Tina Davidson

Composer

creative process

Immersed in Sound

by

The morning is still dark as I creep down the stairs. I am five, and under the Christmas tree are two boxed sets of LPs – Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado and The Pirates of Penzance.

I finger the cardboard, open up the lid, and feel the weight of the four black discs in each box. My small phonograph is blue and silver with a hinged cover. I sit on the floor, and open it carefully. Slipping the record out of its sleeve, I put it on the turntable. Holding my breath, I lower the arm onto the disc. The needle sinks into the shiny grooves of plastic. I lose myself in the scritch scratch of the margin. I wait for the music to fill me.

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Sound is all around me. My denim skirt swishes between my legs when I walk fast and hard. I laugh, and almost jump with pleasure. It is the whip of sails against the mast, it is the sound of laundry being hung out on a cold day, of curtains in a heavy, dusty breeze.

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Drawing, colored pencil, from music journal

These days are dark and quiet, filled with composing. I have finished I Hear the Mermaids Singing, and wait before copying the pencil score onto the computer.

I live in a world of sound, my ears are filled. When I look up from my work, the house is surprisingly calm, the street empty; the magnolia tree waits to blossom. Looking down again, my ears are flooded.  Sound has never kept me so entranced, so excited. My days are effortless. I am full. Before I touched the surface, now I bathe in the waters. I put my head down in the cool depth and breathe.

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There has been good work on my piece. The beginning has a metallic howl, the slow growing melody goes well.

In the afternoon, I walk on the beach. The skies over the ocean are grey; the waves are dark. The wind is so cold that my face aches. I sit in the sand, and watch the overlapping clouds move layers. A bright spot is in the sky where the sun almost comes through. The houses on the ocean are boarded up. Like trees without leaves; they are without life. I trudge past them; their ears are shuttered to winter and the wind.

Excerpted from Let Your Heart Be Broken, Life and Music from a Classical Composer  © Tina Davidson, 2022.

Listen on YouTube:  I Hear the Mermaids Singing, for viola, cello and piano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auLzryCh_Mk

CD, Tina Davidson: I Hear the Mermaids Singing

Buy the CD:

https://www.newworldrecords.org/products/tina-davidson-i-hear-the-mermaids-singing

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: