Tina Davidson

Composer

Tina Davidson

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

Escaping Gravity

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I am counting again. It comes up now and then like a nervous tick. I notice it most when I am outside walking and preoccupied with some interior thought. Suddenly I hear the sound of my counting; how many steps to my front door, how many trees line the street or how many rows of grass to mow in a section of lawn. It’s embarrassing; an obsession that keeps me from experiencing what’s around me. I sternly forbid any more counting, abstaining like an alcoholic. Soon, however, I forget to be wary and I slip back into it again, this preoccupation with the count, the soul of music.

I have long been fascinated with rhythm in my music – how to shape the energy of a piece, like a band of shimmering movement. My interest is in how it transforms, moves from one state to another, interrupts itself, then doubles back. Sometimes it is a stream of water bouncing down a curling bed, glancing off rocks and edges. Other times is it a hot liquid metal, slithering, pulsating, spurting, angry, and insistent. Whether whimsical or full of power, it is the rhythms that often take a listener to a breaking point.

But I am getting ahead of myself. First, a bit of back ground on how I understand and relate to rhythm.

Music, for me, in its crudest form is three things: organized sound, duration and silence. Sound is the pitch (high and low). Duration has to do with time, both as the invisible net in which sound floats (how long the piece is), and the length of each individual sound, or rhythm. Silence is the great back drop and rarely intrusive. It acts as a foil to contents of music, bringing it into relief.

Rhythm is organized around a pulse, a steady continuous beat that hides in the background. The pulse can be fast or slow becoming the tempo or the speed of the music, but its primary role is to be the skeleton-form on which rhythm rests. For convenience, these pulses are corralled in countable units or measures, commonly 3, 4, 6 or 12. These keep the performers from flying out of place and loosing themselves completely.

The downbeat, for me, is the star of the measure. Its genesis, most likely, comes from walking. Stepping out to walk four steps, the dominate leg (usually the right leg) takes the lead, making a slightly firmer emphasis on the first step, and again on the third step. The first of these is the down beat, a natural emphasis of the measure.

Walking in groups of three is slightly different. The first group starts on the dominate leg (RLR), but the second grouping uses the nondominant leg (LRL). I almost stumble as I walk the pattern on my studio rug; the slight-off-centeredness catches my imagination.

I play with the magical insistence of downbeats. I am forever adjusting groupings of continuously running fast notes – like the sound of steady rain – not mathematically or intellectually, but in a playful, natural kind of movement.

This is where I begin. I am counting in a steady fast pace, let’s say 123 123 over and over. The first in the series is the downbeat that I feel as a little pulse. Then, wanting a change, I add them together, 123456 123456. Now the distance between downbeats is longer. Feeling a bit sassy, I put these groups together, 123 123 123456. Counting steadily, snapping my finger on each 1, I feel a lift in the last grouping, as if the 456 can’t keep their feet on the ground and are curling upwards.

There, right there is the magic – that lift, as if you were about to fly. The upward motion pulls at gravity. I am a kayak, rushing downstream only to hit a rock. As I fly in the air, the suspension seems longer than possible; my heart stops beating for a endlessly long moment – time is distorted.

In truth, this is the way I feel my own energy. Restless and seeking, I move from one slight change to another, but always in a context that makes sense, and has an inner logic or glue. As the pressure  heightens, I burst out into a calm, an arching melody of understanding perhaps. There is an interplay between the instruments, before I collect my wits about me, and dash on, back into the pulse of life.

This leads me to another question, what happens when my rhythms run out of energy? I imagine a marathon race where I am running and running. I am becoming more and more physically tired, although my pace has not changed. The moment when all my physical energy is depleted, I am unable to stand and fall towards the ground. In that vulnerable moment, I transform, and go upwards.

Isn’t it so in life? Significant change often happens when I stumble, or am so exhausted I can no longer resist. And then, the rhythm moves me upwards to what ever name I call it at the moment – God, higher power, the cosmos.  I escape gravity.

Finding Words for Music

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My memoir, Let Your Heart Be Broken, was recently published. Never did I imagine it would take so much work to launch and follow it through. Nor did I realize that a work in words would receive such a different response than a work in notes.

In the music world, a new piece is premiered after working with the performers in rehearsals. We confer about tempos, do a last bit of editing, talk about the musical heart of the piece and how to express it. At the performance, I introduce the work to the audience, or do a pre-concert presentation. But mostly, I am in the audience, listening. I stand for the applause, usually from my seat, or bound up to the stage for a quick bow. During the intermission and after the concert, a few audience members warmly clasp my hands. But most of them dodge around me. Did they not like my work? Or is it too vulnerable to express an opinion face to face?

After the editing and revisions are done, the book is published with a flurry of press releases, podcasts, interviews, and book tours. I get emails, messages or posts from readers, sometimes several over a week, letting me know they are halfway through, almost done, they couldn’t put it down until 4 AM. It reads like a thriller, has a musical lilt, they resonated with my words. I have introduced them to contemporary music, articulated something about composing andmy deep relationship to sound – I have put words to an art form that is generally wordless. They feel let in.

What a difference between the music world and the literary world! A live performance, or a release of CD’s will get a review or two. One can track how many listeners on Spotify or Apple Music, but never hear personally from any of them. On the other hand, my memoir not only gets reviews from critics and bloggers, but also from dozens of readers on Amazon and Goodreads. Bookstagrammers (I know! It is a word!) post their reviews to hundreds Instagram followers.

Readers are involved and connected. Listeners are mute. What is this about?  Of course, there is a gap between the eye and the ear, the visual and aural. Sound is not translatable into words – that is part of its beauty. But still it doesn’t account for the lack of audience response. I wonder if it is a difference between public and private, and historical and current.

Books are read in the safety of one’s home, perched on a chair, on a couch or in bed – buffeted by cushions or nestled under a blanket, warm and comfortable. The subjects are about us – relatable – about our growing understanding of the world seen through a contemporary lens. The opposite is true in the music world. Presented in a large concert hall, music is heard in a thigh-to-thigh seating with strangers. The artists are virtuosos, highly esteemed for their performing abilities. The works they perform are primarily historical, often hundreds years old, and referred to as masterpieces. Contemporary music – our living culture – is not performed with any regularity.

Music is listened to at home, but the response is divided between popular and classical music. Taylor Swift, for example, writes music that evokes a feeling of intimacy between herself and her audience. Her fans are avidly vocal about her and hotly analyze her lyrics on line. And classical music? Honestly, I have no idea. I could not find any discussions about classical or contemporary music that included even a moderate audience.

The differences between the literary and music world are dramatic, and while the effect is up to some interpretation, my experience is of readers expressing their opinion and connecting with my work. They exude a sense of ownership, even belonging. I feel the barrier between myself and them relax, even removed. The experience is no longer mine but theirs, and in that exchange is a freedom. They are now peers, and the intimacy of the exchange is personal on both ends.

Having tasted this fruit, I want more of this. I especially want this for my music world.

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.

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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