Tina Davidson

Composer

music by women

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.

Music is Like Bread

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We sit, shoulder to shoulder, listening to her string quartet. Composer Jennifer Higdon is a student at the University of Pennsylvania. She comes over often to share her music or to talk. The afternoon is late, and shadows lengthen through the windows. She is dressed in a dark jacket, her face is open and smiling, framed by short black hair.

Her musical style is in the same spirit as mine, a beautiful motif appears and then recedes, ebbing and flowing as it is pushed by rhythms. We wonder out loud what relevance the standard of development has to our music. What does that word mean – develop?

I keep hearing the word ‘allow’ instead of ‘develop,’ giving the music room to fill. Is this merely about semantics, or does the argument have a deeper meaning?

In the classical music tradition, development is a process by which a composer uses the musical material of the piece. The melody and accompanying components are reworked, stretched out, condensed or changed in some fashion throughout the piece. The sonata form uses development as part of the overall structure of the piece, so that whole sections appear again, sometimes slightly modified. The idea is that the listener will anticipate the return of a melody or a section, and even understand the mu sic better because of the repetitions.

Many living composers use development as a chief technique in their music. They push the melodies around, and rework them by directly transposing or inverting them. My ear pauses. Why do I feel that they stand at the river’s edge beating their musical material with stones until it is thin, weak and colorless?

I provide the right size pan, large enough so the bread can expand to its fullest potential, and small enough so it can use the sides of the pan as support. I decide when the bread has risen enough without too much poking around. This is a judgment of my eye, heart and mind acting together. Rising too much, it will be filled with air and collapse. Rising too little, it will be mean and hard, an impenetrable nugget.

The word ‘allow’ asks for balance and helps me rethink the issue of ownership and parentage. Allow provides a medium for growth, and questions authority. Too much control forces a finger into sacred ground, leaving a trail of infection. To allow, in the end, is to have.

Featured Work

LULLABY
for solo & unspecified instrumentation (6-8)
“a gorgeously gentle piece” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
Listen: https://open.spotify.com/track/77Nm1qrUp6RKBRWhti8z2S

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Who Names Me? (Healthy Narcissism)

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“I have wondered for a long time why it is so hard for artists — especially women — to own their status in the world,” writes artist and author, Lisa Congdon recently. “It took me years to identify confidently as an artist.  Why are we so hesitant – at least until we’ve graduated from school or until we’ve ‘made it’ — to proclaim, ‘I am an artist’?”

Sigh. The idea that it is presumptuous and pretentious to call oneself an artist has a long history. It was connected to my gender and the insistence of the music world I grew up in.

I came of age as a composer when two things were happening simultaneously. Women were testing and changing boundaries about themselves and life around them, and composers of atonal, dissonant music fought for a position in the classical music world. Just as I was looking to be included as an equal participant, they famously declared that contemporary music was above the laypeople’s ability to understand, and music, as a ‘high art form’, implied a hierarchy – who could be a composer and what kind of music one could write. Calling oneself a composer, particularly without proper pedigree, became a kind of a reverse impostor syndrome. There was no need to doubt yourself, because everyone around you was doing it so well.

And there I was, back then, naming myself – “I am a composer” without excuse or preface. It was an act of self-definition and self-creation, it was healthy narcissism.

Early on, I would spit it out, daring others to refute me. It was my mantel, my fighting clothes, instead of the more gentle “I write music.” But, by articulating my identity, I was creating a framework that allowed me to explore how I related to the world, particularly as a woman and mother. In an article for Ms Magazine (1990) I wrote how my sexuality and physicality impacted my music,

… my sexuality seems dark and powerful.  It comes out of a center place and is wide, continuous, warm, moist.  My physical energy is long and deeply rooted. It goes on and on, winding from one rhythm to another, slowly moving out, until, at its peak it is suddenly transformed into something else — a glowing, evanescencing energy.  This, for me, is not a climax, but an epiphany.  

Staking the claim, my vision became broader – I began to see more opportunities and possibilities. No longer hoping for work, I pursued it. I sent my music to performers without introduction. I became a part of a new music ensemble both as a director and performer, and wrote many pieces for them. I wrote grants, and investigated how to become more connected to community work. And always, I was on the scent of new collaborations and connections, and new works to compose.

These day, naming myself helps me deal with the ups and downs of being a life-long artist. The career of an artist takes a certain kind of exterior and interior toughness, not only a willingness to speak your truth to an audience who may or may not accept it, but also lasting through successes and failures, growth and fallow times, and career ups and downs.  But, these are, quite simply, part of being a composer. It is a package deal, and within that context of who I am, this is easier to bear.

Pastel, by Tina Davidson, © 2023

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ORDER Let Your Heart Be Broken, Life and Music From a Classical Composer by Tina Davidson
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