Tina Davidson

Composer

women composers

How Will I Know When to Stop?

by

Timothy stands close to me. When I move, he moves. He waits for me to play his piece with him and follows me like a shadow around the room.

I help Shante with her instrument, calm Ferron down so he can concentrate, and get sidelined by Brandi and Terrell. They work on a piece for two desks and their hands. Experimenting with fingers, palms, and fists, they make sounds on the wooden tops. I step back and almost fall over Timothy; he is patient.

Jake and Michael struggle with their invented notation. Jake’s faces contorts, he cannot figure out how to write his rhythm down. We put words to the melody, and suddenly he claps it with ease.

Timothy pushes me towards the piano and I grab a drum. His piece, Thrill Ride, is carefully notated in tiny print. Only he knows what it means, but he has taught me. He begins to play, his long fingers curving around the complicated chords. A dreamy look comes over his face.

“How will I know when to stop?” I press him. He continues to play, immersed in his own sound world. (McMichael Elementary School)

∗∗∗∗∗

Michael’s eyes are full of tears. His small body slumps in the chair. “It’s not fair! I want to work with the cellist.” Tears splash down his face. I study him for a moment, then settle down beside him.

Michael and two other boys were out of the room recording the rap lyrics to the song the fifth grade class had written. During their absence, the rest of the class completed their graphically notated pieces about Homer’s Odyssey. Today, the Cassatt String Quartet joins my residency. Each group will collaborate with a member of the ensemble. The three boys have no composition. I stall, thinking.

“What if you write a new piece for all of the string players right now?” I suggest. Michael runs for the markers and newsprint. Working quickly, the boys write a piece they call Rough Riders from Lotus Town. They fight briefly about how to notate the motorcycle sound.

After a discussion, the Quartet plays the piece for the class. Michael leans into me, smiling. “They played my piece pretty good!” he concedes.  (Nebinger Elementary School)

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

Listen:  Celestial Turnings, string orchestra: excerpt

 

Tina Davidson created Young Composers program to teach students to compose their own music through instrument building, graphic and invented notation. Designed to enhance self-esteem and reinforce achievement through alternative measures of expression, the course culminates with a performance of the students’ compositions.

Have Your Babies Or Tie Your Tubes

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She steps close to me, and almost whispers, “Can you have children and still have a career in music?”

Attractive and young, she is a successful composer, already teaching at a prestigious university, and married to an older, well-known composer. They are talking about having children, but she is not sure. I smile.

I can only speak for myself. Having my daughter opened me up in a way that I never could have imagined. Through her I found the courage to face my dark self which has allowed me to speak true in my music. She awoke in me the possibility of love given and love reciprocated, and connected me to lingering soft animal embraces and the wonder of discovering the world anew. It was a second chance of unknown dimension.

And yet, time was now not my own. As a mostly single parent, I crafted careful structures for childcare, combinations of daycare and babysitters, which, at any moment could fall through – an illness, an early dismissal, a snow day – all was in shatters and I was frantic.  I’d sneak into my studio when she was playing or napping, feeling the weight of my continual distraction. She learned, implicitly, that even when I was with her, I was not always present. My gaze far off, I would put her voice on mute as I tended my evolving work, moving energy around in my thoughts.

“There is a passionate case to be made on either side, having your children or doing without, and both sides are for humanity,” says Alix Kates Shulman, in her book, Burning Questions. “Have your babies or tie your tubes – whatever you decide, you’ll find out soon enough that you’ve lost something precious.”

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

Listen to Core of the Earth, and Lullaby, from Tina Davidson’s opera, Billy and Zelda

 

Writers I Have Stalked

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Mary Gordon and Father Daniel Berrigan

I love setting a poem or text to music. Constantly on the look-out, I read extensively. But primary to finding the right text is getting permission to use the text. Too many composers have learned the hard way, setting a contemporary text only to learn that the author or publisher will not give them permission. The piece, then, lives in a kind of limbo, waiting for the seventy years to elapse until the text is in public domain.

Locating an author is the first order of business. Over the years, I developed an uncanny ability of finding writers through a combination of sleuthing and stalking. Getting permission to use a text is usually through the publisher, but often I need to be in direct contact with the writer. Finding their contact information can be challenging. Researching them extensively at libraries or online, through universities or book reading, I snoop out addresses and phone numbers. And always, I sent them samples of my music.

In the mid 2000s I had two projects in mind, the setting of Daniel Berrigan’s poems from Uncommon Prayer for chorus, and an opera based on Mary Gordon’s wonderful novel, Pearl.  Of course, I knew neither writer, nor did I know anyone who knew them.

Mary Gordon, one of America’s most admired writers, was the easiest to track down. I quickly discovered she taught at Barnard College, and sent her a letter with a CD of some of my choral pieces and an outline of the opera project.

Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, peace activist, and poet best known for his commitment to a ministry that combines work among the poor with nonviolent civil disobedience, was another matter. Despite his international profile and long list of publications, he was a hard man to find. He seemed to have disappeared.

I poked around to no avail. Finally, I found his name on the Interfaith Assembly Community web site. I called the director. Yes, he knew Berrigan and had his contact information. No, he would not give it to me. I hesitated, “Would you be able to forward a letter from me to him?”  I immediately sent Berrigan a CD of my music with an attached note.

By mid-December I was on the train to NYC to visit Father Berrigan on the upper west side. His apartment was spare and airy; a crucifix hung on the wall along with colorful wall hangings. A lean man in his eighties, he was suffering from a cold. Somehow, in our conversation, I mentioned Mary Gordon. He laughed and recounted that he had, years before, received a letter from her when she was in a catholic high school. Having been discouraged by the nuns and doubting her work, she asked what he thought.  ‘Full speed ahead.  Stay with it.  You’ll be terrific.’ he wrote back.

I brought out my copy of his Uncommon Prayer, his rewriting of the Old Testament psalms, a brilliant reweaving of their themes into contemporary reflection.

 “I haven’t read them in years,” he mused. 

“Why don’t we read them out loud together,” I suggested. 

We sat side by side in the white winter light, reading his poems to each other. “When the Spirit struck us free/ we could scarcely believe it for very joy,” I read his version of Psalm 126.  “The heavens bespeak the glory of God/The firmaments ablaze, a text of his works,” Berrigan read.

The afternoon grew dark and we sat quietly with his poetry curling around us. Finally, he said, “They held up pretty well,” his face breaking into a smile.

That evening I sat on the train returning home. I was aglow with the afternoon and pressed my forehead to the cold window. My cell phone rang. Absentmindedly I put it to my ear.

“Tina,” said a woman’s voice. It was Mary Gordon. “I loved your choral piece, Antiphon to a Virgin.” It brought tears to her eyes and she had to call me.

I laughed, “I was just talking about you this afternoon.”

Listen –

Radiant, from the opera Pearl, soprano and piano: https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/pearl-radiant

The Land, from the opera Pearl, soprano, tenor and piano: https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/pearl-the-land

Cassandra Sings; Changing the Music

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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.

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

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: