Tina Davidson

Composer

Tina Davidson

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

The Dance is On

by

Composing and daily life

The day is cold, and snow-blown. The sun shines clear on the stark, naked trees. The house is bright with reflection. I could be resting, inside, warm from the white, frosty day, instead I am disconnected.

The time nears to begin my new composition for saxophone. I am restless and irritable. I pace and growl, find other things to do, and waste time. I want to move forward and to stay back at the same time.

Of course! My old friend, procrastination. For years I fought against him, as he sniffs around my house. Now I concede. Procrastination has transformed from the art of avoiding my work into that nebulous space of beginning – I am on my way, the dance is on.

from music journal by Tina Davidson

At first, I only have an impression of the piece, its general size and weight, as if I were holding an invisible oval shape in my hands. I can only feel the smoothness of the outside shell. Gradually, I start to hear the edges, like an egg hissing in a frying pan, the whites gradually crisping under the heat, gaining definition.

I begin to write the material for the piece. Quickly, notes scatter over the page, a short hand of sorts. I am interested in the journey, the relationship between where I am and where I am going. I map out the whole piece before I start to score it.

There is a beauty about this process. Sometimes I am so deep into the work that daily life is not a conscious act. Instead, it revolves around me on its own, as if it knows what to do without my directions. It is something else, it has a pulse and a rhythm of its own, color and speed. My work is silent, far away, full of itself and only itself. It has my total attention. I am rapt and inert, and at times rapturous. Then life tugs at me, like a suture on the skin. I leave reluctantly; this will await me tomorrow when I take up the pencil again.

But there is a dark side as well. Often the music I am composing has a mind of its own.  When I am unhappy with the direction of the piece, I erase measures. Later I notice that the deleted section has wormed its way back in without my noticing. Try as I might, the direction has been set and unmovable. 

After an intense day of work, I wake several times a night hearing my music, or watch it slowly, scrutinizing every moment. My mind is like a computer; I am forced to watch the notes twist and turn. My privacy is invaded and music blares in my ear, possessing me. I roll over in bed, “Get back to the studio where you belong,” I mutter.

In the worst moments, I am resentful of my music. It soars, breathes, moves on its journey. I am the servant. I sit, quietly, studiously and patiently pressing the small black and white notes on a staff paper. Hours away from friends and family.  I have a fleeting fantasy, a secret fear; I will turn into music, this vehicle for sound. Music will overtake me, fill my pores, and submerge me. I will wake up one morning scaled and encrusted like an ancient desert creature, a reptile with congealed flesh. A watcher.

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

Listen: Transparent Victims for soprano, alto and pre-recorded saxophones (soprano, alto, tenor and baritone)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLE-HbmLOPg

 

Random Thoughts, #4

by

from my music journal

October 3

A great day. I can hear. And I am dreaming again. The dreams are busy, as if they were leading my daily life for me while I concentrate on the symbol. My dreams wash dishes, tend the garden, and pay bills. I sleep well, though my stomach is still tender.

I came in and immediately worked out several sections, streamlining the shape of the piece, reducing it to two sections. I get to the point right away. The old sense of balance and confidence returns. The end of the piece is already written, and I am anxious to compose towards it.

Most difficult is to wait until my unconscious offers up the music to my conscious. A patient waiting, an eternal sense of trust, and then suddenly, clarity.

July 10

Monday morning. The magnolia tree is dying by degrees. The slender grey branches cross over each other at the base, this year the leaves are small and pale. Overcast day, foolish thoughts. Where do I place grief?

 

 
pastel by Tina Davidson

September 1

My music often springs from an idea first formulated in words. The titles come well before the music itself and are, to some extent, my map of the world, guiding me as I compose. They are metaphors or secret encoded meanings for my pieces that I understand, do not understand, and come to understand. Dark Child Sings, for example, is my dark child singing out his life, with growing ecstasy and passion, of sexual beginnings, of calm lullabies and of strong chants.

I have a love affair with the poetry of words. Strung together, they are both important and not, mysterious and clear. Occasionally, words stand in the way of my music, speaking louder than the piece itself, because I simply do not know yet. I cannot dig beyond the phrase.

Music is never just passion or reason, instead a delicate balance between opposites that need the other to exist. Without one there are neither. Reason, brittle and devoid of passion, can be a monster of blindness and self-service. And passion, without reason, is bloated and ridiculous.

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

Listen: It is My Heart Singing, for string quartet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYpKICTyO9c

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, #3

by

from my music journal

September 28

I consider the interval of a fifth and wonder what is at the edge of sound. The fifth is a magic interval, circular and round, empty and full. It has an eerie hollowness to it. I am reminded of the soul. Without having actual form or substance, it is the heart of existence.

from music journal

Where does pitch begin? Where does rhythm, which is circular, start to spiral up? Must I always write in rhythms, or can I slow the upward turning? What is beauty?

October 12

“When you sing,” says Saint Augustine, “You pray twice.” Crickets chirp with candor and cars swoosh by. Sound is sacred in all its manifestations. The voice comes out of the dark, dank breath, truth warmed by my core. My vision is that we all find ourselves as the music and song.

July 7

 

How do I write of death and connection? The last section of the orchestra piece is clear, starting as the still point. Slowly circling, moving up, the last notes breath into an ecstasy of sound—the kind I love and can hardly bear not to write – swirling blissful love. But how do I get there? The first two thirds of the piece are blank.

The image of the laundry keeps appearing in my eye, a white dazzling continuous curl of fabric. I hear the wind rushing down the mountains, around my face, in my ears, glancing off my legs, stopping. Then picking up again. The rush of life, at its apex, almost a distortion.

December 15

My music is always my guide. The long rhythmic passages I write in most of my pieces are a marathon run of the soul, the process of surrendering to the larger unnamable whole.

At first I run light-footed, and the rhythms are enthusiastic and playful. My intellect enjoys the gait, the wind, and the smell of the earth. I begin to tire a bit, and I am absorbed in the pounding of my soles on the ground, the intricacies and overlaps. But soon my mind weakens to the muscular fatigue, and the rhythms swell.

Now there is no energy left, I can go no further. As I start to fall, there is a moment of pure supplication; my heart leaves my body and lifts upward to the divine – to the color and sound that is beyond words. There is no hesitation, no intellectual chatter, just a slow, graceful fall upward.

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.  I. Paper: 

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

Many are Called

by

I moved to Philadelphia after graduating from Bennington College in 1976. I wanted to test the world as a composer. There was some question about how I should go about it. My brilliant and renegade Bennington teacher, Henry Brant, had no time for graduate school. “Just write music!” he practically shouted. “Write for your friends. Get it performed. Write more.” My parents, however, encourage me to think about graduate school.

My first job was at the University of Pennsylvania. Working full time, I was allowed to take two courses a semester for free. I wrangled a graduate composition class with a well-known composer. One fall afternoon, I brought in the first piece I had written after college for review, a large piece for full band that I labored over.

The eminent composer gravely considered my composition. We sat quietly, expectantly in chairs scattered around the graduate seminar room. Slowly, he turned the pages. The crisp sheets crackled. He looked without comment, and finally closed the score. Sitting back, he crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. Smoke floated and swirled around his face. “Many are called, but few are chosen,” he finally said.

We were silent; the criticism was implicit. My brain whirled frantically. “Get out of here!” it screamed. “Get away from teachers like this!”

 “Many are called, but few are chosen,” says Jesus at the end of the Parable of the Wedding Feast. What does he mean? The word ‘chosen’ implies a selection process. Jesus smiles; he is too full of love for exclusion. Well known psychiatrist and best-selling author Scott Peck deciphers it for me. “All of us are called by and to grace,” he writes, “but few of us choose to listen to the call.”

We are called, we do not listen. We have the capacity; we get sidetracked or confused. Scarcity is a false god. The world is large and full. The ability to create is a birthright. To be chosen, then, is merely to respond to the invitation. We only need believe and surround ourselves with those who say a resounding, infinite yes.

I did not complete the composition seminar that year, nor go on to graduate school. Deciding to take the advice of my teachers from Bennington College, I composed for friends and local ensembles and orchestras. Over the years, the circle widened. The National Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, The St. Paul Chamber Ensemble, and Hilary Hahn.

Showing up, I write the music.

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

Listen: BLUE CURVE OF THE EARTH for solo violin (or violin and piano)
Commissioned by Hilary Hahn and recorded on Deutsche Grammophon in 2013 & 2018
“Grows into a lyrical world that literally seems capable of embracing the horizon. It is a shamelessly lovely piece.”  (Communities Digital News)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AaS8MkuQs8