Tina Davidson

Composer

Contemporary Music

The Box You Chose

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The truth is, I have never given up my pencil. With it in hand, I slip into the tactile world of music. I love the scratch of the point, sometimes breaking with a pop, the smooth finish of the staff paper, and the slide of the eraser. Sometimes, I lean in hard with feeling, pressing almost through the paper. Later, my fingers brush over the marks on the back side of the page, and as if reading them like a secret code.

This sensitivity to touch comes from decades as a pianist; my fingertips can almost see at touch. The act of playing music on a piano is about bending the bones of my fingers – meeting music with my flesh – moving into and through to mold, bend, scoop it out of the ivories. This finger work, whether at the piano or grasping a pencil, sees and smells independently of myself.

But there is another reason I compose with pencil; the freedom it gives me to create. The page is a tabula rasa, open and waiting to be filled.

In my first draft, notes drift around, sometime clumping together or jumping lines. Page after page I scribble here and there, crossing out, or drawing arrows to another section. Pages waft to the floor or slide on top of the piano; a sea of notes. I am full of motion as I compose, using a kinetic energy that brings out a sweet solidity. I swear that my hand, moving up and down, over and across as I compose with pencil, wakes up a deeper something else. It moves me into the heart of things.

By the second draft, I have decided the order of the sections, and crafted each transition. Only when I have put the whole piece together in pencil do I turn to my computer, my typewriter.

A music notation program, no matter how brilliant, is a box in which I fit my music. They are created based on classical music or even programmers’ ideas, and lag far behind living composers who challenge perceptions and create new ways of communicating music. It has to catch up to me, not the other way around.

If I am not careful, the limitation and inflexibilities of a software program can impact my composing process and even my thinking. Sneakily, it defaults to a notation I don’t want to use. Fortunately, I have already settled the argument with my pencil, so I insist. The program fights back, and we wrestle back and forth until I find a workaround, or use a prompt to override it.

I find it exhausting resisting this steady pull to the middle that is not my own. But with my score already rendered in pencil, I am fully armed and ready to push against the software and avoid the influence of its’ overbearing hand.

 

It is the first day of my composition class for the music majors at Franklin and Marshall College. I have just informed them that they are not allowed to use their computers for the first six weeks of the semester. A look of confusion flashes over their faces, then concern. “What do you mean?” asks one student, “We have to use a pencil? And compose music on staff paper?”

I smile. The start is an open field to explore.

Inter Stellar

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Not until the first snow of the year, did I know for certain that she was there. I had guessed as much, somewhere in the back ground, in the corner of my eye, in the undergrowth of my thoughts. But now, here were her footsteps, curling and meandering across my yard, like shafts of arching winter wheat.

I had heard her months before on the edge of sleep. A cry, a half-shriek or moan, almost like an animal mortally wounded. Stumbling out of bed, I stood by the open window and waited. The sound recalled my childhood. Late one afternoon, our dog appeared with a small brown rabbit in his large jaws. Terrified, the rabbit’s mouth was shaped like an oval as it screamed continuously – a bowels of the earth sound.

This, was no rabbit, however. Instead a vixen in heat, calling out an ancient enticement for a mate.

I started to set out scraps of meat for her, a fresh bone or two, a nightly snack – just something to keep her going in the winter. I know, I know. This is against all current wisdom: do not interfere with nature, or make wild animals dependent on humans. But, in truth, either by choice or necessity, foxes live in my neighborhood; we are part of the same ecosystem.

Small traces of her began to increase. The plastic dishes I laid out were scattered around the yard, often decorated with round puncture marks. Then, a carefully composed dropping of scat on the walkway, later, on my doorstep. A blue ball was left under the apple tree.

One evening I looked out the window and there she was. Slender black legs, thick red orange fur, and a laughing face. She approached the food as if it were a foreign object, jumping back in caution. Circling, she lay on her stomach and slid forward to eat, only to dance away again. Finally she finished it, and began to move gracefully off, stopping to look around every few steps.

Her movements were both of curiosity and caution. It made me smile. She had none of the cruel intensity I had as a young composer, where insistence was the only path forward. I was singular, driven, and compulsive. A straight line, a harsh beam of light, always thinking about what to create. Preoccupied and rarely in the moment, I was angular and often strident.

Now, in my seventies, I am more tamed. c is no longer one-directional, scraping and scouring rocks. It oozes, bubbling towards my writing and composing, my garden, and my friends. I have more elasticity, more contours.

I have, I think, learned wisdom, by being humbled through experience. I no longer move at a fast pace or travel long distances. Instead, the reach is deep, and as connections come to the surface, words are there to articulate them. Before I was a runner aimed for the horizon. Now I have a spade; I dig.

Age has not taken away my ambition – the belief I still have something important to add. I grapple with doubts or vulnerabilities, but I have learned how to be more fluid and gentle, like the fox’s looping footsteps.

I soften at the sight of her. For all her grace, she is no fool. While she is not possessed or driven, she knows the boundaries and carefulness of living.

I search to name her. I am thinking of Interstellar, or Inter Stellar. Borrowed from Latin, stēllāris, it is of or pertaining to stars, like the ones she roams under. And, both of us are are “inter” or between stages. She, a wild creature living in a tamed neighborhood, and I, a human living with the passage of time. 

Like her, I pause to sniff before moving a few more steps forward. I pick up my head and gauge the shifting patterns.

The Speed of Things

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I am at a local concert, listening to a performance of Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Piano Sonata, No. 23. The pianist has impeccable clarity as he thunders through the tempestuous last movement. The speed of his playing, however, distracts me. What is it about the escalating speeds in performances of musical works?

Everything is faster and faster these days. In fact, things have sped up so much that they say our brains have been reprogrammed. Being forced to use a rotary phone, taking 7 to 12 seconds to dial a number, would probably drive us crazy. Once adjusted to the current speed of our computer, slow loading of a program can be irritating, even anxiety provoking.

Physical prowess has also changed. Young athletes are bigger, faster and stronger, demonstrating a level of athleticism that was once considered beyond their years, due to a combination of better training techniques, technological advances, and specialized sports science. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, few Olympic and professional sprinters could run a 100-meter dash in under 10 seconds. Since 2019, however, some high school athletes have been able to do so.

In other words, once a barrier is broken, it becomes a standard. A gifted athlete – or prodigy performer – creates a new marker of normal.

The classical music field reflect much of this increased speed. According to the 2018 Universal Music Group study, the recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Double Violin Concerto have sped up by as much as 30% since 1961, with the 2016 recording lasting about 12 minutes compared to 17 minutes. Modern recordings, the study suggests, may be picking up the pace by about a minute per decade.

With escalating speed of performance comes an increase of technical abilities. I was up at the recent Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival when Steve Mackey introduced his work, Physical Property.  In the mid 1990s, performers struggled to master his technically difficult work. Now, he laughed, the young performers, “Ate it up like whip cream.”

Last year, I was in rehearsals with the Jasper String Quartet and Natalie Zhu. We were preparing for the the recording of my latest album, Barefoot. The quartet were playing my difficult work beautifully; seamlessly moving through the tricky meter changes and the rambunctious middle section.

As the piece closed, we sat for a moment. “Wow,” I finally said, “You play fast!” I paused, “Can you take it slower?”

They smiled. Of course.

How fast, ultimately, can we listen, and what do we miss hearing because of speed? I love composing music that quickly twists and turns upward, or plunges downward. Hanging for a moment, breathless, it dashing off to another curve. Playing it too fast, however, flattens, even blurs the music. Sadly, we do not have instant playback to rehear, in the moment, and decipher the music that just rushed by us.

For my part, I say to my performers, slow down. Breathe. Allow the music to have more space.

 

You are What You Eat

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As an artist, does one need to be a good person to create good work? I’m a little embarrassed; it seems like a silly question, but it has nagged at me over these many years.

I have always maintained that ‘you are what you eat,’ and I feed myself well. To support the music I create, I spend a lot of time reading, journaling, and drawing. I get outside and garden, take long walks, spend quiet evenings meditating or thinking. I go to art museums, music and theater performances – filling my head and heart with enriched fertile soil to grow the music I compose.

But do my actions – how I treat others – find their way into my music as well?  If I am careless or cruel to my partner, children or friends, if I am selfish, self-centered, even narcissistic, will these character traits translate into my music? How does who I am effect my music, possess it, even corrupt it? Crassly put, can bad people write good music?

There are plenty of examples of badly behaved composers. Gesualdo committed a gruesome murder and mutilation of both his wife and her lover, Beethoven was famously temperamental and more than a bit abusive to his nephew, and Wagner was a fervent anti-Semite. Scriabin was a pathological narcissist who imagined himself a god and Mussorgsky was a raging, out-of-control alcoholic who idealized his addiction. Closer to home, I know many good composers I would rather not spend any time with.

How can I understand this from my own life perspective? Perhaps it is in the creative process itself that I might find common ground.

When I compose, it is as if I have two lives – one that is music and the other one that is every day. Call it a split personality or a double self, I project myself into this realm, into this voice – my second self. As I wrote in my memoir, Let Your Heart Be Broken,

“Without music, I am plain and unremarkable. I shop, eat, dally about, think foolish thoughts, peer into the mirror. I hate, I love, I sleep, I anguish—nothing special. But when focused on writing music, I am a channel, a beam of light – I am a passageway for what must come out. My entire person comes together in a pulse, condensed and absorbed. The work follows me everywhere. I hear it in the bathroom, while I am cooking, as I fall asleep. There is always this murmur, this whisper.” (page 47)

In my composing life lies untethered ground, unhampered by anger, pettiness, and dis–ease. This neither-here-nor-there state becomes a clean slate and a dreamland where all is possible. I can articulate deep feelings of connection and love without encumbrance of my more human emotions. I can turn my night sweats, jealousy and rage into energy and rhythm, dissipating their destructive force. I am, as I compose, a better person, an imagined best.

In this way, I understand how badly behaved composers write good music. In this composing dream-world, they can exist emotionally open, kind and connected. Whereas in daily life, they can be harsh, cruel, mentally unstable and even murderous.

But, honestly, this doesn’t work for me.

The relationship between my life, who I am and how I behave, and my work is inseparable. There is no slacking off in either regard. I am as flawed as the next person, but it is how I am accountable to and work on those flaws that matters.

In the end, I ascribed to the Shaker’s motto, hands to work, hearts to God, where “every part of life is a spiritual manifestation of God – the God within – whether they make furniture or say their prayers” (Let Your Heart Be Broken).

The glue in my life is that I am always working to be the best I can be. My imagined best that I project into my music is my true north.

© Bottle, Tina Davidson, pastel

Read Let Your Heart Be Broken, Life and Music from a Classical Composer

https://www.amazon.com/Let-Your-Heart-Broken-Classical/dp/1633376974

Radical Inclusion

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A lovely morning in Philadelphia with composer Andrea Clearfield was wrapping up. She sat there, framed in the sun, eating the last of her bagel. “I would love,” I confided, “to do something to support other composers.”

Andrea smiled, “Let’s talk to Alex.”

A year later, and together with composers Andrea Clearfield, Alex Shapiro, Mara Gibson, Jennifer Higdon, Cynthia Folio and Alexandra Gardner, we created the Composer Posse, a brain trust of composer wisdom of hundreds of years of practice. In meetings, open to all composers, we share our experiences in topics such social media, tech, networking, balancing family and career, to name a few.

The Composer Posse is about connecting, supporting and acknowledging fellow composers from all genres, career levels and interests.

Life as a composer is always the long game. Surviving the obstacles and setbacks, the highs and lows and just continuing to compose the music is a victory worthy of celebrating. The shared companionship of the Composer Posse makes this easier. Who ever shows up to these meetings is greeted with joyous inclusion, and embraced as one of the tribe, regardless of number of years in this field – a beginner, intermediate, or established composer, even the late comer.

I always wanted to take over the music world. I know it is a silly goal in the face of reality, but I am tired of the competition between composers, not to mention the condescension by classical music to contemporary music, or the lack of opportunities for this generation of music to flourish. So, teaming up with others, I ground my advocacy in radical inclusion. And this has enriched my life beyond measure.

 

Drawing, colored pencil, © Tina Davidson