Tina Davidson

Composer

creative process

Some Things I Have Learned, Part 1

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I was recently asked to come up with a lists of things I have learned about being a composer. What would I tell myself as a young composer? What would I share with others?

Three categories come to mind – how I nurture myself, what is part of my practice, and what is the business of being a composer. Over time, the list has grown, but at the root is always, always, safeguard your creativity and enrich yourself as a working artist.

Here is the first of two installments  – nurture and practice.

NURTURE, verb: to help (something or someone) to grow, develop, or succeed

Trust and value your own creativity.
Taking the time and patience to actively believe in myself as a creative person has been a life-time process. It has become a deep-self-knowing.

 Be with people who say yes.
If you have creative aspirations and your friends are not supporting you, find new friends. I am constantly grounded by friends who are generous, non-judgmental, and who see my work as just part of who I am.Feed the mind, body and soul. Embrace experience.
As an artist, I am what I eat – so reading and traveling are experiences that are directly channeled into my work. Eat pray love – life is the resource. I read, dance, take art lessons, and walk. Being a composer requires a multi-pronged approach.

Build community where ever you can.
Reaching out and being interested in other artist’s work has been a gold mine for me. I am not only inspired by what others of all disciplines are doing, but it feeds my work as well as puts it into perspective. Moreover, to have a community to share struggles, resources, and work is invaluable.

Dare to create yourself anew.
Heartbreak, failure, being sidelined – all of these are part of life. It is how I act upon them, manage them, learn from them, move through them and dare to try again, in a strengthened position, that matters.

PRACTICE, noun or verb: 1. the actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, 2. to perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient

Talent depends on hard work – it demands it.
For me, there has never been an easy, quick path forward that doesn’t include time, discipline and work. The willingness to sit down and face what ever is in front of me, every day, most days, is essential.

Heave your heart into your mouth – often.
Composing is about authentically speaking about myself to others, not so that they understand me, but resonate with my music.

Learn that “no” is part of the artistic process.
When discouraged, I take comfort that even  successful artists get rejected. A life of artists’ endeavor is a process not a destination. I am in it for the long game and just keep going.

Journal every day.
Finding words to express my inner thoughts is part of my daily artistic practice. This allowed me to dig deeper into myself and my art. It is a place of asking myself questions – what is holding me back, what could I do better? Who are the inside voices that are giving me negative commentary?

Take a nap.
When blocked in my work, I take a walk, meditate or – my favorite, take a nap. My brain has an amazing ability to solve problems when left alone.

Late Summer Hydrangeas & Roses by Tina Davidson, pastel

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.

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.

The Old Canon

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I sit across the table from him. He stands, leaning towards me, his hands grip the back of his chair. The night is gathering with birds tracing the colored clouds. “You must,” he is emphatic, “Study the history and theory of music before you begin to create your own music. Only when you know where you came from can you know where you are going.”

I smile. The old canon – a powerful system of beliefs. I have wrestled with them before, and have found, after a fifty-year career of writing music, that they are not true for me.

The canon insists that one must study the classics before creating; years of studying performance, harmony, counterpoint, set-theory, analysis and orchestration before pencil hits the paper. The canon maintains that understanding music history is an essential, and without it the artist gropes in the dark in a vain attempt to reinvent the wheel. The canon implies an order – one must do A before B. It reinforces that personal creativity is not trustworthy unless it is in an old container: it is not credible without context. In other words, one must be coupled to the past to make authentic, groundbreaking art.

I disagree, differ, object, dissent, argue, debate, and nonconcur. I protest. My experience is there are multiple paths to creativity and all of them include the word “Yes.”

I am interested in a personal ownership that grows out of doing. I support experiencing writing music before too much comparison. In the initial stage, I want everyone to compose the way they painted in kindergarten. Hardly knowing how to hold a paint brush, they work with abandon and in full confidence of their creative abilities.

Playing an instrument is key. It combines the kinetic, aural and visual learning in one practice – a kind of intimate study of music – fingering each note, breathing with the phrase – a mind-body experience.

And of course, the “guts” of music – the harmony and theory, but in context. I wonder what this study tells us about the composers of that time period, and how is it different that our own. I remind myself that the ‘great’ composers that we study, listen to and venerate have been curated by excluding much of musical culture or even composers.

But mostly, I was always on guard to protect creativity – mine and my students. I believe critical thinking rather than criticism – what worked, what didn’t work, what could I do better. This is a conversation between myself and the work, no from an outside source.

And always, always, the practice of authentic self-expression comes from digging deep into my own personal, emotional and spiritual landscape.  Where do I find myself at this stage of life?  Who am I growing into? What do I have to say next?

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Featured Work

PAPER, GLASS, STRING & WOOD
A side-by-side work to perform with student string musicians or string orchestra

This beautiful four-movement work was created so that young or amateur musicians have the opportunity to rehearse and perform with professional string performers.
1. Paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHfCz2qbucY
3. String: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNOBbt1EHrQ
4: Wood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_XSku4IpoU

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