creativity

Deep Listening

September 12, 2022 by Tina Davidson

Pauline Oliveros and James Tenney

Pauline Oliveros playing the accordian A few days up at the Charles Ives Center for the Performing Arts gives me relief. I am in residence with musician, composer, and maverick Pauline Oliveros. “Hear, remember, and imagine,” she intones. You hear a sound, remember it, and then imagine it again. She uses words to form her music, bringing the performers into the process of creation. Her work begets community.

I am struck by music’s linear process, where duration is the great ingredient. Unlike visual art, music cannot be experienced all at once. Instead, it moves though time. As we listen, we construct the whole in our mind through memory. Like a transparent ghost, music moves our hearts with its lack of tangible substance.

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I heard a piece by composer Jim Tenney recently at a concert. Something interests me. His Composer James Tenney piece is a voyage of technical manipulations involving tape delay and difference tones – those haunting resonances that appear when certain pitches rub against each other.

At first I am rapt. But, I cannot hold on, my mind disengages and falls into a dark quiet. After eight to ten minutes, the piece suddenly opens up, and I catch onto the piece again. How did I get here – where have I been? As if a white shirt, shown in meticulous technical detail, suddenly blossoms with blood, both a terrifying signal of death, and an affirmation of life.

The shape of his music reminds me of my own shape. While the content of our work is different, the linear shape and flow, moving from one point to (and through) another, is similar. He uses a one-theme-one-idea approach, where the starkness and persistence engages the listener. I am episodic, darting though material with single-minded purpose. His music is a straight line, mine moves in and over. He takes a fragment and expands it. I sew my fragments together, so one becomes another becomes one. His overall shape is like the stem of a flower, long and thin with a sudden bloom at the end. My shape is conical; the whole piece expands from a beginning point and opens up to an ecstasy. His epiphany is sharply beautiful in relief to his material. Mine is joyous and circular.

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

Listen: Wēpan for string quartet and piano, was written at the request of the Open End Ensemble. From the old English, wēpan means to weep, bewail, mourn over, or deplore.

I have written about Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) before and I suspect I will write about her again. She is one of the great American composers, investigating new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of “deep listening” and “sonic awareness.”

Jim Tenney (1935-2006), a pioneer of computer music, was interested in the possibilities offered by pure tuning. I met him in the mid-1980s and was drawn to him as a fellow graduate from Bennington College, and to his warmth, kindness and curiosity.

Learn to be Embarrassed

April 4, 2022 by Tina Davidson

By the time I arrived at Bennington College in 1972, I had never written a note of music. In fact, I had never played or heard any music by women composers. It never occurred to me that women could compose.

The music department boasted of four composers on their faculty – Louis Calabro, Vivian Fine, Lionel Nowak and Henry Brant. They believed that all performers should be composers, and all composers performers. Moreover, they eschewed the academic approach to composition that prescribed years of study of harmony and theory before you touched pencil to paper. They saw no need to waste precious class time with something you could teach yourself, and preferred to teach composition by allowing their students to write music and learn from the performance of it.

My freshman music class was taught by Lou Calabro, a loose-limbed man with slight stoop and a strong New York accent. He was quick to give us our first assignment, to write a duet for two of our classmates. There was little instruction on how to compose. Staff paper was handed out.

I was distinctly grumpy, and muttered something about how all good music had already been written and all good composers were dead. But I wrote a piece for oboe and French horn. Twelve measures.

The piece was terrible, and the instrumentalists complained bitterly about the scattered notation and lack of dynamics. I vowed never to write for that combination again. But I was interested, and continued composing for my classmates.

By the end of my first semester, I was hooked. I knew what I wanted to do in life. It was as if, looking out into the forest, I could see many different paths, but only one was illuminated. More than that, I wanted to know who I was, and composing music was a way of finding out, without revealing too much. It was a place of investigation and almost complete anonymity.

The years at Bennington passed quickly. Tuesday afternoons the entire music department gathered and played all the music composed that week. Wednesday night was the weekly concert. I studied with witty and generous Vivian Fine, a former student of Ruth Crawford Seeger, and with iconoclast Henry Brant, famous for his acoustic spatial music. He was small, brown and never without cap or sunshade on his head. Because he was opinionated and sometimes difficult to study with, I asked him to be my advisor and surreptitiously brought him my scores to look at. His rules for orchestration were brilliant; I still review his notes carefully before I begin a new orchestra piece.

As composing became my voice, piano was my anchor. My teacher, Lionel Nowak, listened intently, eyes closed, as I played. “Get into the piano keys, like clay,” he would say, lifting up his head and waving one hand. “Dig deep into them – don’t be afraid, don’t back away from anything.”

“Courage!” He sat rumpled in the chair, his right index finger raised, “You must always dare to make a fool of yourself, and then you’ll be able to do things you never dreamed you could.”

He shrugged his shoulders, “Learn to be embarrassed.”

Bennington College was, in the end, seminal in my development as a musician and composer. The faculty did not teach me how to write music, instead they invited me in joyfully and with generosity. They fostered inclusion – everyone was worthy of this particular creative process, from bright-eyed beginners to sullen veterans. They believed learning was doing, again and again.

They taught me the difference between criticism and critical thinking. The former takes a stance of superiority, the latter is respectful and self-questioning – what works or doesn’t, and how can I do better next time. They were at the heart of artistic endeavour – bold, generous, humorous, and supportive. They taught me as a fellow composer, one of their tribe.

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

Listen: Render, for string quartet was commissioned for the Cassatt String Quartet

https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/render-2016-for-string-quartet-excerpt-2?si=2ce244ae90d64934bb8f9c02dff17e96&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Random Thoughts, #2

April 1, 2021 by Tina Davidson

from my music journal

September 1

Bruce Chatwin, in his book Songlines, suggests that the aboriginals sing the world into existence. Songs, or “dreaming,” are a primitive map of the world. Their natural soul describes the country in its most primary form.

February 26

I grapple with the ending of my new piece. Does the energy transform into a ‘still point,’ or is it unto itself? What is the balance between terror and wonder? What is ‘sitting-there’ energy that doesn’t change or go anywhere? I only know a deep body sense, but struggle for words.

My energy comes from a center place, and expands outwards in a kind of fullness, without grasping or overwhelming. The energy exists unto and for itself; there is no motive other than being. Like mountains, or volcanoes, like the ocean, it is guileless and full of terror. Wonder without intent. Turn away from these edifices of nature, they continue in memory, persistent, eternal. Lost or misplaced, they are there at the next turn. So simply. Just this much.

April 16

Composer Morton Feldman reportedly said, “Most composers are limited by one form.” Finding a level of comfort, they stay with it. I wonder about mine, and wonder if I should relook at it. Press on, explore it further.

Forms or approaches are inherently archetypal. Like jewels, hidden deep in the earth, not all have been found. The work of an artist is to reveal the ones overlooked and connect us, the present us, with their magic in new ways.

July 26

Is my music an attempt to control time? Often, it is a passage or a journey, other times a documentation of now. Do I compose to control life or explain it? I have a back and forth, give and take, learning and growing relationship with my work. I dip into a sea of myself, and try to capture it in music to share with others. My work and life are fluid and I experience myself through it.

My work has a life of its own, and often insists on its own way. But it is reciprocal; as I reveal myself to my music, the music reveals myself to me. The work teaches me where to go, and what next to learn.

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

Listen: Paper, Glass, String and Wood, for two string quartets. III. String:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNOBbt1EHrQ

It is My Heart Singing, music by Tina Davidson, Albany Records, TROY842, 2006

Performed by the Cassatt Quartet (Muneko Otani, Jennifer Leshnower, Tawnya Popoff, Nicole Johnson), Stephen Manes and Caroline Stinson

Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/My-Heart-Singing-Tina-Davidson/dp/B000FO443K

Random Thoughts, #1

February 1, 2021 by Tina Davidson

from my music journal

August 3

A new piece of music stirs within me. I feel it in my stomach. It twists and wrenches. I know it is time to start, but I bargain for a later date. The piece quiets for a moment, then twists again. There is no real latitude in here. It pretends to placate me, but ultimately is relentless. I am relieved. Without its insistence, I am lost.

August 24

Marc Chagall wrote, “In my paintings I have hidden my love.” Why does he hide his love? In my work, I want my love to pour out.

October 20

I am testing the difference between knowing and knowledge. Knowledge is a noun, knowing is a verb. Knowledge is permanence, an arrival to a destination, a measure of power, and a method of control; it is a command, and a grasp with expertness or skill. Knowing, on the other hand, is to perceive, sense, or see; it is to trust and listen, to hear and accept things beyond one’s imagination. Knowing is not being able to explain, but being able to expand and grow continuously. Unfixed and inexhaustible. Knowing is to be.

Fear, fear!? What is there to fear? Knowing is to recognize oneself. What is this crisis, then, this debate, this holding back?

April 3

My music is an experience, not an event. Most music is circular and contained. Mine, on the other hand, is languid and rests on its elbows like a horizon. I create a linear shape, where the music evolves, transforms, and becomes. The listener moves with the music though a passage of time, into another place. In the end, the music breaks open like an egg, its content finally revealed. The gift is the inner and outer, the private and public. The soul unveiled.

Listen: Delight of Angel for string quartet:

It is My Heart Singing, music by Tina Davidson, Albany Records, TROY842, 2006

Performed by the Cassatt Quartet (Muneko Otani, Jennifer Leshnower, Tawnya Popoff, Nicole Johnson), Stephen Manes and Caroline Stinson Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/My-Heart-Singing-Tina-Davidson/dp/B000FO443K

Cassandra Sings; Changing the Music

January 13, 2021 by Tina Davidson

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.

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:

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