Tina Davidson

Composer

composing music

Escaping Gravity

by

I am counting again. It comes up now and then like a nervous tick. I notice it most when I am outside walking and preoccupied with some interior thought. Suddenly I hear the sound of my counting; how many steps to my front door, how many trees line the street or how many rows of grass to mow in a section of lawn. It’s embarrassing; an obsession that keeps me from experiencing what’s around me. I sternly forbid any more counting, abstaining like an alcoholic. Soon, however, I forget to be wary and I slip back into it again, this preoccupation with the count, the soul of music.

I have long been fascinated with rhythm in my music – how to shape the energy of a piece, like a band of shimmering movement. My interest is in how it transforms, moves from one state to another, interrupts itself, then doubles back. Sometimes it is a stream of water bouncing down a curling bed, glancing off rocks and edges. Other times is it a hot liquid metal, slithering, pulsating, spurting, angry, and insistent. Whether whimsical or full of power, it is the rhythms that often take a listener to a breaking point.

But I am getting ahead of myself. First, a bit of back ground on how I understand and relate to rhythm.

Music, for me, in its crudest form is three things: organized sound, duration and silence. Sound is the pitch (high and low). Duration has to do with time, both as the invisible net in which sound floats (how long the piece is), and the length of each individual sound, or rhythm. Silence is the great back drop and rarely intrusive. It acts as a foil to contents of music, bringing it into relief.

Rhythm is organized around a pulse, a steady continuous beat that hides in the background. The pulse can be fast or slow becoming the tempo or the speed of the music, but its primary role is to be the skeleton-form on which rhythm rests. For convenience, these pulses are corralled in countable units or measures, commonly 3, 4, 6 or 12. These keep the performers from flying out of place and loosing themselves completely.

The downbeat, for me, is the star of the measure. Its genesis, most likely, comes from walking. Stepping out to walk four steps, the dominate leg (usually the right leg) takes the lead, making a slightly firmer emphasis on the first step, and again on the third step. The first of these is the down beat, a natural emphasis of the measure.

Walking in groups of three is slightly different. The first group starts on the dominate leg (RLR), but the second grouping uses the nondominant leg (LRL). I almost stumble as I walk the pattern on my studio rug; the slight-off-centeredness catches my imagination.

I play with the magical insistence of downbeats. I am forever adjusting groupings of continuously running fast notes – like the sound of steady rain – not mathematically or intellectually, but in a playful, natural kind of movement.

This is where I begin. I am counting in a steady fast pace, let’s say 123 123 over and over. The first in the series is the downbeat that I feel as a little pulse. Then, wanting a change, I add them together, 123456 123456. Now the distance between downbeats is longer. Feeling a bit sassy, I put these groups together, 123 123 123456. Counting steadily, snapping my finger on each 1, I feel a lift in the last grouping, as if the 456 can’t keep their feet on the ground and are curling upwards.

There, right there is the magic – that lift, as if you were about to fly. The upward motion pulls at gravity. I am a kayak, rushing downstream only to hit a rock. As I fly in the air, the suspension seems longer than possible; my heart stops beating for a endlessly long moment – time is distorted.

In truth, this is the way I feel my own energy. Restless and seeking, I move from one slight change to another, but always in a context that makes sense, and has an inner logic or glue. As the pressure  heightens, I burst out into a calm, an arching melody of understanding perhaps. There is an interplay between the instruments, before I collect my wits about me, and dash on, back into the pulse of life.

This leads me to another question, what happens when my rhythms run out of energy? I imagine a marathon race where I am running and running. I am becoming more and more physically tired, although my pace has not changed. The moment when all my physical energy is depleted, I am unable to stand and fall towards the ground. In that vulnerable moment, I transform, and go upwards.

Isn’t it so in life? Significant change often happens when I stumble, or am so exhausted I can no longer resist. And then, the rhythm moves me upwards to what ever name I call it at the moment – God, higher power, the cosmos.  I escape gravity.

Why I Compose Music as a Woman

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In these days of growing numbers of nonbinary, gender-nonconforming and transgender people, I have been reflecting on how and why I compose music as a woman. I wince a little as I write this. It does not seem current, or perhaps currently relevant.

I came to composing over forty-five years ago when feminism was in it’s second wave, where the focus was on the inequality and discrimination of women. It was a time when women were speaking out about the marginalization of their choices and expertise, it was about being seen and counted.

My mother was the first feminist in the family. She read Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan. She taught women’s studies and went to on countless marches. True, she often spat and lectured. A professor at the State College in Oneonta, mother of five, she knew the limits of her salary and position. She had valid grievances and was angry.

I was a second generation feminist. I read Alex Katie Schulman, Erica Jong, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker. Early on, I didn’t wear a bra or shave my legs. I worked to pass the equal rights amendment, and went on marches, taking my daughter in a stroller. Feminism, for me, was personal and deeply related to finding my voice in a male dominated music world of the late 1970s. I needed to grow myself, and I wasn’t sure how.

I am reminded of the summer I was eleven and I lived with my aunt and uncle who were scientists in Cambridge, England. One day they brought home small plates from their laboratory coated with agar, a clear medium that fuels microbes and bacteria as they grow. My job was to see what was really on our household surfaces. Carefully I took samples from the kitchen and bathroom and spread them on the agar. Uncle John pressed his thumb on one of the plates. We waited to see what emerged. Colors bloomed several days later, a brilliant white and a poisonous looking orange – a world invisible – existing only when it was allowed to grow by itself.

My agar medium, as I think back on it now, was feminism, or seeing myself as female. And it was Beethoven, oddly enough, who gave me permission to culture and cultivate myself.

Classical music, whose language and history I grew up in, carried forward the idea that music is ‘universal’ in its expression. In 1818, Schopenhauer wrote that music “is such a great and exceedingly noble art …  a perfectly universal language, the distinctness of which surpasses even that of the perceptible world itself.”  Soon came the claim that classical music works were masterpieces – above and beyond our daily lives.

This superlative description of music confounded me. Instinctively, I felt that the artistic endeavor came out of an authentic expression of myself, or as close as I could get to an inner truth. Take Beethoven, for instance. He wrote richly genuine music, an expression of who he was: a white, educated, Christian, and upper middle class. And male.

I shivered. A male aesthetic, not universal at all. And I was female.

With this realization musical world opened up and works came tumbling out. While composing, I held words in my mind that related to myself and the world around me – not to create a ‘tone-poem’ or music describing a story, but as a way of exploring and understanding myself. Cassandra Sings, commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet, was both the anguish of the Greek prophetess who was never listened to or believed, and my hope for better times in the future. Women Dreaming, for mixed ensemble and piano, was my continued dreaming of possibilities. River of Love, River of Light, a seven movement choral piece, was my understanding of the female face of God.

Feminism was, in an odd way, my lucky break. In pushing forward to illuminate the wealth of the individual, giving credibility to the female gender, I found my agar plate. It was a rich medium to explore myself, to grow my work from the hidden secrets of my inner and outer surface. To press my thumb down, and see what was revealed by my print.

After a decade of composing, I softened. I became more digested and reformulated; more fully mixed. My interest began to shift from an inner to an outer relationship to the world, and my gaze looked upwards. What was the connection to the larger whole, to the sky, earth, to the unnamable? From these eyes that belong to a woman?

Music as Collaboration

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In rehearsal, the performers sit there for a moment and exude nervousness. They are struggling with my music. It is trickier than they realized, and they haven’t had enough time to rehearse together. At the end of this two-week long festival, they are exhausted by the many concerts they have already performed and time is in short supply. I smile. I am easy. “Forget the notes,” I suggest. I am their supporter and collaborator. They are brilliant musicians. “Just play the music!”

The creation, rehearsal, and performance of music is, for me, a full scale collaboration. Initially, I collaborate with the idea of the new work I am composing  – I am both progenerater and investigator – the idea itself is almost a code I have to learn and understand. Often, I collaborate directly with the notes. They are sometimes compliant and easy to keep in place, other times they have to be corralled or even threatened. They can wander off, or even, magically reappear after I have erased them, insisting on their own logic to be.

Next I collaborate with the performers. I have a fluid approach and not interested that they get exactly what I intended. I am excited that they will inhabit my music with their own sense of themselves. My work is shaped by their body and understanding, they put their skin into it. I trust them.

At times I am commissioned to create a work for an individual ensemble. I stalk them a bit, going to their concerts, listening them perform on YouTube and talking to them – what do you like, what are the things you do best as an ensemble or individually? My goal is to create a piece for them that is both mine and theirs, a bit like a beautiful set of clothing, stitched to fit their their particular sound or skills, or, at the very least, using that as a jumping off point.

In the end, the performers collaborate with the audience – the receivers of the music. For me, it is a journey, a traveling through a sonic and emotional landscape. Because music can only experienced through time, the listener perceives the whole only with the aid of memory, a remembrance of beginning. As the performers bend over their music and the audience listens, the energy between them creates the experience.

Collaboration, at its best, is when all participants, artist, performers, and audience, serve what is there; to deeply feel and express the moment. And in that expression is a wonderful transference – not what I am thinking or composing about, but what the performers and listener understands about themselves.

Mechanics and Matters of Style

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I am perplexed. Since my memoir, Let Your Heart Be Broken, has been published, I have had a couple of reviews complaining that I didn’t write about my music in a “substantive way.”

 “We get a strong sense of the composer’s moods and environments as she creates her art, but nothing of the mechanics or matters of style.”

The ‘mechanics’ of composing – huh. I am not completely sure what the reviewers are wanting. Perhaps how I choose chords or notes? Or exactly how I create metric modulations or my musical form? And as to ‘matters of style’ – for the life of me, I am clueless; it is not what I consider as I compose.

In my memoir, I write about my composing process. Not the actual putting the pencil on the page, but what is in my mind as I compose, what I am interested in both sonically and emotionally, and how it pertains to where I am in my life. I also write about what I am intellectually interested in at the moment – where does pitch begin, how do I create a musical situation where the notes magnetically move themselves, or what happens to an exhausting rhythmic sequence – at the moment before it falls to the ground.

Is this not enough? Am I still not writing about the ‘mechanics’ of composing?

I came to composing through the portal of playing the piano since I was five years old. I learned harmonic changes by ear; they had no name, instead were imprinted on my bones. I studied music theory and harmony only after college and never much believed in it – it seemed to apply only to classical music written long ago (counterpoint, on the other hand, is eternally useful). These studies made me wonder whether Beethoven knew what he was composing in a step by step way, or was he so in the fullness of the moment that the music just came out of him?

There is so much of the creative process, for me, that is an accumulation of years of practice, information and experience. Thus the fingers that grip the pencil over the music paper know instinctively what to do – or, at the very least, start to move towards that end. It is no longer an intellectual process for me, but an intuitive one that is very difficult to parse out, give meaning to, or even teach.

When students ask me how to develop a piece, or make transitions between one section and another so that there is a seamless flow, I throw out a couple of ideas; tension, resolution, gravity, friction. But these are only words compared to the practice of doing it again and again until they have solved the problem for themselves. We sit and listen to one of their pieces, sniffing out how the phrase fell flat, or the melody didn’t lift. I am both coach and cheering section, my job is not to fix as much as encourage students to move forward.

Are the mechanics, then, irrelevant? I am undecided. We all want to understand how something is created on a deeper level. To name it, or give words to it, is another entrance into the work from a different angle. I totally support demystifying the artistic endeavor. Mechanics, however, just seem to add another layer to confuse and distance listeners.

Oh! I wish could explain the mechanics of my composing process the way my art teacher tries to get me to draw realistically. I apply all the perspective and foreshortening, the color theory and the idea of value –  but when she takes up my brush to show me, her brush is alive in a way that neither of us can articulate.

My Fingers Have Eyes

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My finger tips have hardened and softened after years of playing the piano. Both instinctive and learned, the fingers use multiple points of contact, never actually on the tip, but turning the pad inward a bit, or slightly to the side. The thumb is a special case and is used on the length of it’s side where the muscle is less dense, and closer to the bone. Loud dynamics are produced by stiffening up the whole hand so it can bear the weight of the arm, or even engaging the back; soft sounds take more muscle restraint. Recently at a concert, I saw a brilliant young pianist stab the keyboard with stiffened fingers to create a percussive depth of sound, then bending her back, using loose wrists, her fingers whispered a soft rapid phrase.

The piano is an odd instrument. Considered by some as a percussion instrument, because of it’s mechanical nature and the broad inner harp of strings, it is the only classical instrument that uses both hands and the weight of the body to create sound in a skin to note manner. String instruments use one hand to finger, while the other holds the bow, which alone creates the dynamics and nuances of the sound. In the winds and brass, it is breath that creates sound and dynamics, while the fingers lift and close the note holes. Percussion instruments use mallets, and some of the drums use the flat of the hands, even fingers at times, to coax out the sound. Finally, the harp; while both hands are used to pluck the strings, the body, wedged behind the spine of the instrument, cannot move.

Piano technique has a long and rich history. During Bach and Mozart’s time, the keyboards were light to the touch. Performers used what was know as the “finger action” school, where the arms were relatively fixed, and the fingers skittered along. As the piano evolved with a wider range of volume, the touch became heavier. Pianists and composers such as Chopin and Liszt began to use the weight of the arm, playing with a supple wrist; this became known as the “arm weight” school of technique. I love the description that Amy Fay, a student of Liszt, wrote in 1902, “When Liszt played he seemed to be devoured by an inner flame, and he projected himself into music like a comet into space. He simply threw himself headlong into it, and gave all there was in him.” I imagine Liszt, sitting elegantly erect, while playing the music with his whole body.

Over the years, my fingers have become more and more sensitive, to the point where I swear they have developed beyond touch into vision. They have a depth of nerve endings, an acute sense of touch. When I compose music, I sink into the tactile feel of the score paper and the scratch of the pencil point into the paper. I run my finger tips on the back of the page; they read the pencil indentations as a kind of magical musical braille. Even erasing the notation errors – the rub of the end of the pencil, the small eraser castings – all this, a sensual relationship to composing.

My finger lust has spread in all directions. Since adolescence, I have knitted or crocheted, loving the way the yarn wound around my right index finger, slipped it in and out of clicking needles. Recently, I became fascinated with the various weights and textures of wool, and then, the consummate deliciousness of cashmere, thin, durable and much too expensive to buy. I found old cashmere sweaters at the thrift shop, and slowly undoing the side seams, I unraveled the yarn into glowing balls. I was, I confess, obsessed with the ease of this wealth of yarn and I made fingerless gloves, hats, scarves, and finally large cashmere blankets until my family begged me to stop.

Some years ago I was introduced to drawing with pastels. This is one of the few art forms that you actually hold the color between your fingers and not on the end of the brush. The pastels come in varying grades – from cool and edgy to an almost crumbling softness. The colors are brilliant, and tempt me to taste them with my tongue. I hold myself back, and satisfy myself with the scratch or the knock of the pastel, and the spread of the color on paper. This is truly the height of finger decadence.