Tina Davidson

Composer

creative process

Small Things

by

My world, whether in music or in my country, is dear to me.

I will not let it go without some sort of action.

 

The evening in my studio was beginning to darken at a recent Composer Posse gathering. Faces shone from my computer screen as fifteen composers shared information and support about their creative work. The topic of life prior to computers and notation software came up, and laughingly we recounted the times before.

I came to the field when we used India ink, vellum, with an ozalid process to print out long accordion fold scores. Others, younger than myself, began their careers when they copied out their music with pen and score paper and photocopied it.

“That reminds me,” Jennifer Higdon said, leaning forward with a smile, “of an amazing story.”

While in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, a composer colleague of hers had finally completed a large work for orchestra with only a week before the rehearsals began. He had copied his lengthy work out by hand on paper, a breath taking long process. Then with care, he copied out each individual orchestral part. A one of a kind score and parts, with no backup.

Stacked and ready to go to the copier, the composer left his work on the kitchen table. Upon waking the next morning, he was horrified to find that his little grey striped kitten had squatted on top of the music and let loose a yellow stream. The score was soaked, the inked notes melted and flowed down the page, the parts were stained and shredded. The entire project was rendered useless; a catastrophe beyond measure for any composer.

In a panic, he called up his friends. They, in turn, did something extraordinary. Each taking a portion of the piece, they re-copied the score and parts for their friend. Working full-time over a week, they hand reconstructed the orchestra piece with over thirty parts before the first rehearsal.

Thinking back on Jennifer’s story, I wonder at this display of support between artists. Working together, each completed a small part of a larger piece, reconstructing the torn, yellow stained ruin into something whole. In other words, small actions, taken together, are important.

It is, in the end, what we face in today’s political arena. Coming together as concerned citizens, we are less afraid of what is happening or what might happen if we speak out. We can be positive and also realistic; we don’t have to agree, but can always be respectful. And we never, never underestimate the power of our actions, no matter how small.

My world, whether in music or in my country, is dear to me. I will not let it go without some sort of action.

The Box You Chose

by

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

by

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 Death of Finale

by

Recently, the music notation software, Finale, long considered the industry standard, announced that it would end production. Although the software would be permanently available to download, the company would longer provide upgrades, particularly when the computer operating system changed.  In other words, soon Finale would be obsolete, and most probably the music created using it would no longer be accessible.

I, like many other composers, was panicked. I had used the software for over thirty years, and almost all of my music catalogue was in Finale. I had made PDF files of all my scores for ease of printing, but any re-editing or correcting had to be done on the original file.

Finale assured composers that all was not lost; music could be migrated to another notation software system. However (why is there always a however?) this entailed a lot of re-editing. Most of the dynamics had to be reentered, glissandos were all over the place, and any unconventional notation was illegible. I was looking at hours and hours of work to upgrade each piece. The prospect was daunting at best, terrifying at worst.

Of course, I was glad I wasn’t dead. That would have been a real problem.

I came to age as a composer in the mid 1970’s. To create a score, I used vellum or onion skin, a durable, semi-transparent material pre-printed with a staff. Using various well chosen pens and India ink, I would copy out my music. The manuscript was then reproduced through an ozalid process. 

This mode of copying was time consuming. The vellum had to be dusted with talcum powder so the ink would stick. Pen nibs needed meticulously cleaning, and mistakes were scraped off or even cut out. Once the score was created, each part needed to be copied out separately on vellum. Imagine an orchestra piece with 24-28 parts; it was a proof-reading nightmare.

When photocopiers became available, I switched to handwriting the score with pen and paper.  I corrected mistakes with white-out fluid, and cut a photocopied score up and glued the parts onto separate sheets of paper. The only drawback was that the parts would constantly come unglued, often falling into a tangled mess.

I began using a computer and the Finale software in 1991 with a great sigh of relief. Quickly I learned how to key in the notes, adjusting the formatting to my own personal satisfaction. My music was now more regulated and easier to read. Parts were extracted from the score and I sent them to performers by mail, or electronically as a PDF.  This was a best case scenario.

The advent of music software, coupled with direct access to the world wide web has been a great equalizer for artists. Before the internet, publishers (museums or libraries) were gate keepers. They selected artists they wanted to represent and made them ‘important.’  Now, composers became their own publishers, creating websites to publicize and sell their music directly to performers. More than that, the digital age offered artists – offered me – the taste of the promise that my work would endure, some place in the big somewhere. That my work would survive and have a life beyond mine. 

Artists are always concerned with the preservation of the works they have created over a life time. First, will the material used – the paper or ink – stand the test of time?  Secondly, how will the works continue to get out to the public? Are there publishers who will make the music available to performing ensembles after the death of the artist? Are there libraries, museums, or archives that will store and protect the work?

We live in a time of diminishing resources to safeguard the legacy of music created by American composers. We have no national repository in the way that other countries have. Canada, for example, has a library of all its composers’ works available to view, study or perform. In other words they honor and treasure their country’s artists; the US does not. And publishers have neither the financial resources nor the interest in representing composers that are not currently successful. 

The internet and the availability of music in a viable software system is of great importance; it will house, remember, preserve, and make available works of all composers – so that this generation of composers, who speak of our time, will be remembered.

The Finale-end-of-the-road reminds me of the false promise in terms of permanence. I look at my music paper with renewed fondness.

You are What You Eat

by

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