Tina Davidson

Composer

music by women

Measurable Outcomes

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Children playing on homemade instrumentsMy three-year residency in Delaware is winding down. We sit in meetings and talk about outcomes or measurable results of my work in community settings.

Do my students get better grades? Are the women who are homeless more successful after working with me? Or, at the very least, have we created new audiences for the arts?

These are reasonable questions. If one puts in the effort and money, shouldn’t there be tangible, visible results?

I shake my head. It is really none of my business.

I teach because I believe the power of creativity is in all of us, just unrecognized. I teachteaching because I trust it will take root in some strange and unimagined way, in its own time. I teach as an act of faith; a spiritual practice. I get up every day, and do it. “Here,” I say, “this is what I have for you today.”

I find no master-strokes or large, efficient gestures. Only this one-on-one, slow work that brings others into a meaningful connection to the arts – hopefully. A commitment to work close to the ground.

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

Listen: Paper, String, Glass & Wood excerpt, written for professional string quartet and students quartets

 

Immersed in Sound

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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

Random Thoughts, #1

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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?

Deisis, drawing by Tina Davidson

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.

Excerpted from Grief’s Grace, A Memoir by Tina Davidson.  © Tina Davidson, 2021

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