to push forward meaning. But to me it’s not narrative meaning, and that’s what I was afraid of, that when I had to engage language, I had to be tied to a narrative, instead of being tied to the complexities of thinking about something like love, or lots of other things.”
Ultimately, whatever the medium, inti is interested in constructing open structures that take performers and listeners to new places.
“For the most part my pieces are workshops in some ways,” she said. “It’s almost like a loose suit and then we fit it over the rehearsal.”
When you're sitting around and you have a lot of thoughts and emotions, it's helpful to have an outlet.
inti figgis-vizueta
The psychology of string quartets is some of my favorite material in some ways to encounter with different groups that I'm writing for, kind of figuring out what feels good under their hands, what feels good, what sounds they kind of lean into.
inti figgis-vizueta
The kind of music that I write ... is really in some ways trying to hold a mirror to ensembles and their own kinds of musical tendencies.
inti figgis-vizueta
Maybe I'm showing my barista roots, but I love the idea of having something appear in one way, tasting it, adjusting a little bit, having it appear again, shifting out of the parameter.
inti figgis-vizueta
The idea of a shared score is extremely important because it feels like we're all reading from the same thing and therefore are able to make decisions from the same kind of mutual gaze or perspective.
inti figgis-vizueta
I kept being given drums in elementary school as part of our music lesson and then they would take them away pretty quickly because I wouldn't be doing what was being tasked of me.
inti figgis-vizueta
The music program at the high school I went to wasn't great. We watched Amadeus like maybe three times a week out of this class. So it was a very chill class. I really didn't do much. I learned the note names. I learned about Mozart maybe, depending on how we feel about that movie.
inti figgis-vizueta
I see them as vessels, but I also see them as plants, that we're able to continue to revisit them and see how they've changed. I'll hear people come back and play something that I haven't heard in years. I thought I had a stable sense of that piece in my mind and suddenly someone just blows me away with a completely different place that they go with it. And to me, that has to feel really exciting because the idea that like, we're just writing something to exist in one form and then it just, you know, like time passes, just stops moving--it's very strange.
inti figgis-vizueta
The reason that the work exists is that it's in some ways trying to kind of push at the notion that there has to be a separation between an interpretive artistry and a creative artistry
inti figgis-vizueta
When there's this kind of mutual investment that everyone has, then suddenly we can get past this the sense the score is something to be achieved versus the score is a tool to create really beautiful music in whatever that feels like for the people who are in the room.
inti figgis-vizueta
A lot of the ways that I started to first send out my music was through calls for scores and all of my instrumental music got picked up really, really quickly, and no one wanted to touch the choral vocal music. Probably because it was using techniques and ways of orienting them that just was outside the practice and I've come to now know that there's an entire industry based on music that's being written in a certain way for this ensemble. So I'm not surprised now.
inti figgis-vizueta
I felt like instrumentalists were down to clown a little bit, where I just didn't always feel that with vocal ensembles.
inti figgis-vizueta
How do you give permission for disalignment in an ensemble context? Because it often feels very wrong to people.
inti figgis-vizueta
There was a time pretty early where anytime anyone reached out, I just put everything into the piece that was being asked for.
inti figgis-vizueta
With string players, I hear them think about intonation a lot. With percussion ensembles, I hear about timing a lot, and I hear about unison and groove and pattern and beat.
inti figgis-vizueta
I am strategizing about what engaging creativity and openness means in a context where people want to be together. The philosophy of all of this exists at the mercy in some ways of who's playing it, because it's music that requires a level of sympathy to go along with me, to agree to my rules and my ideas.
inti figgis-vizueta
For the most part my pieces are workshops in some ways. ... [I]t's almost like a loose suit and then we fit it over the rehearsal.
More than anything, our climate change studies have helped me gain tremendous perspective, to understand climate change from the vantage point of the individuals experiencing and digesting it, and to hear of their struggles, worries, and aspirations as they ride the rogue waves of this crisis. And while it is necessary to learn about the experiences of those most immediately affected by climate change in various parts of the world, I am equally interested in the stories I have heard from every one of you. As a fellow musician, I often find your thoughts and solutions to be more easily applicable in my own life.
In the wunderschönen month of May, the foliage in Ontario transitions (over a few days) from lifeless frozen grey to a tropical rain forest with a hundred shades of green. We have been experiencing many temperature oddities this year, a very mild winter, followed by an erratic April and May that swung between 25-30 (centigrade) degree temperatures, and freezing cold, setting many records along the way for the hottest and coldest days for the time of year. As I type, we are in the middle of a heat wave warning. This year, we are participating in a campaign called “#NoMowMay“: Those with a lawn are encouraged to mow less, and to not mow at all in the month of May, a critical time especially for butterflies, bees and other bugs to feast on wild flowers. The campaign was initiated by Plantlife, and caught on quickly around the world and has been circulating widely on social media. Sadly, we seem to be the only people participating in our neighborhood. Next year, I hope we can have a #NoMowMay sign put in our yard, both to let the neighbors know why our house looks like a meadow, and to spread the word and hopefully encourage others to consider doing the same.
I am also continuously thinking of ways in which we can make our practice, as musicians, more green and sustainable. The hardest part has been to identify the priorities, the areas needing the most immediate attention (apart from the obvious one being frequent long-distance travel). Like many of you, I have also been receiving strong resistance from organizations when I suggest alternative approaches in their plans going forward. It boggles my mind: many of them imply that they are short on funds coming out of the pandemic, perhaps as an excuse to offer subpar rates, yet they are unwilling to consider more economical solutions. It has been my hope that we might be more able to ask for a hybrid of in-person and virtual appearances going forward, and support local musicians, but at this stage, most organizations seem to be tired of the virtual platform, and very eager to go back to an in-person format, start traveling/touring, and collaborating with international names again.
Please feel free to send me your thoughts!
Next year, I hope we can have a #NoMowMay sign put in our yard, both to let the neighbors know why our house looks like a meadow, and to spread the word and hopefully encourage others to consider doing the same.
Iman Habibi
I am also continuously thinking of ways in which we can make our practice, as musicians, more green and sustainable. The hardest part has been to identify the priorities, the areas needing the most immediate attention (apart from the obvious one being frequent long-distance travel).
Iman Habibi
It has been my hope that we might be more able to ask for a hybrid of in-person and virtual appearances going forward, and support local musicians, but at this stage, most organizations seem to be tired of the virtual platform
I have been playing the guitar now for over 25 years. The pursuit has always been one of attempting to unite my soul’s expression with the physical act of touching an instrument, in between my soul and the guitar exist the two realms of my mind and my body. Cultivating a musical mind has meant ear training, learning theory, learning the sounds of various musical traditions, histories, what is a downbeat? what is a swing feel? what does it mean to bounce? what does it mean to resolve on the 10th beat of a 12 beat cycle, harmony, counterpoint, subdividing rhythms, study and endless study. The practice of touching an instrument, endless hours sitting with the guitar, playing notes that sustain, playing notes that move quickly, stretching fingers to play the cool chords, making my thumb play in 5 while my index middle and ring fingers play in 4, or any other polyrhythms; micro coordination, how to make a rasgeo of sextuplets sound like a thick wave of sound crashing into the 3rd pulse of a solea. This stuff takes time and many many repetitions, intense focus that overrides the body’s stubborn habits. Intense focus can result in wear on the hands, which are attached to the wrists arms elbows shoulders back and hips. My hands and myself have known overwork and overuse.
Over the years I have had many bouts with injury, tendonitis, tendonosis, burn out, soreness. Through this I have learned many ways to maintain the mind-body; dance, yoga, weightlifting, physical therapy, psychoanalysis meditation etc. Recently I had a week with many gigs rehearsals and opportunities to perform music with people who have more experience than me. As a result I came to a day where I had to force myself to do nothing because I had been working too hard. Whenever these moments happen I experience what I recognize as an inevitable embodiment of a mind that does not want to rest. A mental state where pursuit, ambition, perfection, improvement etc. become a relentless obsession. The body is an amazing mirror of the mind, and though I was pursuing my vitality through my art, my flesh was becoming slow and tired and clumsy. (Obviously one can’t play an instrument in a delicate and soul touching way with clumsy flesh.)
As a musician I feel that I have been cultured to believe in hard work, achievement, etc. “Become an excellent musician so that you can receive attention, money, respect, or even more dire so that you can survive, make a living, not have to work a side hustle that (potentially) crushes your soul.” The artistic purpose of “personal-achievement” seems divisive and destructive to me. Lately I have been reflecting a lot on how my own performance and creation practice can be less interested in achievement or personal gain; accolades etc. and more interested in being a catalyst for connection and gathering. The myth of progress is not one that serves me well.
So I have been pondering questions related to my musical practice.
Can the music draw people and and inspire them to engage with their soul response? Can the performance create a space where the people share those responses with each other? Can the press coverage be about community more than it is about virtuosity or mastery of craft? Can the compositions lean towards playability? Can I nurture my performers’ strengths instead of demanding them to overcome weaknesses or transcend the limits of their technique or instrument? Can my craft be so solid that is can just serve expression? Can I leave the myths of “cutting edge” “technical mastery” “virtuosity” “eliteness” alone and pursue concepts that create space for listening, a shared sense of time, sensation.
I’ve been interested in the concepts of intention and transmission. What is the intention behind my practice, compositions, performances. Why am I starting this band, writing for this ensemble? What am I offering these performers and listeners? What am I saying to this interviewer? What am I telling people about the work and its intent? How can I set myself and collaborators up to transmit something that draws people into their own creativity, and that draws them towards each other?
Recently I began study with a guitarist names Nino de Pura. What I encountered in my studies with this master of guitar technique is that there is a playful way to deepen one’s technique. Studies can be explorations of a physical (musical) gesture, a fascination with a concept that is eluding the composer or the player/practitioner. He has an incredible technique that delivers intense musical sensation, explosive, emotive, very powerful. But his manner of teaching is very relaxed, demonstrative, fun, and his physicality when playing these incredible passages is totally relaxed. Of course, while studying with him in Sevilla Spain I have often felt that I need another lifetime to pursue this craft, that I am attempting to learn something that will continue to elude me beyond the years I have left. But the spirit of enjoyment and exploration is something I can practice immediately and for the remainder of my time creating music.
Intense focus can result in wear on the hands, which are attached to the wrists arms elbows shoulders back and hips. My hands and myself have known overwork and overuse.
Dustin Carlson
I came to a day where I had to force myself to do nothing because I had been working too hard. Whenever these moments happen I experience what I recognize as an inevitable embodiment of a mind that does not want to rest. A mental state where pursuit, ambition, perfection, improvement etc. become a relentless obsession.
Dustin Carlson
One can’t play an instrument in a delicate and soul touching way with clumsy flesh.
Dustin Carlson
The artistic purpose of "personal-achievement" seems divisive and destructive to me.
Dustin Carlson
Can I nurture my performers’ strengths instead of demanding them to overcome weaknesses or transcend the limits of their technique or instrument?
Dustin Carlson
How can I set myself and collaborators up to transmit something that draws people into their own creativity, and that draws them towards each other?
Dustin Carlson
The spirit of enjoyment and exploration is something I can practice immediately and for the remainder of my time creating music.
Just out of school in 2014, I witnessed childhood friends, relatives, and peers who pursued non-musical careers make tangible changes and developments to improve their communities. Writing music gave me great joy, but I questioned if there was a purpose for it that was equally wholesome. The question lingered, could composing music enact change as a doctor treating a patient, an attorney representing a client, or a senator voting for public policy?
A TREE WITH DEEP ROOTS
I returned to my roots and joined the faculty at the University of Hawaiʻi. Teaching fulfilled what I perceived to be a greater purpose, but that was just a part of a larger mission. Then in 2017, I began composing music about the Polynesian Voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa. I had primarily avoided exploring my Polynesian roots (out of shame for ignorance). Still, as I learned of the ingenuity of the ancient Hawaiians, skilled navigators capable of sailing more than 2000 miles of the deep ocean with only the stars and currents of the sea to guide them, I was compelled to know more and to tell these stories with music.
With finite resources aboard the canoe, conservation ensured the crew’s survival, and this continued on land. Isolated in the Pacific, the Hawaiian Islands are a much larger canoe. By extension, today, our planet is an island, an island earth in a vast sea of universal darkness. For over a thousand years, the ancient Hawaiians thrived sustainably, untouched by the known world. However, with anti-Hawaiian policies in the years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, a wealth of indigenous knowledge was nearly erased from history, dismissed as primitive and treasonous. Today, with 90 percent of food and resources imported, Hawaiʻi is unsustainable.
ISLAND EARTH
In his decades leading the Hōkūleʻa voyages, Master Navigator Nainoa Thompson witnessed the corrosion and inflammation of Earth’s circulatory system, from the bleaching of coral reefs, the continent of floating garbage in the Pacific, and vanished Polynesian islands from sea level rise. The dire state of the planet pushed Thompson to send a worldwide message that our world is in trouble. Thompson recalls the words of Astronaut Charles Lacey Veach (1944-1995):
“You can never believe the beauty of island Earth until you see it in its entirety from space,” recalls Veach. He was the world’s greatest optimist, but he always felt a great concern over the imbalance between human needs and the limited resources of our small planet, over the danger of exponential population growth and depletion of natural resources to support that growth. He would talk about how the 21st century was going to be very different from the century we’re leaving. There would be great challenges ahead; there would be places on this planet that are going to be, by our own definition of quality of life, extremely substandard.
On one of his shuttle flights, a fellow crew member woke Lacey up and told him to look out the window–they were passing over the Hawaiian Islands. Lacey could see all the Islands, and he could see his whole spirit and soul here. He saw the entire planet in one vision. “The best place to think about the fate of our planet is right here in the islands. If we can create a model for well-being here in Hawai’i, we can make a contribution to the entire world.”
Hōkūleʻa sparked a new sense of purpose deeply tied to my own identity. There were stories to tell and a purpose and role for me as a composer to represent these stories through concert music. Moreover, venturing into the voyaging communities demonstrated a real possibility for creating summit-like performances, an opportunity to forge strategic partnerships with industry leaders, sponsors, and lawmakers and have them in one place.
BEYOND MUSIC
Shortly after, I was encouraged to join a leadership cohort comprised of individuals from all segments of the community called the Pacific Century Fellows. I had no idea what to expect from the program that was based on the White House Fellows. I was stepping outside my comfort zone; alums from this program included a sitting senator, the then governor, and executives from the private and public industries. I felt grossly out of place, but what I had learned from Hōkūleʻa and the Composing Earth initiative, pushing for social change and solving the climate crisis, cannot be done alone. The program gave me behind-the-scenes access to Hawaiʻi’s different issues and working sectors, such as tourism, renewable energy, military, recycling, homelessness, agriculture, and criminal justice; it became clear that, like climate change, everything is connected.
DEFENDING KALO
My cohort embarked on a trip to Hawaiʻi Island (Big Island) in the final months of the program. On our last day, we traveled to a Loʻi (Taro Farm) at the Hale O Kalo in Waipio Valley. The cultivation of Kalo (breadfruit) is a staple of sustainable Hawaiian agriculture. Knee-deep in the cool fudge-like mud of a taro patch, bent over and pulling Kalo from its roots, I was closer to the Earth than I have ever been, literally reaching into the ground and connecting with the sustainable past of our ancestors.
The road into the valley is steep and treacherous. It’s a narrow mountainous path slowly eroding from constant heavy pedestrian and significant vehicle traffic, the mark of over-tourism. The nearby black-sand beaches and lush manicured green farms of the Taro farmers is a haven for tour companies cashing in on busing in tourist. Crops suffer, and irrigation infrastructure is contaminated when vehicular traffic moves through privately owned farmland, but tour companies assert legal precedent for access. When the Hawaiʻi Island mayor closed the road to Waipio and restricted it to residents (mainly farmers), tour companies sued, and the local media portrayed the story as an infringement on rights. The appetite for capitalizing on natural resources is not new in Waipio or the entire Hawaiian Islands. However, this demonstrates the hurdle with profiting enterprises and the assertion of entitlements, and it is salt in the womb. Business and commercial interests led to the Hawaiian Kingdom’s demise; it continues with our planet.
SERVING THE COMMUNITY
Exploring my roots with Hōkūleʻa and joining the leadership cohort confirmed the necessity of going beyond music, seeking out, reaching out, learning, and listening. The Waipio trip became the story of my Composing Earth work, music that represents environmental themes through the lens of Hawaiʻi. My journey towards music citizenry began with a personal search, and this has remained with the need to specifically create Pacific work.
Recently, I joined the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra as the Director of Artistic Engagement and Composer in Residence. This position has given me a platform to voice, design, and curate symphonic programming to push for representation and social issues front and center. But there’s work to cultivate and expand an audience to connect with music as more than just entertainment but as an enriching metaphor; work that is part of the larger campaign to use music as an agent for connection and education. The tools to effect change are already here, and as a composer I have chosen to add my voice to our counterparts in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields advocating for carbon-reducing policies. Music has a purpose to serve. We have the scientist in our musicians, the technology in their instruments, the engineers in our composers, and the mathematics of our music to send a unified message to Mālama Honua (to care for our island earth).
Could composing music enact change as a doctor treating a patient, an attorney representing a client, or a senator voting for public policy?
Michael-Thomas Foumai
In 2017, I began composing music about the Polynesian Voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa. I had primarily avoided exploring my Polynesian roots (out of shame for ignorance).
Michael-Thomas Foumai
Venturing into the voyaging communities demonstrated a real possibility for creating summit-like performances, an opportunity to forge strategic partnerships with industry leaders, sponsors, and lawmakers and have them in one place.
Michael-Thomas Foumai
Exploring my roots with Hōkūleʻa and joining the leadership cohort confirmed the necessity of going beyond music, seeking out, reaching out, learning, and listening.
Michael-Thomas Foumai
My journey towards music citizenry began with a personal search, and this has remained with the need to specifically create Pacific work.
Michael-Thomas Foumai
There's work to cultivate and expand an audience to connect with music as more than just entertainment but as an enriching metaphor; work that is part of the larger campaign to use music as an agent for connection and education.
Michael-Thomas Foumai
Music has a purpose to serve. We have the scientist in our musicians, the technology in their instruments, the engineers in our composers, and the mathematics of our music to send a unified message to Mālama Honua (to care for our island earth).
I’ve been compiling a list of questions that I’ve received over these past 18 months in various interviews, panels, etc., since I began publicly communicating my environmental alarm in earnest, not just casually. I’ll share two such questions I’ve received, one that comes up a lot, innocently, and one that has come up just once, hostile.
Innocent: “What projects do you have coming up?”: I love this one. It’s a customary way for interviews to end, and without being explicitly asked about the crisis, I have an opening to talk about my concerns. “Well, my husband and I are deep in fire preparation mode. I just spent two symphony commissions on a fire-resistant stucco exterior for the home, water tanks, etc, etc.” or “I have to confess that for all of my work studying my mom’s culture, what really consumes me is the climate crisis and the perils it poses. How will music connect communities fractured by environmental collapse… etc, etc.”
And the hostile: “What if you’re wrong?” This was asked when I did a virtual Zoom panel about “composing in the anthropocene” for a group in Europe not too long ago. We had a few hundred people in the webinar audience, and I was rather unclear about what I was supposed to address. A scientist spoke before me, impressive but unsettling, with a presentation about people becoming cyborgs after a violent era of survival of the fitness weeding out climate deniers as well as believers. I was rather taken aback by how impersonal and fantastical, both, that presenter’s talk was, and felt like a fish out of water.
Nevertheless, I spoke about my own feelings and experiences, the actions I was taking with my platform, such as it is, and how much I was learning from peers similarly concerned, including you all. It was horribly early for me, around 6am PT at this point to accommodate the time zones, but I gave it my best. And when I got this question, which was posed to me and not to the scientist before me (??), precluded by what can only be called a cynical exposition on music as a prestige object, for a brief moment, I did hesitate.
Then this, from the transcript, my answer:
“Listen. If I’m wrong, and that’s a big if, I’ll shout it from the rooftops, and post all over Facebook. I’ll get on the radio and take out a billboard. I’ll happily confess that fires, floods, derecho winds, bee die-offs, diminishing crops and heat waves are at best a figment of our imagination and at worst, boringly normal. I’ll call up journalists who have profiled me to recant, newspapers across the US, filled with relief that my family and I are not in danger after all. Scholars later will describe this phase in my compositional output as my ‘Era of Great Disillusion’ or ‘Wow, Was She Wrong.’ But until I’m proven wrong, wrong to believe in the science and the evidence of my eyes, wrong to celebrate my neighbors coming together for our mutual survival, this is what I’ve got, all I’ve got. I believe in the science, and I believe in the music. In the process, I have finally fallen in love hard, with Mother Earth, appreciating what I have now that I’m in danger of losing so much. Wrong. I would love to be that.”
And so it goes. Sometimes in panic, comes a moment. I delivered the above with a smile and a laugh, although it reads strong in the transcript.
I just spent two symphony commissions on a fire-resistant stucco exterior for the home, water tanks, etc.
Gabriela Lena Frank
I have to confess that for all of my work studying my mom’s culture, what really consumes me is the climate crisis and the perils it poses.
Gabriela Lena Frank
If I’m wrong, and that’s a big if, I’ll shout it from the rooftops, and post all over Facebook. I’ll get on the radio and take out a billboard.
Gabriela Lena Frank
Until I’m proven wrong, wrong to believe in the science and the evidence of my eyes, wrong to celebrate my neighbors coming together for our mutual survival, this is what I’ve got, all I’ve got. I believe in the science, and I believe in the music.
I have come to think of my life as a mixing board. There are a number of different channels. Mine are labeled composing, score producing, entrepreneur, teaching, community work. But the levels on those different channels are constantly changing as I move through my life. Composing is currently at 11 but now, especially after completing my term as president of the Alliance for Women Film Composers, I have brought the community work down to around 2 for a season. Teaching is at 4, I enjoy my role as Adjunct Faculty at NYU but I keep it to a limited scope. For a long while I wasn’t teaching at all, my Masters degree in Music Education seemingly a waste of time and money. But the opportunity to teach film scoring at NYU came into my life at the perfect time and now it brings me a lot of joy.
This mixing board approach gives me room for flexibility and movement as I continue to explore who I am as a creative entity. The work and knowledge I glean from one line feeds into the other avenues I pursue. It allows me room to accept the ebb and flow, and continue to grow and change as I hope I will, throughout my life. But this approach didn’t come naturally. Like so many others, for a long time I was pursuing “the thing” – the one job that would define me. That search often led me astray.
It took me a long time to figure out I wanted to become a composer. I spent decades in different aspects of the music world, and the working world in general. I remember finally finding my place in the arena of film composing and feeling an overwhelming sense of relief. I was home. That feeling continues to sustain me, especially on those tough long days.
Once I decided to pursue the career of a film composer I looked into copying and orchestration. I had been a musician my whole life but I was new to the world of film composition and I wanted to get paid to learn. I wanted to be in the room where it happened; to observe and learn the language and the movements of every aspect of how a score was created. Every step of it.
As I took on these “support work” gigs I heard a fascinating and concerning mantra. “Be careful doing orchestration work,” I was told. “If you do that you may be pigeon-holed as an orchestrator and then you’ll never get composing gigs.” It struck me as a weird caution and I have always struggled to take on advice that is based on fear. Also, many of the people recommending that I stay away from orchestrating had orchestration credits in their very own IMDBs. Some had big ones! I became keenly aware of this pressure to become a composer – JUST a composer. If you were simply a composer, you were legit. If you were a composer plus something else? Less legit. Not the real deal.
This seemed problematic to me on a number of fronts.
1 Financial – what pays the bills?
Let’s get the money talk out of the way – the least fun but perhaps the most critical issue. The one reliable piece of information I have heard from a whole range of composers is that it takes about 5-10 years to begin to make a living from being a composer. To begin to make a living. That was certainly the case for me. If that is the reality, then how is one supposed to pay the bills in the meantime? And why is it so bad to spend that 5-10 years, not only composing, but being paid to learn all the different aspects of the craft, and in so doing hopefully becoming a better composer? Yes, you will receive credits that aren’t composer credits, but honestly, you don’t have to tell people about them if you don’t want to! You can remove those credits from your IMDB. You can decide not to put them on social media. And then, while making money in the very industry you want to be working, you can also hopefully learn a lot and become a better composer. Win, Win!
I think everyone has heard of the term “diversification of income streams.” It’s a simple concept: make money from many different areas, then if one dries up you still have other avenues delivering income. This is something that has definitely benefited me in general, especially during the pandemic, and even now, during the strike. But it hasn’t just benefited me financially.
2 Personal – what feeds the soul?
What if you like doing more than one thing? The concept of being solely a composer is perfectly acceptable and I know a number of people who truly thrive from that singular focus. But I also know a number of people like me. We thrive from wearing different hats. It fulfills us. We are excited to compose and then excited to switch gears to do something else: put out an artist album, play gigs, orchestrate, music edit, run a business, teach, manage a non-profit, write articles. Not everyone is the same. If you are someone who benefits from a diverse working environment then it is important to allow those different aspects of yourself to be fed.
But it isn’t just about the financial and soulful benefits.
3. Time – how you spend it
When you are a person like myself, you can find that wearing multiple hats every day can help you utilize your time more efficiently. When you do one thing for too long you can experience fatigue, quickly followed by diminishing returns.
To make this point, I am going to quote from three fantastic authors who regularly tackle the ins and outs of the creative existence in their writing: Steven Pressfield, Orna Ross and Cal Newport. I encourage you to deep-dive into their work but let me just dip in briefly to bring my point home.
Steven Pressfield, in The War Of Art, talks about how he only writes for four hours a day. In a recent interview he said, “I used to be able to put in four hours, but these days two and a half is my outer limit.” I have certainly experienced this. While four hours is not my limit, I do find that after very focused composing for a string of hours, I experience diminishing returns. It is best for the project if I stop and pick up again after some rest.
But this doesn’t mean I am necessarily out of steam for the day. I have experienced how moving from composing to teaching, or writing an article like this, or producing a recording session, is perfectly doable. The change of focus and pace feels good, re-energizes me. I do a lot in one day, and because I am not in just one gear but cycling through many, pulling on different skill sets, I don’t feel overwhelmingly fatigued. Instead of doing one thing and having to call it a day once I am fully fatigued, I can financially benefit from more hours of my day by doing different things.
Orna Ross writes about the business of creativity in an excellent examination of the challenge of diversification in her blog post The Indie Author’s Three Hats: Maker, Manager and Marketeer. This post explores these different “jobs” of an author. Even if your goal is just doing one thing – writing books in the case of Ross – you still either need to take on these multiple roles (or pay someone to do it for you) in order to be successful, especially as you are initially building your reputation in your industry. Those roles include creating, marketing and business management. My sister R.J. Amos is a fantastic author, and one way she has diversified her income is not only writing books but also editing the work of others. We have a similar approach: utilizing the skills we developed in creating our own work by helping others achieve their creative goals.
I believe this is not only a smart business model but also a generous way to approach your work. By giving to others, you receive so much. “Supporting” other composers as their score producer or orchestrator has incredibly enriched my life through both the building of relationships and the experience of shared creative endeavors.
Cal Newport is an astoundingly prolific human. He is a tenured professor of computer science at Georgetown University, and a prolific author in both the commercial (New York Times Best-seller) and the research spaces. And yet he finishes work at 6 pm every day, puts the computer away and spends the rest of the day with his family. He says, “A 40 hour time-blocked work week, I estimate, produces the same amount of output as a 60+ hour work week pursued without structure.” He explores how to do this in his book Deep Work. A great read, I highly recommend.
You can make the most out of the day when you are doing more than one thing. You can pull on different aspects of your skill set that may lie dormant when you are focused on one thing but become fully utilized when your focus changes.
While we are talking authors I also want to highlight the work of Gretchen Rubin. I have been reading her books and blog posts for years. She has a very interesting concept – The Four Tendencies. It is an examination of what makes you who you are and how that impacts the way you approach your work. One reason the diversification approach has been so successful for me is that it fits me as a person. To understand how best to build our working life, we have to understand who we are and how we work best.
4. Network – what brings in the work?
As a freelance creative, there is a network you develop throughout your career that brings work your way. When you are working in one area, like just composing for film, then you are building connections in that area. When you work in a number of different areas, your network is being built in all different directions. I visualize it as a web that broadens as I meet more people. More people in your network, means more real relationships, means more work. That is how it has happened for me.
I made a deliberate choice to take on multiple roles because it occurred to me that these different things I wanted to do had different audiences. I could promote myself as a composer to the film community, while promoting myself as a score producer / orchestrator / copyist to the composer community. To the education community I was a teacher with a masters degree in music education. I was very careful with my branding. Being known as a composer was most important to me, so my website reflected that work and only that work, except for perhaps a line or two in my bio. My orchestration work, which led to me founding Joy Music House (JMH), had no website for the longest time. I simply used word of mouth within that particular network. When we decided to brand as JMH, the choice of business name used part of my own name but also allowed the brand of “Catherine Joy” to continue to be composer focused.
We have so many different avenues to advertise and brand ourselves these days, with easy access to website creation and social media accounts. It gives us a lot of flexibility as to how we choose to represent ourselves to different audiences. When you use these tools mindfully, you can precisely take control of how you are branding all the different aspects of who you are and what you do.
While I have found diversification being discouraged in the composer community, in the film community at large it seems to be widely accepted. They even have a term for it: “multi-hyphenates.” I have been to so many film events where people introduce themselves as a multi-hyphenate: a writer-director, director-editor, writer-actor, dp(director of photography)-editor. This seems to be completely accepted. The challenges of the financial aspect appear to be fully acknowledged and there also seems a real awareness that wearing multiple hats can be beneficial to the production. There is often an overlap in skill sets, but even when that’s not the case the different point of view from a different role is also welcomed as a valuable change in perspective.
As I was writing this article, I decided it was probably wise to do some research. What does science say about doing multiple jobs? This has really worked out for me, but am I an outlier?
There were a lot of articles on the benefits of the gig economy (although some of them felt a little suspicious, making you wonder if it was capitalist propaganda) and an older memoir called The Elephant and the Flea from 2001 where the author predicted that working from home would become much more prolific. Then I came across this article in The Atlantic: “Your Career Is Just One-Eighth of Your Life.” Thompson talks about the research of Economist Dashun Wang, “In a deep analysis of the careers of scientists and artists, he found that their ‘hot streaks’ tended to be periods of focused and narrow work following a spell of broader experimentation. This is sometimes called the ‘explore-exploit’ sequence. The idea is that many successful people are like good oil scouts: They spend a lot of time searching for their space, and then they drill deep when they find the right niche.” I love this idea of oscillating between trying different things and then zeroing in once you find something that truly resonates with you. This is a fascinating article covering a lot of different aspects of the working existence; I encourage you to check it out.
I don’t have a lot of time left to delve into the intricacies of Thompson’s article but it did also talk about how younger people these days are much more willing to quit and move on. This idea of doing the one thing, forever, is going out of style, often to the benefit of the individual.
When we are young, many of us are often very sure of what we want to do with our lives. But that can change as we get older. We can feel like somehow we are betraying ourselves when we acknowledge that what once set us on fire now leaves us feeling stale. We feel like all that time, all that work, will be for nothing if we walk away. But that is not the case. As we move through our creative career lives, everything we have learnt feeds into the latest opportunity. In my experience, no skill I have developed has gone to waste and often it is utilized in a way I could have never imagined. But staying in a working environment that bleeds you dry is no way to exist.
I want to leave you with one final idea: rest. Rest is so important. Giving yourself time to think, or not think at all, to let your mind wander, to even get bored. We have been talking a lot about work, and all the different kinds of work we can do, but a life that is only work is not a life well lived. As many reels and memes have been constantly reminding us: you cannot pour from an empty cup. Cheesy and oversold but still completely true.
I do have a full life in which I wear many hats, but I try to leave time for long walks, for TV, for cooking (usually while also watching TV or listening to funk music), for drinks with friends, time with family, and time to travel and see new things. I am not sure a balanced life is possible, and I cannot say I have one. But recently I saw an Instagram reel (I love watching these reels) that encouraged us to pursue contrast instead of pursuing balance. This made a lot of sense to me, and it has been what I have been talking about this whole article: switching gears. Make sure you aren’t just shifting between different channels of work, but also between work and rest: changing from extreme focus to no focus; mind wandering, body relaxed. From in depth meetings – maybe an intense spotting session with your filmmaker – to you, on a long walk in nature, speaking to no one. From a four-hour composing sprint to zoning out in front of your favorite show while eating delicious food. From an intense recording session to an active workout session.
Find the path that fits you, who you are right now. It is important to listen to the advice of our peers, and to read about the journeys of those who have come before, but what is often so remarkable about the journeys that make headlines is that they were new, different and shocking. They were predicted to fail and a surprise in success. What often makes us successful is the very thing that makes us unique. I hope you will surprise yourself, explore beyond what you thought was possible, and live a life full of creative endeavors which bring you joy.
The mixing board approach gives me room for flexibility and movement as I continue to explore who I am as a creative entity. But this approach didn’t come naturally. Like so many others, for a long time I was pursuing “the thing” – the one job that would define me. That search often led me astray.
Catherine Joy
As I took on “support work” gigs I heard a fascinating and concerning mantra. “Be careful doing orchestration work,” I was told. “If you do that you may be pigeon-holed as an orchestrator and then you’ll never get composing gigs.” It struck me as a weird caution and I have always struggled to take on advice that is based on fear.
Catherine Joy
If you were simply a composer, you were legit. If you were a composer plus something else? Less legit. Not the real deal. This seemed problematic to me on a number of fronts.
Catherine Joy
The one reliable piece of information I have heard from a whole range of composers is that it takes about 5-10 years to begin to make a living from being a composer. To begin to make a living.
Catherine Joy
If you are someone who benefits from a diverse working environment then it is important to allow those different aspects of yourself to be fed.
Catherine Joy
Wearing multiple hats every day can help you utilize your time more efficiently. When you do one thing for too long you can experience fatigue, quickly followed by diminishing returns.
Catherine Joy
By giving to others, you receive so much. “Supporting” other composers as their score producer or orchestrator has incredibly enriched my life through both the building of relationships and the experience of shared creative endeavors.
Catherine Joy
To understand how best to build our working life, we have to understand who we are and how we work best.
Catherine Joy
When you work in a number of different areas, your network is being built in all different directions. I visualize it as a web that broadens as I meet more people. More people in your network, means more real relationships, means more work.
Catherine Joy
We have so many different avenues to advertise and brand ourselves these days, with easy access to website creation and social media accounts. It gives us a lot of flexibility as to how we choose to represent ourselves to different audiences.
Catherine Joy
While I have found diversification being discouraged in the composer community, in the film community at large it seems to be widely accepted. They even have a term for it: “multi-hyphenates.”
Catherine Joy
When we are young, many of us are often very sure of what we want to do with our lives. But that can change as we get older. We can feel like somehow we are betraying ourselves when we acknowledge that what once set us on fire now leaves us feeling stale. We feel like all that time, all that work, will be for nothing if we walk away. But that is not the case.
Catherine Joy
We have been talking a lot about work, and all the different kinds of work we can do, but a life that is only work is not a life well lived.
The green and white, two-story ranch house on Dandridge Road in the Hillman Estates neighborhood of Birmingham, AL was built by Herman (Steeplejack) A. Taylor Sr. and Earnestine C. Taylor in 1968. Steeplejack, a brick mason’s helper and the first black officer in the steel workers’ union for the US Steel plant in the Ensley district, and Earnestine, an art teacher in the suburban school district of Bessemer, AL, were the picture of the typical middle-class Black family – a two-income unit with a high school-aged son ascending the ladder of the American dream. The house they lived in prior to Dandridge Road was a mile away on what was then known as Avenue K. Herman Junior remembers that first house fondly, especially the Woods.
For this story to be told appropriately, it’s important to hear about the Avenue K house and then circle back to Dandridge Road. The Taylors lived on that street, also known as the Jefferson Highway, for most of Junior’s childhood. He remembers going into the Woods with the neighborhood kids to play, hunt, catch crayfish for pets at the Ditch, whatever else kids of the 50s and 60s would do. Rumor had it that the city would be building a playground there. Imagine the kids’ excitement when they started hearing trees being cleared and the land being leveled. The playground they found was filled with huge piles of concrete slabs, stacked somewhat haphazardly. What perfect structures to climb and roughhouse on. Then the flood lights were erected. Great for target practice for bats. Childhood resilience is truly remarkable.
The construction continued, the result being an industrial complex, serviced by the nearby railroad tracks, with a huge parking lot. New rumors began to circulate; the worst one being that there was an order to shoot-to-kill anyone who is shooting at the bats swarming the floodlights. Meanwhile, the very same floodlights pointed directly into the bedrooms of the families living along Avenue K.
Their homes now destroyed, and food sources eradicated, the rodents and other creatures in the Woods began invading the homes along Avenue K. Junior remembers that his father would set gopher traps for the huge rats that would forage in the house. He was especially impressed by the sound of the murderous snap of the trap and then the ominous scraping that told him that the rat was still alive and dragging the trap.
Clearly, the Taylors needed to find a new place to live. As the story goes, Steeplejack was on the train back from a meeting out of town, reading a newspaper. In the paper, there was a picture of a house. When he got home, he showed the paper to Earnestine and announced, “This is our house!” Steeplejack didn’t want to move too far away; some of the houses along Avenue K were occupied by friends of his from the steel mill, and he generally liked the area. Hillman Estates was nearby and offered many things, the biggest being a quiet street and little chance for industrial construction in their backyard. The plot he found was flat with three- to four-foot-tall fire anthills, “looked like [the termite mounds of] the Serengeti,” Junior recalls. The Taylor building project was soon followed by other new homes in Hillman Estates, and a vital bedroom community was established. The quiet streets of this neighborhood would eventually become the haven for Junior’s son. . . me.
My earliest memory is December 1982, my second birthday, which we celebrated at the Dandridge Road home. My grandmother, the art teacher, had made a banner and gotten a delicious cake. My father was there, too, on holiday from his work as a general practitioner in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami, FL. The small gathering is the warm core of my happy memories of my childhood. A child of divorce, I often stayed with Grandmamá and Granddad. Eventually, I became friends with other kids in the neighborhood, who would always come by to check to see if I was in. The barbecues, summer fun, and Christmas were all quite idyllic for me. Hillman Estates was a come-home-before-the-street-lights-come-on type of neighborhood.
It was also a convenient neighborhood. There was a butcher shop and great grocery store within 3 miles of the house, and the swanky Western Hills Mall another half-mile beyond that. It featured Sears, JC Penny, and Parisians (a Macy’s-style Birmingham-based clothing store that eventually merged with Saks 5th Ave.) Grandmamá could do her holiday shopping, pick up meals for the week, and catch a movie within a 5-mile radius. Within the community, the neighbors spoke across their lawns as they watered their plants, and invited each other over to grill or watch a game. My grandparents’ house became a hub of activity, especially when my grandfather started helping his steel worker pals with their asbestos class action settlements.
As the years passed, the residents got older and the kids went off to college or elsewhere. I still loved going there, it was where I felt safest, but troubling things started happening. By the time I was in college, the butcher shop had closed, meaning the local Piggly Wiggly had to pick up the slack. The meat and fish was often rancid by the time my grandmother was finally able to cook them. Western Hills Mall started losing business and slowly died. There would be fits and starts of development, but never anything that was sustainable. Soon, the only viable food options were fast food restaurants; the only stores were pawn shops, and the only entertainment was what we could see on cable.
What I describe here is not all that surprising. I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that this is the common life cycle of communities of color: built during a time of prosperity, eventually it is depleted of tax dollars and services and stores run away. What interests me about this are the subtle impacts on the climate this process represents.
That area of Birmingham is under a regime of apartheid – food, employment, and services. It is primed to become the next area involved in regentrification. But for the residents that are still there let’s consider what this all means. What used to be a 3-mile drive, is now an 8 to 10-mile drive that involves driving on the interstate, just to get good groceries. The same increase in mileage applies for anyone that worked in white collar jobs near the mall. Clothes/gift shopping, and entertainment are now 10-15 miles away. All of this adds up to more gas consumed. Gas prices fall, encouraging more gas consumption. Residents in this area, through no fault of their own, have now seen their collective carbon footprint increase significantly. Of course, this process isn’t just happening in Hillman Estates and surrounding areas, it occurs throughout the Birmingham metropolitan area, mostly in Black neighborhoods. And in each of these neighborhoods, the process is a feedback loop, until property values are rock-bottom and new development is encouraged, often by the city.
To me, this story of the house on Dandridge leads to a question: how do we ask communities to change their behaviors to be more environmentally conscious when doing so requires a complete reordering of protocols families implement to survive, let alone thrive? As I see it, this is a particularly U.S. American issue, and one that is often met with condescension, microaggressions, and gaslighting. In this scenario, the people most effected by the cycle I describe have had their agency stolen from them. How can they prevent the trickle of businesses leaving the area? What is an achievable and sustainable model for encouraging local business to provide viable alternatives to national brands? Where can these people turn for answers?
My posts always seem to raise more questions than answers. What I hope is that I am able to provide another perspective, somewhat outside the mainstream. The coalition we have to build has to be able to answer questions like what I ask for the residents of Hillman Estates, before it’s too late.
Childhood resilience is truly remarkable.
Matthew Evan Taylor
Hillman Estates was a come-home-before-the-street-lights-come-on type of neighborhood.
Matthew Evan Taylor
What used to be a 3-mile drive, is now an 8 to 10-mile drive that involves driving on the interstate, just to get good groceries. ... All of this adds up to more gas consumed. Gas prices fall, encouraging more gas consumption. Residents in this area, through no fault of their own, have now seen their collective carbon footprint increase significantly.
Matthew Evan Taylor
How do we ask communities to change their behaviors to be more environmentally conscious when doing so requires a complete reordering of protocols families implement to survive, let alone thrive?
Matthew Evan Taylor
What is an achievable and sustainable model for encouraging local business to provide viable alternatives to national brands?
My name has a few different meanings, depending on who it is that knows it. My mother told me I was named after her doctor, Donald Lee. I was the last baby Donald Lee delivered before retirement and it felt fitting to my mother. To him, my name might have meant the end of an era, or the beginning of one.
I had a hard time accepting my name when I was younger because it felt so White and so old on my young, Black frame. Amongst my classmates—Brittney, Takeisha, Kimberly, Latoya, Michelle—I felt like an oddball. I’d only met old White women named Donna. The day I met a young Black Donna at an IHOP was the day I met with a major symphony orchestra timpanist to talk about an unfair situation that affected my career as a percussionist. It was January 2020, and I wouldn’t be able to follow up the conversation with a former teacher until after the worst of the pandemic. I was stuck for two years in an unfinished-business limbo, two years evenly split.
A lot happened the day I met my first Black Donna. Facing for the first time a conversation that I had been needing to have for ten years—a conversation with an old, White man about how I felt he had derailed my music career, and why me being a woman and Black was at the center of it. Meeting Donna, my waitress at IHOP, meant that the name Donna existed in more ways than one.
To the musician, my name can mean music. It can mean Charlie Parker, or it can mean be-bop. It can mean a time in history that meant something to so many people. It could mean Miles Davis depending on one’s religious beliefs (I believe in the Bird). When I tried and failed to play “Donna Lee” for the first time in 4th grade on a set of bells, I began to think that my name meant something intricate, something people can’t do without practice, not even me.
Or it can mean a literal translation. The translation of Donna in Italian is “an Italian lady.” It is a nobility title, a reference to the lady’s class: Donna is in the aristocracy. If I were in Italy, I would be called Donna Donna Lee. In all honesty, I found refuge in that. It made me feel better when I was treated like an inferior, like I didn’t have enough class to be in the spaces classical music placed me.
After a classmate of mine told me that I am also a Donna (in spirit) in addition to being named Donna, that my name fits me, I was joyful. Not because of what is Italian in it, but because of what is Black in it.
My classmate is a Chiambeng. Chiambeng means “sound the bell,” he explained to me. A writer currently getting his MFA in fiction at Columbia University, Thomas Chiambeng explained to me the Cameroonian legacy of his name—how he is identified as it, by it.
“In the beginning, before the invasion of words, they studied music,” he began.
*
Families had their own identities specific to the music they played. They might be gifted in healing, or experts over roots and herbs. One family knows the plants, another family knows the animals—raising the animals, domesticating them. All these skills were passed down, and everyone knew what a family was good at. To generations growing up in a family, skills became natural. There weren’t schools to learn music so those ordained, in a sense, to pass it down—the composers—they played during village festivals over bonfires and other public events, passing down both the music and the natural ability to play and hear it. A child could find themself playing the harp or inventing an instrument from the back of a tree—a hollow log—and start playing. The patterns played and the emotion of one’s voice mixed with the tone of the music to pass their message, it changes accordingly.
Passing the message of someone’s death is different than passing the message of someone’s birth, similar to how we intone our voices. People intoned the music differently. And there is hierarchy in the music. Personality, status—a princess, for example, is born, and the sound of the music indicates a royal birth. A king’s message has its own tone, and a queen or prince just as well. There were bright, joyful rhythms and melodies for wedding announcements, grief-stricken music for funeral announcements. They communicated with swells of emotions massaged into a strum of a harp, a striking of tom-toms, or a rhythmic yet melodic wooden keyboard.
Houses weren’t compacted together, but spread across large expanses of farmlands, and by bushes, and by narrow paths. A gong is heard from the path to send a message in such a way that those on their farms and far away bushes knew exactly what it meant, even if they didn’t necessarily hear the inflections of the voice singing along with it. Through the rhythmic and melodic patterns, neighbors heard their voice.
The beauty of it is how people got to understand it. There are so many languages that divide Africans, meaning inter-kingdom communications depended on the compositions of Black composers in the past. Chiambengs are the family of the gongs, their name rooted in this music of the past. That hypersensitivity of the music meant that it was more than sound, more than who they were identified as (family of the bells), and by (playing the gong)—this hypersensitivity meant what instrument their family identified with (the name itself).
“They don’t do any of this anymore,” Chiambeng says, but he knows this was custom because he was taught the family history of it. Being taught has given my own name new meaning just as well. Imagine my elation when I came to understand that my name is the title of a Charlie Parker tune. After growing up listening to the jazz of my father, a saxophonist, and of my brother, a saxophonist, encompassing four decades of jazz. Even more, that the be-bop era is my father’s favorite. Add the complexity of then learning that I wasn’t named after that tune, but after my doctor who delivered me last as I was the last child of my mother, the youngest of 8—intentionally.
And yet despite these impactful meanings, the one that meant the most was meeting another Black Donna—both the timing of it and the shared identification of it. I wasn’t alone anymore.
But sometimes I learn names too late. It wasn’t until after leaving the conservatory I attended in New York City pursuing a B.M. in Classical Percussion Performance that I learned the name Julia Perry (1924-1979). I learned about both her and the percussion ensemble piece she wrote, and that the Manhattan School of Music percussion ensemble played and recorded it under the director Paul Price in 1965. I learned that at Spelman College, an HBCU in Atlanta, Georgia. Homunculus, C.F. for 10 percussionists (1960) is the piece, which means there were 10 highly trained percussionists most likely not of color performing repertoire by a Black woman. Duncan Patton, the recently retired principal timpanist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and faculty member at Manhattan School of Music (MSM) for over 30 years says that of the small handful of Black percussion students who apply to MSM each year, three have enrolled in his 30 years of teaching.
Perry’s 5-minute Homonculus sneaks up on you, starting with what could be a percussion version of strings tuning on stage. Snare drum and woodblock softly tussle with one another, both trying to tune to an evasive A440. The piece grows—matures, matriculates—from scrapes on cymbals, a hide-and-go-seek marching of the timpani, and tom-toms to plucked strings on harp introducing the melodic: xylophone, vibraphone. Celeste and piano drive snare drum and woodblock to a determined end.
Yet while I was at MSM, I didn’t feel as though I belonged, hadn’t felt that way for over a decade. Not because I didn’t love it, wasn’t one of the best, didn’t live and breathe it every day for most of my life, but because oftentimes (not all the time), I stood to the side and watched close relationships amongst percussionists rather than having any, treated like an outsider, sometimes aggressively as inferior.
At Interlochen Arts Camp when George (let’s just call him George for now) put his mouth to my ear and whispered a chant while I played a Bach partita on marimba in the practice room.
“You suck. You’ll never be able to play this. You’ll never be any good,” his lips occasionally brushing the black skin of my earlobe in repetition. “You suck. You’ll never be able to play this. You’ll never be any good,”—the sharp sting on the ‘s’ of suck and ‘n’ of never.
I kept playing, remaining locked into the only two lines of the piece I could play without needing to stop just to drown him out. Up until then, I hadn’t yet learned how to play a fugue, layers unfolding what it means to feel free. What first seems like a melody trapped in repetition opens and opens like a surgeon cutting into a chest cavity. First skin, then tissues—fat tissues padding and protecting—then rib cage, heart, blood vessels. Each more complex than the next.
Classical music, and even more, Johann Sebastian Bach, wasn’t supposed to belong to me, but I had made it mine. I had forced it into my hands, those first two lines, the only two lines I could play and didn’t know I memorized until my mental practice room built a fortress all about me. George had invaded my only refuge. He tried to take it, colonize it, gentrify it: he came, he saw, he attempted to conquer, but failed. Failed because Black composers like Julia Perry existed and Black composers exist in the future.
George was competitive, as we were all trained to be, but George had something extra, something personal. Winning something ahead of him was like a personal offense to him. He could have lost to someone to whom he would bow gracefully and accept his defeat, but he lost to me instead, treating it as though I made his mother cry and maybe I did. Maybe his line of ancestry, maybe the mitochondria only traced through the line of mothers going genealogically back to wherever they came from were pained to see me taking what they had already taken from me.
Interlochen wasn’t just about enjoying our crafts. We were given a window to see and understand that there were people all over the world who were better than us, and who we were better than. Every week we competed for chairs in the orchestra, drilled to focus our craft on triumphing over someone else. But to win the international concerto competition was the goal, the ultimate prize, an uncontestable recognition of superior skill that George wasn’t being trained to accept. Instead, he wanted to train me to not feel deserving of my achievement.
George was jealous. We all were in one way or another. George was also filled with rage for not just that he was beat, but by whom he was beat—because he was beat, like everyone else, in a myriad of ways. Did he taunt everybody?
*
I didn’t know Julia Perry’s name for over a decade after this collision with superiority. Imagine what it meant to learn that Donna is an Italian lady, an aristocrat—of noble birth. Then imagine what it meant to learn Julia Perry’s name, that she composed for percussion, that my percussion ensemble, the one I played with for two years before transferring to Spelman College—imagine what it was like for me to learn that I am of noble birth as an African American rather than as a translation for an oppressive aristocrat in Italy.
I did, however, feel like I had been translated. Take the name Donna out of time, put the genealogical name on a new me, then translate my translated name and what you end up with is a Black composer in the future. It was through my instrument that I found new meaning in my name like my classmate Thomas from Cameroon described to me. Just like what my name might have meant to the doctor that birthed me, the end of an era or the beginning of a new one, learning Julia Perry’s through my instrument was the beginning of a new era for me.
I am be-bop. I am classical. I am the daughter of a mother who is trained in classical flute and a father on jazz saxophone. I am the sister of a bassist, a trumpeter, a saxophonist, and a guitarist. I am a family legacy—third time soloist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. I am a percussionist and as a writer, a Black composer in and of the future.
Amongst my classmates—Brittney, Takeisha, Kimberly, Latoya, Michelle—I felt like an oddball. I’d only met old White women named Donna.
Donna Lee Davidson
To the musician, my name can mean music. It can mean Charlie Parker, or it can mean be-bop. It can mean a time in history that meant something to so many people. It could mean Miles Davis depending on one’s religious beliefs (I believe in the Bird).
Donna Lee Davidson
Families had their own identities specific to the music they played. They might be gifted in healing, or experts over roots and herbs. One family knows the plants, another family knows the animals—raising the animals, domesticating them. All these skills were passed down, and everyone knew what a family was good at.
Donna Lee Davidson
There are so many languages that divide Africans, meaning inter-kingdom communications depended on the compositions of Black composers in the past.
Donna Lee Davidson
It wasn’t until after leaving the conservatory I attended in New York City pursuing a B.M. in Classical Percussion Performance that I learned the name Julia Perry.
Donna Lee Davidson
Classical music, and even more, Johann Sebastian Bach, wasn’t supposed to belong to me, but I had made it mine.
Donna Lee Davidson
Interlochen wasn’t just about enjoying our crafts. We were given a window to see and understand that there were people all over the world who were better than us, and who we were better than.
Donna Lee Davidson
Just like what my name might have meant to the doctor that birthed me, the end of an era or the beginning of a new one, learning Julia Perry’s through my instrument was the beginning of a new era for me.
Donna Lee Davidson
I am be-bop. I am classical. ... I am a percussionist and as a writer, a Black composer in and of the future.
Teddy Abrams (photo by Chris Wietzke, courtesy of Louisville Orchestra)
Louisville’s exceptional and dynamic music scene has always flown a bit under the radar from a national perspective. This is a microcosm of life in Louisville generally; we are deeply proud of the talent in our own backyard but somewhat baffled by the lack of positive attention to our city from outside media. Similarly, the broader Kentucky landscape contains the generative center of much quintessential American culture but doesn’t often receive commensurate recognition for the role our state has played in helping define our country’s musical history. I think this dual sense of pride and omission has had the perhaps unintended effect of inspiring Louisville and Kentucky musicians to develop an endemic, unique approach to their art. Due to limited music industry infrastructure or a lack of excessive outside influence, our local musicians have built a particularly open and creative environment for music-making; unusually porous cross-genre collaborations and consistent support for young talent may be two of my favorite Louisvillian cultural characteristics.
Thus I am honored to introduce you to these spectacularly talented musicians, all of whom are as equally committed to the health of their community as they are to the excellence of their musicianship. I chose these folks to represent Louisville (although I regret that I couldn’t extend this invitation to the dozens of other brilliant artists in town!) because they espouse what I consider to be our highest calling as artists – a desire to make music in a way that bridges divides, heals wounds, and allows us to confront our challenges as a strengthened society. Jecorey, Rachel, Tyler, Diane, and Carly exemplify this mentality and have made life far more musically inspiring for our city – and for me! I hope you will have a chance to visit our beautiful city and see these artists perform live and in person. You will leave town with a similar dual sense of pride that art is being created like this in our nation, and bemusement that the rest of the world hasn’t quite realized it yet.
Due to limited music industry infrastructure or a lack of excessive outside influence, our local musicians have built a particularly open and creative environment for music-making; unusually porous cross-genre collaborations and consistent support for young talent may be two of my favorite Louisvillian cultural characteristics.
Teddy Abrams
Louisville, a friendly, mid-sized, midwestern/southern town has a rich and complicated cultural history and a swift current of creative people who make and support local art.
Rachel Grimes
Louisville is the city of Muhammad Ali—the greatest human example of using gifts for good. He used his boxing platform to call for change while I've used my music platform to call for change. All artists, but especially Louisville artists, have that hometown responsibility.
Jecorey Arthur
I've stayed here because I am in complete awe of the love that people of Louisville have for music. Louisville cultivates such a wide range of musicians and actually shows up to support them.
Carly Johnson
Louisville has an energy and comfort to it that I haven’t quite experienced anywhere else. I also identify with Louisville’s refusal to be easily labeled.
Tyler Taylor
To me, Louisville is an easy place to live. It has a lot of quirkiness, too. Louisville is the largest producer of disco balls in the world. Benedictine spread was invented in Louisville. The Happy Birthday song was composed by 2 sisters in Louisville.
Rachel Grimes at Loretto Motherhouse, Marion Co, KY, 2016 (Photo by Ted Wathen)
I was born and raised in Louisville, with multi-generational roots in central Kentucky. As a young child I learned piano by ear playing tunes, from ragtime to standards, alongside my father and grandmother. I took piano lessons to learn to read and to love Chopin, Bach, and Brahms, but it was as a teenager that I excitedly dove into the thriving Louisville underground post-punk scene. I attended the University of Louisville School of Music, earning a degree in composition with piano as my principle instrument. While there I also explored jazz combo, Renaissance harpsichord, and medieval a cappella vocal music. Over the next many years, I wove all of these musical threads together into chamber and orchestral music, scores for theater, film, and museum installations, recording and touring genre-defying albums with several bands, and pushing the boundaries of collaboration with many fellow creatives from my hometown.
Louisville, a friendly, mid-sized, midwestern/southern town has a rich and complicated cultural history and a swift current of creative people who make and support local art. It is known around the world for musical legends such as Lionel Hampton, Slint, My Morning Jacket, Jack Harlow, Valerie Coleman, and the Louisville Orchestra. It is an affordable place to live, work, eat, and create with access to beautiful natural spaces and rivers. After the spring of 2020, it is also known around the world for the murder of Breonna Taylor by the local police, and the killing of David McAtee by the National Guard. Our community experienced shattering pain during these events and subsequent protests, which was compounded by the intense fear, loss, and grief brought on by the pandemic, economic destruction, and tragic loss of health and life around the world.
All of my scheduled performances in 2020 and beyond were cancelled by the pandemic, projects put on hold and into limbo. At that time I was caregiver and guardian for my father and his brother, and in light of all of the strife and chaos happening around us, I focused on managing the circumstances the best I could. My husband, along with so many educator peers, was juggling many new stressors for keeping teachers, families, and children safe while ensuring learning. As a creative musician, I wrestled with many conflicting feelings of uselessness. I played the piano for my hurting heart – that helped. For fun, I played covers with my husband playing bass. I talked with my friends and held hands over the phone. After years of not getting to it, I updated many of my older pencil and digital scores and opened up a web shop for my digital sheet music – that was satisfying. In late 2020, I encouraged my fellow composers Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider to salvage our hopes of recording our co-composed work for mezzo-soprano and strings The Blue Hour and co-produced that album with Shara Nova throughout 2021. The album, performed by Nova with the commissioning ensemble A Far Cry, was released by New Amsterdam/Nonesuch Records in late 2022, and was included in the Top Ten Albums of 2022 by NPR, The Nation, WNYC’s New Sounds and more.
Music heals, music unites, music is essential to our lives and our hearts – now more than ever.
Louisville is the city of Muhammad Ali—the greatest human example of using gifts for good. He used his boxing platform to call for change while I’ve used my music platform to call for change. All artists, but especially Louisville artists, have that hometown responsibility. This led me to run for city council, win, and become the youngest legislator in city history. So I’m not just here for my artistry but for my ancestry—continuing our fight for freedom, and music has been the main medium throughout my career.
Our music scene is so eclectic you can hear live jazz, hip hop, classical, soul, rock, bluegrass, and more all in a single weekend. Louisville composer, Mildred Hill, used to send transcribed “Black street cries” to Antonín Dvořák, who later influenced American culture by composing with Black music and claiming it was the future of our country. When you hear popular American music today, it was all influenced by Black Americans, likely from right here in Louisville. So our eclectic music scene today is tradition. Since the pandemic I’ve been overwhelmed with technology—virtual concerts, virtual meetings, virtual everything. Being back in school with my music students and concerts to hear live music has been healing.
Jecorey’s Music Picks…
Note: Kanye West is not from Louisville, KY. The featured artist on this song is—Vory
Carly Johnson (Photo by Mickie Winters of Winters Photography)
I’ve lived in Louisville since I was 8 years old and it has absolutely become home to me. After living in Philadelphia (which I also loved) while getting my jazz degree at The University of the Arts, I was lured back home after graduation due to feeling a little homesick…and truth-be-told missing a boy…who–thankfully–was worth the move back, as he eventually became my husband. I was still battling a bit of stage fright and it was such a comfort to get my footing and my jazz chops up in my hometown. As it turns out, I’ve stayed here because I am in complete awe of the love that people of Louisville have for music. Louisville cultivates such a wide range of musicians and actually shows up to support them. As a full time musician, I am forever grateful for this city’s love and passion for music and the arts and I’m truly grateful to the Louisville audience.
Other than the complete love and support of live music, Louisville has a real quirky small town feel, while still maintaining the highest caliber of the arts–our orchestra, our ballet, our jazz and indie rock scene, our art museums–and of course our food and drink. Our farm-to-table, modern, down-home and outside-of-the-box-creative bars and restaurants can absolutely stand-up to the best well known foodie cities and then some.
I found out I was pregnant less than a month before the pandemic came down in Louisville, and it quickly became very apparent that me and my husband would be going through a lot of these first-time experiences alone, instead of being surrounded by our amazing community. On one hand, having the time to be more in the moment and without the daily distraction of the grind that we all endure, was a gift. On the other hand, as a musician, I don’t think I fully understood the sense of self and sense of emotive expression I experience through making music with an audience on such a regular basis, until it was taken away. I was so grateful for any online streaming or outdoor performance opportunity that our community made happen, but they were still very few and far between compared to the 5-6 weekly gigs of singing I’d been doing for years.
Thankfully, Louisville unsurprisingly didn’t disappoint, and despite so many financial challenges that all of the venues faced during the pandemic, everyone got back to live music as soon as possible. I’d venture to say my schedule is the busiest it’s ever been. During the pandemic, I also took that time to release my first solo album and make a music video (of my tune “Burn Your Fears”) about that loss of human connection that we were all feeling, to show how strong we are as people and that, though things might look different on the other side of the pandemic, we’d be able to get to a place where we could see the beauty of life where we were then and now, again.
My own music pick was a tough choice, since my record is mostly a soulful 13-piece band…but I went with “Burn Your Fears” since it ties into the pandemic experience. I originally wrote it for a dear friend of mine, Marisa, shortly after she was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of lung cancer (ROS-1), as a 30 year old non-smoker. She really beat the odds and was able to live 5 full years after being diagnosed, but she passed away last November, just a month after being honored by the American Lung Association as a Lung Force Hero. This song was an anthem for her, in the sense that it’s about facing something incredibly difficult in your life, allowing yourself to embrace and feel every emotion it brings your way and deciding to find beauty and live your life fully in a different way than you had planned. It’s always had a universal theme to it that anyone living with trauma has been able to relate to, but now more than ever, it feels immensely poignant and more relatable than before. Right now, we’re all afraid, experiencing intense emotions and we’re trying our best to navigate this new way of life; we’re learning to find joy and beauty and live our lives in a different way.
Whitney Hall is so important. It represents a longstanding beautiful mecca of the arts in Louisville, and it’s locally owned and supported by its patrons (not Live Nation!). At a time when music and the arts are really struggling, when Whitney Hall is sitting empty and the future is so uncertain, it feels like an impactful message to include the towering gorgeous hall as the background for new art being created—a new way for Whitney Hall to be showcased and seen by everyone who misses it. It’s even more personal for me…I was on stage at WH with Teddy and the LO Friday March 13th, probably the last rehearsal that took place there before the shutdown…and I’m dreaming of when we all get to be back up there again.
The vision…The video is simple in the sense that it’s mostly just myself singing and playing piano in the middle of the WH stage to a massively empty house. But as the song continues, 4 string players would gradually appear in the audience (very very spread out far apart from each other) and they’d pick up their instruments (viola, 2 violins, cello) when the strings start in my song and play from their seats. As the song builds, 2-3 ballerinas would join the stage dancing around the piano (very very far apart from each other and everyone else).
What the viewer is experiencing during the video is a reflection of feelings/emotion…the great big beautiful empty WH house–representing the loneliness we’re all experiencing (and that many people have experienced through trauma), myself playing alone on stage despite being alone– representing our strength as humans to continue and endure, the appearance of the string players and eventual ballerinas–representing humanity, hope for the future and a sense of community in our shared feelings as people.”
I was born and raised in Louisville but wasn’t born into a musical family. I didn’t develop an interest in “classical music” until my older brother started playing the trombone when he was in elementary school. I took up the horn when I was in elementary school and by middle school had developed an intense curiosity about how music was put together – it seemed the only way I could get answers was to try and put it together myself. Fast-forwarding, I went to the University of Louisville as a composer and horn player, then Eastman, and finally IU. I was dumped out into the world during the pandemic with no prospects. I got a job at a coffee shop and worked until I could get my own place. 2021 was the year when things picked up – I was getting significantly more work as both a performer and composer. Even then I had a plan that I would only stay in Louisville for two years after I moved back and then figure out a way to get up to Chicago or New York. However, I realized that I could sustain myself artistically in Louisville – the city I know and love and where I want to stay.
I’ve now lived in three cities in my adult life – Louisville, Bloomington, IN., and Rochester, NY.. What makes Louisville different is its size – it’s not so big that is overwhelming but is also too small to provide the same amount of opportunity that you might associate with a bigger city. Like some other cities, Louisville has a tendency to value what comes in from the outside more than what they already have, so it might take people coming in from other places to validate your artistry or for you to leave and thrive somewhere else to prove your worth. All that said, if you can make it in the scene you can find some really amazing and talented people.
Louisville has an energy and comfort to it that I haven’t quite experienced anywhere else. I also identify with Louisville’s refusal to be easily labeled. For instance, people often argue about whether or not we are a southern or midwestern city. (Though, in my opinion, we are undeniably southern!) We are also situated in a state whose social-political ideologies, by and large, are in stark contrast to our own – we are part of Kentucky but sometimes feel like we don’t always have the most in common with the rest of our state.
During the pandemic I observed some people thrive in their isolation, in some cases creating more than they ever had in their lives. In my case, I stopped playing the horn and writing music entirely – I simply had no reason to do either. I quickly learned that those are two of the most important activities that contribute to and sustain my happiness. I was also faced with transitioning from being a semi-pro student to a professional during the “unprecedented times.” I don’t find my struggles unique but nevertheless difficult. Since then, I have established a fairly healthy freelance career and have made significant strides with many thanks to Teddy Abrams and the Louisville Orchestra. I think I’ve finally shaken the residue from my time as a student and am facing the newest challenges of my career – finding ways not to just sustain my creativity but to grow it. The circumstances have changed but the premise has more or less remained the same: how will I continue to grow as an artist and who’s coming along for the ride? I can’t do it alone no matter how hard I try!
Plus here’s a track by my fave Louisville musician, Jackie Royce.
She is a professional bassoonist and plays in this band Ut Gret. We have played together in gigs several times, went to school together, and I consider her a pillar in the Louisville music community.
My mother grew up in the Highlands of Louisville but upon marrying, moved with my dad to his family farm in Highview to raise me and my brothers. My grandparents bought the land in 1920 and supported their 10 children by running the Highview Dairy, growing crops, and the occasional sale of moonshine. I still live on the same land near my mom and my little brother. This is my home. I feel very connected to our land and never had the desire to move very far away. Part of my connection to my Louisville home was the music that was always present when I was young. “Boil Them Cabbage Down”, “Tom Dooley”, and “Old Joe Clark” were often sung in our kitchen by my mother as she played the banjo. I don’t ever remember not having a musical instrument close to me when I was young.
Louisville is where The Louisville Leopard Percussionists originated organically, accidentally. In 1993 was teaching 2nd & 3rd grade at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School and found a stash of small mallet instruments in a storage closet while searching for bulletin board paper. I enlisted the help of my class to carry the instruments into our room and our group was born. We incorporated the music into our classroom schedule of math, reading, social studies, and science and ended up learning enough tunes to start gigging. A PTA meeting was our first gig, then the mall, for someone’s grandma at the nursing home, then it exploded from there.
In 2003 we incorporated into a non-profit organization and our program really started to grow. Never did I imagine that accidentally stumbling on those instruments would lead to over 30 years of Leopards, over 1000 children, performances at venues all over the eastern United States, an HBO Documentary, and even a appearance on A&E’s Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour. That’s why I still choose to live in Louisville. How could I leave this all behind?
When people think of Louisville, The Kentucky Derby, Muhammad Ali, Louisville Slugger baseball bats, The University of Louisville, or Kentucky Fried Chicken may come to mind. But, there is so much more to Louisville. To me, Louisville is an easy place to live. It has a lot of quirkiness, too. Louisville is the largest producer of disco balls in the world. Benedictine spread was invented in Louisville. The Happy Birthday song was composed by 2 sisters in Louisville.
There is a 30 foot tall golden statue of Michelangelo’s David on Main Street right down the street from the Slugger Museum and Bat Factory. We have the largest annual fireworks show in the country, the world’s longest go-kart track, and the oldest operating Mississippi-style steamboat. And, we have plenty of bourbon distilleries.
I feel that Louisville is a community that values the arts. Our Louisville Orchestra, The Louisville Ballet, and Kentucky Shakespeare are out in the community making the classic arts available and accessible to all. We have numerous art and music festivals all year long so there is always somewhere to go to find great performances and great art. Whether it’s a show by Turner’s Circus, The Squallis Puppeteers, Stage One Family Theater, The River City Drum Corp, Drag Daddy Productions, or The Louisville Leopard Percussionists, people show up to support our arts community. Like many others, our community has had some pretty significant rough patches. But Louisville is my community. I have spent most of my life here. My family is here. My Leopards are here.
The Louisville Leopard Percussionists is a performing ensemble so the pandemic was rough on us. Not being able to come together to play music for an audience was hard for our kids and teachers alike. But, we made the most of it. When it was safe, our Leopard staff at the time, Wes Greer, Kent Klarer, Carly Rodman, and I focused on very small groups and made 17 videos in just a few months. The kids were very proud of their accomplishments and grew so much as young musicians. We were able to really focus in on individual kids to help push them to a different level of musicianship. Our kids were missing out on so much life, we were happy that we could provide them with music to help get them through.
Diane’s Music Picks…
This video is from an October 2022 performance as the warm up band for My Morning Jacket. Watching our little rock stars perform on the big stage reinforced why I do what I do in my city of Louisville.
This is a link to one of my favorite Louisville bands, Squeeze-Bot, performing Thelonious Monk’s Well You Needn’t. I’ve spent many summer evenings sitting at the picnic tables at NachBar listening to these great musicians.
I’ll never forget my first encounter with Shaun Tan’s work. Back in 2015, I was enrolled in an undergraduate seminar on migrant literature, and one of the texts on the course syllabus was his wordless graphic novel, The Arrival (2006). This genre was new to me, and I found myself spellbound by Tan’s illustrations, which paint the story of a father’s immigration to an imaginary metropolis. On some level, I think the idea of telling a story with images alone reminded me of the challenge that composers face when writing instrumental music: how can we weave a narrative without words? Sure, certain images can conjure up specific ideas more easily than sound, but they still leave plenty for the viewer’s imagination to fill in. And here lies, for me, one facet of Tan’s artistry: he always incorporates an element of mystery into his graphic novels; even those that do feature text. You sense that there is a message in them somewhere, but it may not make itself immediately known; rather, it waits patiently for you. Since reading The Arrival, I’ve delighted in Tan’s other works, including Tales from Outer Suburbia (2008), Tales from the Inner City (2008), Lost & Found (2011), and Rules of Summer(2013). His stories have made me laugh and cry and never fail to leave me in a state of awe and reflection.
Beyond this visceral response, I’m drawn to the environmental themes that pervade much of Tan’s work. In Tales from the Inner City, he stages a series of unusual encounters between humans and animals in urban environments. Many of the tales in this collection illustrate the hubris, egocentrism, and shortsightedness that so often define our interactions with other creatures and the natural world at large. Others, however, open a window into the wondrous possibilities that might transpire if we were to find the humility and wisdom to revere and learn from other animals. When GLFCAM commissioned me last year to compose a song cycle for Mexican countertenor César Aguilar as part of its Composing Earth initiative, I sensed that I would be revisiting Tales from the Inner City for inspiration.
Throughout 2021, I joined other GLFCAM composers, Gabriela, and climate scientist Rob Davies in monthly discussion groups about the climate crisis. Our conversations centered on a series of books, articles, and documentaries that GLFCAM and Dr. Davies curated to catalyze our climate education. One hard truth that we discussed is the fact that anthropogenic climate change has ushered in a period of mass extinction: every year, one-in-a-million species should expire naturally, yet the current rate of extinction – accelerated by such factors as human population growth, meat production, and deforestation – is estimated to be 100-1,000 times greater. In response to this tragic development, National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore began documenting at-risk species with magnetic (yet unadorned) portraits as part of the Photo Ark project. Nat Geo writes, “No matter its size, each animal is treated with the same amount of affection and respect. The results are portraits that are not just stunningly beautiful, but also intimate and moving.” Sartore adds, “It’s the eye contact that moves people. It engages feelings of compassion and a desire to help.”
Tan’s Tales from the Inner City and Sartore’s Photo Ark both raise for me the notion of the interspecies gaze. What do intimate encounters with other animals engender in us? Empathy? Disgust? Something more uncanny? How does the setting of these encounters affect our response? These are some of the questions that led me back to Tan’s stories as I researched text to musically set for my Composing Earth commission, which is set to premiere in the fall of 2023. With GLFCAM’s assistance, I was thrilled to secure Tan’s permission this past spring to feature three of his stories in my song cycle. I’d like to share with you my reflections on these inspiring texts, each of which will comprise a different movement of my cycle.
“Orca” is a tale about an urban community that magically suspends a whale from the sky. “It was just so beautiful up there, so inspiring,” recalls the narrator wistfully. At first spellbinding, the sight of the orca gliding across the city’s illuminated night sky loses its charm as people find themselves unable to tune out the heartbreaking, resonant calls of the whale’s mother, which “penetrated all concrete, steel, and urban clamor.” The city dwellers feel ashamed of themselves and promise to return the whale to its mother, but their remorseful vows prove hollow: “We just don’t know how to get it down. We never did.” Musically, I find inspiration in this story’s heights-versus-depths imagery and evocation of different timbres (e.g. underwater sounds, mechanical sounds). At its core, I feel that “Orca” reflects three problematic ways in which humans relate to the natural world. First, how we all too frequently fail to consider the environmental impact of our actions. Second, when we do become aware of our impact–often only after the signs, like the orca’s mother, wail at us–the promises that we make to right our environmental wrongs tend to lie dormant, regardless of our intentions. Finally, “Orca” speaks to many people’s perception of animals as creatures that exist for our own pleasure. This human tendency, as Tan suggests in “Orca,” can instill in us a feeling of delight in the natural world, but this feeling does not necessarily translate into the reverence and respect for nature that might otherwise lead us to more sustainable ways of interfacing with our environment.
In “Butterfly,” a massive, rainbow swarm of butterflies (also known, more poetically, as a “kaleidoscope”) descends upon a city. Enchanted by this wondrous event, everyone stops what they are doing and gathers in the streets to “[wait] for the weightless blessing of tiny insects.” People’s worries fly away. Time seems to stop. (I’ll note here that this evocation of flight, lightness, and stillness lends itself beautifully to music.) Later, once the butterflies depart, people revert to their “factory settings,” desperately searching for reasons why the butterflies came in the first place and what their visit meant (“Was this an omen of something good or bad? A plague?”). At the risk of beating meaning out of a story that warns against “prying things apart for cause and effect, sign and symbol,” I feel that “Butterfly” speaks to certain obstacles that we face as we confront the climate crisis. First, our routine lifestyles–reliant on fossil-fueled energy and embedded in an unsustainable and inequitable profit-driven economy–no longer serve us or the planet on which we all ultimately depend for our survival. In Tan’s story, the kaleidoscope of butterflies snaps everyone out of their routines; they only succumb to their habitual worrying, intellectualizing, and problematizing in the butterflies’ absence. Though these mental tendencies (engrained in so many of us as we grow up) often go hand-in-hand with critical thinking (a tool that we desperately need in order to face the climate crisis), they can also lead to paralysis and inaction. We’re known to think more creatively when we’re playful, curious, and fully present, and Tan’s butterflies invite us into this mindset.
In “Snail,” a tale that will serve as the final movement of my song cycle, the narrator recalls the arrival of gigantic snails in an unnamed city and the outrage that they initially provoked. When night falls, the snails make love in plain sight in the city’s streets and alleyways. (Snails, I learned, are hermaphroditic creatures with an elaborate and languorous mating ceremony; in the narrator’s words, “the slowest of slow dances…”) All corners of society – politicians, religious leaders, naturalists – used to cry out against this open, uncouth display of affection, yet a century later, at the time of this story’s telling, everyone has grown to cherish the snails: “We would be so sad if they ever went away, leaving us all alone with our small ideas about love.” I read “Snail” as a satire on our practice of imposing human mores (e.g. notions of sexual normativity, productivity, public vs. private property) on other species. “Snail” also invites reflection on the rate of societal change: how long does it take for dominant cultural attitudes to shift? When we consider the climate crisis and the cultural (r)evolution that it requires of us, we cannot afford to wait the century that it takes the humans in “Snail” to coexist with their mollusk neighbors and absorb their lessons. If, however, we relinquish our knee-jerk hostility to lifestyles that differ from our own, our future on this planet promises to shine much brighter.
I think the idea of telling a story with images alone reminded me of the challenge that composers face when writing instrumental music: how can we weave a narrative without words?
Timothy Peterson
Anthropogenic climate change has ushered in a period of mass extinction: every year, one-in-a-million species should expire naturally, yet the current rate of extinction – accelerated by such factors as human population growth, meat production, and deforestation – is estimated to be 100-1,000 times greater.
Timothy Peterson
What do intimate encounters with other animals engender in us? Empathy? Disgust? Something more uncanny? How does the setting of these encounters affect our response?
Timothy Peterson
When we become aware of our impact ... the promises that we make to right our environmental wrongs tend to lie dormant, regardless of our intentions.
Timothy Peterson
Our routine lifestyles--reliant on fossil-fueled energy and embedded in an unsustainable and inequitable profit-driven economy--no longer serve us or the planet on which we all ultimately depend for our survival.
Timothy Peterson
How long does it take for dominant cultural attitudes to shift? When we consider the climate crisis and the cultural (r)evolution that it requires of us, we cannot afford to wait.
Timothy Peterson
If we relinquish our knee-jerk hostility to lifestyles that differ from our own, our future on this planet promises to shine much brighter.
