Tina Davidson

Composer

Composing a Life, Note by Note

Cassandra Sings; Changing the Music

by

a commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet

One day in 1988, David Harrington, first violinist of the Kronos Quartet, calls me. Weeks before, on a whim, I had sent the quartet a recording of my saxophone quintet, Transparent Victims without invitation or introduction. “We listened to your music and loved it,” Harrington says. “We want to commission you for a new string quartet – say 15-17 minutes long?”  I am astonished. 

Not long afterwards I fly down to the New Music America Festival in Miami to meet with the quartet. I hear them premiere Steve Reich’s powerful Different Trains and Eleanor Hovda’s beautiful and evocative Lemniscates. I sit and dream through their four-hour performance of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet, No. 2.

Back at home, I being to compose. I title the piece, Cassandra Sings, after the mythological Cassandra in the play Agamemnon by Aeschylus. There Cassandra ‘sings’ her lines, for she, like the chorus, speaks the truth – she sings the reality of life.

The work on the quartet is a sickening roller-coaster ride. Writing the first section is like going through a manic-depressive storm, at times ecstatic, at others agonizingly difficult. The rhythm tears along, bumping into sounds that are both unexpected and comfortable. I spin through reams of material, yet it is all connected somehow; tense, pressured, chased, inescapable, and swept away. I stitch together the fabric of the piece carefully, paying great attention to the transitions. The direction surprises the ear, and is, somehow, just right. The second section rolls out easily. Already I am at Cassandra’s true joy. My dreams are released. I soar along with my music.

I fly to San Francisco to rehearse with the Kronos Quartet. The week is black and desolate. In three days they have only rehearsed two thirds of my quartet and I have yet to hear the whole piece through. Each day they inch through a small section, making almost no progress. I am exhausted. The weather is bone cold and I take long baths.

A week later I am back with the quartet in Minneapolis. At the dress rehearsal in the Walker Art Center, they play my piece in an extraordinary manner, with every note of this difficult piece in place – except for the last two, a major third echoed an octave below. I almost laugh out loud. “What’s going on with the last two notes?” I ask.

“We felt the ending was too optimistic, so we changed them.” the first violinist, David Harrington explains.

I hold my breath and wait. They have several versions to play for me – a minor third, and dissonant second, but nothing seems right.

Finally the violist says quietly, “Let’s play the piece the way it is written.”

The performance is brilliant, and I go on stage during the applause. David leans towards me. “I withdraw the argument,” he whispers. Next week is the New York City premiere at Alice Tully Hall.

Excerpted from Grief’s Grace, A Memoir by Tina Davidson.  © Tina Davidson, 2021

Listen: Cassandra Sings, for string quartet: http://www.tinadavidson.com/works/#string-quartet-sextet

Recorded by The Cassatt String Quartet, CRI # 671, Emergency Music. Listen on Spotify:

Intermittent Accuracy

by

Let me be honest here.

We want so to attach meaning, to understand, to pin the moment down, when it is, at best, a transitory happening. My journals, for example, are an outpouring of the difficulties and pain I feel in my life. But the pain does not possess me in the way the journals seem to indicate. I work, I compose, I care for my family; I am happy and joyous. My journals are truthful and honest, but they are only intermittently accurate.

My music, which contains me, is also not accurate. There is something else, something I cannot get my tongue around. I bend forward and listen to my recent orchestra piece, trying to understand. The piece is massive and powerful, and full of feeling. I wrote it, but do not recognize myself. The work is myself in the future, the vision I have of myself and the world to come. I recognize only that it emanates from my core, and continues to a place I do not know.

Late Summer Hydrangeas, pastel by Tina Davidson

Something happens when I compose, that for all my self-analysis and precious rethinking I have no control over. The workis larger than me, and now completed I cannot imagine how I wrote it, or even have much memory of having done so. I am not saying that something took over me and wrote the music, or that I don’t remember the content. But in the journey of composing, I go to a place that transforms the work into more than me.

Beyond the Blue Horizon, orchestra

What can it be? Second sight, intuition, a deep understanding that goes beyond the mind and ability to understand? Perhaps it is a primal knowing of the earth’s center, massive movements of the rocks, a slipping and sliding of the sun, ribbons of light. I struggle to discover myself, but this is a place I will never know with my mind. Only through my touch, my hearing – through the beating of my heart.

Listen: Render, for string quartet, Cassatt Quartet: https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/render-2016-for-string-quartet-excerpt-2

Excerpted from Grief’s Grace, A Memoir by Tina Davidson

Dance of Creation

by

Stories from teaching composition in public schools

My Young Composers are finished writing their own composition and are now preparing to perform for their school friends, teachers and parents. Because music making is a group activity, I teach them on how to work together as a team, to stay focused and attentive during the performance, and to follow the directions of the conductor. They take turns conducting each other in large group works.

Young Composers rehearsing

Sasha and Jade are the most difficult to engage. They are best friends in the worst sense. They sit together, whispering to each other or literally fall asleep at their desks. I have to wake Jade on a regular basis. Over the course of the residency, they grudgingly pretend to write a composition together. Hoping to encourage them, I ask them to come to the front of the class and play their piece for the other students. They slowly slouch forward, bumping into each other, and fuss with the music.

I wonder why I am bothering. Why don’t I ignore them altogether? But I persist.

Drum Set made from tin cans and pie pan

I find I teach as much about performance as I do composition. The act of performance is complex and is a metaphor for being visible. It takes poise and maturity. These sixth graders, on the cusp of adolescence, are, frankly, a mess. They slump. They begin playing suddenly when everyone is talking. They grab their music and march off the stage before the last note is played. They burst into giggles at any hint of a mistake. 

I work patiently with each set of composers-now-performers, reminding them how to show respect for themselves, their creation and their audience.

Baggin’ Beats, invented notation

Sasha and Jade are no exception. As they perform for the class they have several false starts. They get half way through the piece and grind to a halt. I drill them again and again. There is a lot of smirking as they move back to their seats. They are not going to give me an inch.

The pair drives me to distraction, but somehow, miraculously, they finish a work called Dance of Creation. At the performance they hold themselves a little bit straighter than I have ever seen them. I hold my breath, but they are fine. They perform their piece and it is all theirs.

As the applause sweeps over them, they stand there accepting the hard-won praise. Sasha’s lip curls and Jade’s face shines. They suddenly recognize their accomplishment, and I am so proud of them.

Excerpted from Grief’s Grace, A Memoir by Tina Davidson

YOUNG COMPOSERS PROGRAM

Tina Davidson created Young Composers program to teach students to compose their own music through instrument building, graphic and invented notation. Designed to enhance self-esteem and reinforce achievement through alternative measures of expression, the course culminates with a performance of the students’ compositions.

Compositions to perform with students

PAPER, GLASS, STRING & WOOD
A side-by-side work to perform with student string musicians or string orchestra. This four-movement work was created so that young or amateur musicians have the opportunity to rehearse and perform with professional string performers.  

Listen: https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/paper-from-triples-string

FIRST LIGHT
Beginning string players and string quartet or string orchestra
Created for beginning string players to perform with professional string orchestra, the work opens up with a plaintive melody for the young players. As each string section is slowly added, the work concludes with a joyous finale.

Bearing Witness

by

creating yourself

“What is composing music all about?” I asked the class.

I am teaching another Young Composer session, this time to sixth graders. I scribble their thoughts about music quickly on the black board: writing your own tune, expressing yourself, giving the beat, listening to yourself, being famous, making money.

I wipe the chalk from my hands, “Creating your own song, being heard, witnessing,” I suggest. They stop for a moment. “Creating yourself,” I add. They are quiet.

View from Ghost Ranch, pastel by Tina Davidson

Music has this element of bearing witness; it is that space where I reveal all that I am and dream of who I am becoming. I noticed it most distinctly when I worked with the homeless women, helping them to write operas about their lives. It was slow and oftentimes painful work as they pieced out their stories and wrote lyrics and songs. But it was there that I truly saw the raw power of art for the first time—the ability to transform, to reach beyond the “dailyness” of living to the reinvention of self.

To sing about oneself is to be visible. To witness life is to stand apart and speak one’s truth. To perform a work together is to collaborate for clarity of the moment.

Listen: Bright Flash of Wings for string sextet: http://: https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/a-bright-flash-of-wings-excerpt

Excerpted from Grief’s Grace, A Memoir by Tina Davidson

I Can Also Tell You This

by

A few things I have learned about opera

 “I can also tell you this” is the lyric written by my sister Eva Davidson for my opera, Billy and Zelda. My understanding of opera and song has deepened since I began to write several decades ago.

Opera, in its classical form, is theater in a continuous singing from beginning to end. It is a marrying of several art forms – theater, music and prose. Always shunning its more popular sibling, music theater or musical, it has no dialog. For some, the narration is held in the recitative, or “recitativo,” sung-speech that tells the smaller actions of the story.

Billy and Zelda

For me, the music of the opera – song – is when the voice disconnects from the flow of the story and steps forward to speak directly to the audience.  It is an opening the heart to the moment. The act of singing has sacredness about it. Emerging from the depths of my body, warmed by my breath, it is when I utter my most intimate thoughts: truth telling, a moment of revelation, insight or growth – this is where I am right now.

And always in the beauty of words, a rich variety of poetic words. I work closely with my sister, to capture what is at hand. She creates poetry, not libretto or lyrics – an essence of things. 

As I compose, I taste each word, like small beautiful stones. I pour through the lines looking for understanding. I live days between words. I lose some of my composing assertiveness and melding my music to a phrase as if in service. Rarely do I go straight through the poem in song, rather, I circle back to a line, a set of delicious words, or hard consonants to punctuate meaning.

My characters are learners; they enter the opera without realizing they have questions about themselves and life. They are on a journey of illumination. 

Set of Billy and Zelda

Billy and Zelda explores the mystery surrounding the deaths of two children. The work uses both opera and theater, intertwining contrasting stories about Billy, a young man killed in war, and Zelda, a little girl who has died of pneumonia.

But this is a ruse to talk about the rich life of relationships between parents and their children. The dead return to confront the living, the result of which is the love between them that endures through time as if it were yesterday.

Zelda Narrator, Billy and Zelda

The overlay is the pregnant neighbor who comes to the opera almost by chance. Listen to here in the final song of Billy and Zelda, https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/core-lullaby-from-billy-and-zelda.

Standing alone at end of the last act, she addresses her new, learned awareness of life; there is no protection for her child-to-be, only a willingness to love – a love that knows no safety from loss.

And I have to ask, is Billy and Zelda the only opera whose main character is pregnant, and whose subject is the greatest love story of all – that with our children?

BILLY AND ZELDA

“Blue moon, over the curve of the horizon, the earth proves spherical beneath the crush of chain link stars,” Tina Davidson’s opera tells the story of two children lost in death and found by love. Based on the poetry by the composer sister, Eva Davidson and a short story by Lâle Davidson, and the work is a uniquely moving experience.

Billy and Zelda is a passionate, melodic work which explores the rich life of relationships between children and their parents. A truly innovative opera theater piece, one part is all theater (Zelda), while the other (Billy) all song, with the two plots winding in and out of each other. Zelda is for actress and improvised cello and Billy is for five singers, string quartet and marimba.

Excerpted from Grief’s Grace, A Memoir by Tina Davidson

LISTEN TO BILLY AND ZELDA: https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/billy-and-zelda-5-songs-compilation