Drumming Up New Music with Michael Compitello

Posted on November 27, 2018 by maestrobeats

Michael Compitello. Photo by Matt Dine.

I’m a musician whose mission is to advocate for the efficacy of contemporary music in contemporary society. Whether with my cello/percussion duo New Morse Code, as a soloist, at Avaloch Farm Music Institute (where I am Assistant Director), or as Assistant Professor of Percussion at the University of Kansas, my goal is to build community through and around the arts.

Commissioning and incubating new works from dynamic composers is at the core of my work. I work collaboratively with composers whose music I admire and whose friendship I value. Typically, we brainstorm ideas together and workshop material in the process of being composed, allowing me to have more of a creative voice in new works than I might otherwise.

To that end, I’m excited to announce Unsnared Drum, a new project dedicated to pushing the limit of what’s possible with the snare drum. Over the next year, four of my favorite composers—Nina C. Young, Hannah Lash, Tonia Ko, and Amy Beth Kirsten—will collaborate with me on new works for snare drum solo with or without electronics or video. These four composers will expand the expressive potential of this underutilized instrument through dramatic, sensitive, creative, and multimedia solos. In the process, we will change the way that people think about, listen to, perform, and practice the snare drum.

As we work together, we will post video and audio of our explorations, written reflections of our work together, and all sorts of snare drum-related miscellany which you can follow on my website, Instagram, and Facebook. Thanks to Vic Firth, each of the composers will have an assortment of sticks, mallets, and other implements with which to experiment as they write. I’m also grateful for the support of Pearl Drums, whose drums the composers will be exploring over the next year.

Amy Kirsten: Screenplay

Last July, Amy Kirsten and I began working on her portion of Unsnared Drum at Avaloch Farm Music Institute. Amy and I have known one another since our days at the Peabody Conservatory, and I’ve loved he work since she drafted me to play percussion in the first performance of her Ophelia Forever. She’s a composer, director, singer, writer, visual artist (and a lot more) who highlights the theater present in music performance. Whether it’s a piece for concert programs or a fully staged production, Amy’s music is gripping, full of melodic invention, otherworldly sounds, and hypnotic rhythms. (Do yourself a favor and check out Columbine’s Paradise Theater, Quixote, and Savior.)

Amy Kirsten. Photo by Gennadi Novash.

Amy is also Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of HOWL, a collaborative arts ensemble which Amy calls “equal parts storefront theatre, opera company, and grotesque chamber ensemble.” Bringing together artists from across disciplines, HOWL builds integrative, innovative, and unclassifiable new works that defy expectations of genre and medium alike.

HOWL is representative of Amy’s creative process, and a big part of why I wanted to work with her again. How better to create a boundary-pushing work for a fairly type-cast percussion instrument than by going big? At the same time, Amy’s process matches very well my collaborative ideal. She develops most of her new work through workshop sessions which generate and refine ideas and structures. As a result, her music draws upon the unique skills of the performers with whom she works and turns her interpreters into advocates.

Our Work

Amy’s overarching goal for our time together was to create a mockup of a piece as a feasibility test and proof of concept. Her initial idea for Screenplay features a single live performer flanked by two life-sized pre-recorded video versions of himself, creating a trio for snare drums.

Amy had two inspirations for our work together. First, she was taken by the virtuosic interaction between live performer and video in Michel van der Aa’s Blank Out. In van der Aa’s opera, the typical roles of pre-recorded video and live performers are inverted. A single live performer is (spoiler alert) the memory of a child’s deceased mother, and the part of the now-adult child is played by a pre-recorded singer displayed on a 3D screen. The piece has some wonderful tricks—performers handing objects between the video screen and the stage, and a wrenching trio between the mother and two digital doppelgängers. Amy was taken with the way in which van der Aa makes the digital images indispensable to the narrative. In Screenplay, she wants to highlight the intimacy of musical interaction by giving me chamber music to play with myself.

Amy was also inspired by the capability of percussive sound to surprise and shock us. Near the end of each movement in David Lang’s the so-called laws of nature, Lang introduces a shocking new timbre, made more surprising by these unexpected sounds’ synchronicity between players. Similarly, in Thierry de Mey’s Silence Must Be!, a silent introduction is shattered by the introduction of sound miraculously synced with the gestures of the performer. In Screenplay, Amy wants to experiment with synchronizing sound with gesture, and how surprising gestures can inflect the structure of a piece.

Experimenting and Cultivating

With these ideas in mind we devoted our first session to improvisation as a way to explore as many surprising and unique sounds as we could. For us, this meant exploring techniques and sounds which strayed as far from drumsticks striking a head as possible. Amy is a phenomenal singer, and in our improvising, we looked for ways to make the drum breathe, sigh, and shape a phrase as vocally as possible.

In her stage drama Quixote, Amy asks a percussion quartet to activate tuning forks by striking them against soft rubber objects (a free weight with neoprene covering) then touch the two prongs against a drum, piece of paper, altos tin, or any other sound-making object. The resulting buzz is haunting: full of pitch, but ghastly. We explored this technique on the snare drum, playing with upward glissandi created when the prongs are dragged along the edge of the drumhead, creating morse code rhythms across the drum’s head and shell, and touching the prongs to egg carton foam to generate a muted beep. But the most stunning effect was when we touched the vibrating prongs to the snare wires themselves for a shimmering sound. We then turned the drum over and used two more tuning forks as shims to lift the snares away from the drumhead. By touching the vibrating prongs to the snare wires, we produced a resonant, shimmering, gong-like tone.

Codifying, Refining, Recording

Our next steps were to categorize the sounds with which we improvised, refine them, and record them. After our wide-ranging improvisations, Amy and I recorded a series of videos in which I improvised with an individual technique with the intention of layering the results into the two video screens stationed on either side of the live performer. In the end, our sound categories ranged from tuning forks on drumheads to slowly scraping the snares of an overturned drum.

Inspired by the tight rhythmic connection between visual gesture and sonic result in works like Silence Must Be! and Aphasia, we recorded my lips and hands performing a series of improvised gestures. While Amy edited our “technique improvisations,” I took the silent films of my hands and mouth and worked to assign snare drum sounds to each gesture. In the afternoon, we recorded each of these sounds and synced them with the video, creating a set of videos with foley sounds.

By the end of our short time together, Amy had a strong sense that Screenplay was viable, and that the snare drum could sustain sonic and dramatic interest. While our mockups were crude, we left feeling inspired.

To Video and Beyond

Since last summer, Amy and I have remained in communication about Screenplay’s raison d’etre. Amy has become more and more preoccupied with the video’s purpose. What will separate this piece from a work for three live performers? Can the video be an artistic partner in the piece? Could it highlight elements of the live performance while making its own artistic statement? Amy’s ideas seemed to require more than a competent videographer. We had questions about what was possible, what kinds of approaches could be most effective in live settings. We needed another collaborator.

I immediately thought of Hannah Wasileski, a projection designer and video artist whose work I adore. Hannah designs projections for theater, opera, and concert performances. What I love about her work is the way in which her images intuitively highlight interesting parts of the music while making their own artistic statement. I met Hannah at the Yale Cabaret, where she designed and filmed projections for a show I was part of which retold the Orpheus myth. Since then New Morse Code commissioned a video from Hannah for Robert Honstein’s Unwind, where the slowly moving patterns highlight the gradual unwinding of the patterns in the piece.

So that brings us to where we are now: as Amy and I continue crafting the shapes and sounds of “Screenplay,” we have started working with Hannah to integrate a video component that will bring my digital chamber partners to life.

Our collaboration has resulted in an expansion of the snare drum’s sonic and dramatic potential through intuitive dramatic gestures—exactly what I dreamed for Unsnared Drum. I cannot wait to share the results!

Dieter Schnebel (1930–2018): Radical Reverential Music

Posted on July 11, 2018 by Michael Schell

by Michael Schell

Photo by Peter Andersen.

With the passing of Dieter Schnebel on May 20, Germany lost one of its last links to the post-WW2 generation of composers who built a new paradigm of music after the old ideas had been pulverized beneath the wreckage of war, fascism, and genocide. As a student of the famous Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, Schnebel eagerly soaked up the influence of his fellow students Nono, Kagel, and Stockhausen, as well as their spiritual predecessors Ives, Webern, and Varèse. Like many of his contemporaries, he was also deeply influenced by John Cage, and went on to experiment with indeterminate and graphic notation, distribution of sound sources in space, extended vocal and instrumental techniques, and theatrics of the sort that North Americans often associate with happenings and performance art.

But Schnebel didn’t always follow the script of the stereotypical European avant-gardist. For one thing, he earned degrees in both music and theology, eventually teaching both subjects and becoming an ordained Lutheran minister. And in contrast with the reputation of some composers as vain and temperamental, Schnebel exuded a gentle, collaborative personality that displayed little trace of Stockhausen-sized ego or Partch-sized shoulder chips.

These traits seem to define Schnebel’s oeuvre from its very beginnings. The short piece dt 31₆ (completed in 1958) is a humble attempt to articulate a modern religious sensibility using the methods of modern music. Written for 15 voices dispersed throughout the performance space, its title refers to Deuteronomy 31:6 (“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because the Lord goes with you, and will never leave nor forsake you.”). Fragments of that verse are sung, spoken, and whispered both in ancient Hebrew and in various translations. Don’t worry if you can’t make out the words though—Schnebel treats the text almost as a found object, preferring to highlight the transcendent, mystical side of scripture. As he puts it “in the course of the piece, language becomes music and music becomes language.”

dt 31₆ is the first piece in a trilogy of a cappella sacred works. The second piece is entitled amn (the vowelless Hebrew rendering of “amen”). This work is longer, about 15 minutes in the linked performance (it starts at 33:24 in the video). This time the text comes from the Lord’s Prayer, once again rendered in multiple languages and sometimes paraphrased. Apart from a few coordinated outbursts (like the one in this score excerpt that corresponds to 42:43 in the video), the 16 solo voices proceed independently in a way that suggests the private nature of personal prayer. Indeed the variety of idioms and vocal techniques heard in the piece suggests an assembly of people from diverse cultures and nations, consistent with the universalist ideals of the Lutheran faith.

Such devotion to exploring the full range of human vocal expression can easily lead a composer toward theater, and Schnebel indeed went on to pioneer a hybrid of new music and theatrics that is still influential today. The video linked above is a good sampling. In its use of nonsense syllables, moving sound sources, and strange hand gestures and choreography, it shows the influence of Schnebel’s friend Mauricio Kagel, but also connects with the work of like-minded American contemporaries such as Kenneth Gaburo. Efforts like this helped pave the way for such postmodern classics as Ligeti’s Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures, the new music theater of Meredith Monk and pieces like Mark Applebaum’s Aphasia.

Schnebel’s theatrics also had an occasional whimsical side. Do you participate in a sport where the players wear special headgear? So do these singers. Do you wish that a cello could play sustained chords? Try a special curved bow. Do you prefer riding your Harley-Davidson to attending prim and proper concerts? So do these people:

In the 1970s Schnebel developed an interest in collage-quotation music, one of the quintessential styles of musical postmodernism. His collection Re-Visionen takes a fresh look at several Central European warhorses from the 18th and 19th centuries. Some of the Re-Visionen (such as his setting of Contrapunctus I from Bach’s Musical Offering) are straightforward arrangements of the original. Others might remind you of the Swingle Singers in their heyday. The most admired movement is the Schubert-Phantasie, which sounds like an orchestral acid trip with Schubert’s late and poignant G major Piano Sonata playing on a nearby stereo. It was written for the 150th anniversary of Schubert’s death in 1978:

These days a piece like Schubert-Phantasie might be called a “remix.” Either way, it’s a clear precedent for two much newer Schubert homages that have been featured at Second Inversion: Eric Wubbels’ Gretchen am Spinnrade and Vladimir Martynov’s Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished).

Schnebel’s music took a more contemplative turn in his old age, as evidenced by a pair of string quartets that were recorded by Quatuor Diotima. The beautiful String Quartet “Im Raum” (“in space”) from 2006 sounds like the satisfied musings of a man nearing the end of a fulfilled life. The texture is slow and sparse, punctuated by several musical quotes, most notably the plaintive beginning of Stravinsky’s Orpheus and the similar-sounding opening of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony. In a live performance there are elaborate instructions for how the performers should move on stage, which explains both the title and the footsteps you hear in the last movement.

In the Second String Quartet (2000–07) two actors join the ensemble, reciting numbers and occasional snippets of text in German and English. It reminds me of Crumb’s Black Angels (without the amplification) and Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet (without the helicopters), but it also belies the notion that intellectual Germans can’t write sensual and playful music. Unusually for Schnebel, the music is often beat-driven, with melodic fragments and little repeating riffs emerging from the instruments. But more characteristically, it explores the full range of associations from abstraction to meaning, and even incorporates musical quotations too, including the familiar Tristan chord, which rears its head in the second movement.

Even as he entered his 80s, Schnebel stayed active, still exploring, still fascinated by the voice and the sacramental connotations of theatricalized performance. One of his last works is a ritualistic setting of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Joyce’s Ulysses. It seems fitting that the coda of Schnebel’s career should come from the coda of the 20th century’s most exemplary literary work.

Schnebel with John Cage ca. 1979 (via Croatian Society of Composers).

Though Schnebel’s aesthetic and philosophical interests remained fairly consistent throughout his career, any survey of his work reveals that the music itself varies greatly from one composition to another. This is partly the result of his penchant for graphic and text-based scores, but he also seemed eager to avoid repeating himself. “You ask whether I have a style? I hope I don’t. I would like my pieces to have been born each in its own manner—for each to have a style of its own.”

Can one reconcile this eclecticism with the constancy expected of a Christian clergyman? According to his colleague Godfried-Willem Raes, Schnebel “was not very church minded, and I think his idea of god was rather abstract, certainly not prescriptive. However, he believed in the meaning of rituals.” Perhaps the variety that Schnebel sought in his own music expresses a concept of God as embodying the multiplicity of the world and the cosmos. And perhaps Schnebel’s lifelong interest in ritualized performance expresses a human awe and reverence for that same multiplicity.

Women in (New) Music: Women Who Score

Posted on March 6, 2018 by maestrobeats

by Angela Drăghicescu

About a year ago I was given some music to play by Louise Farrenc. The music was so heavenly it moved me to my very soul. It had the same quality that the music of the most famous composers of the era had, and I wondered as a trained pianist with an extensive repertoire list how it came to pass that I had never heard of this composer or her music.

I looked for more pieces of hers and found an incredible body of work, greater than or equal to the best composers of her era. I read up on her and not only discovered a life and experience of heroic proportions, but a life spent fighting uphill battles simply to get the respect she deserved. Despite ultimately earning the respect and admiration of the finest composers of her era, the musical establishment after her death ignored her work both in performance and in education, and in an insidious fashion erased her from history.

Much of her work sat in libraries collecting dust for over a century until a French graduate student rediscovered her in the 1980s. I quickly began to realize that this was a pattern that spanned centuries and crossed oceans. Scores of talented female composers were treated in this fashion. Measures were taken to prevent them from joining the classical canon of composers, and when their talent was too great to be contained, the music itself was shunned by the establishment, or subjected to specious and clearly bigoted smears in the press.

It is a universal truth that great music, like great art, is a pure expression of the soul and a thing of deep and abiding beauty. It is priceless, unique, and each piece has a power to stir the soul. To anyone capable of appreciating such things—whatever the gender—the idea of destroying or hiding this music from the world is truly appalling. The fact that so many women’s legacies and achievements, along with their incredible music, were deliberately erased from history by the bigotry of small minds is a profound injustice that cries out to be rectified.

This year Felipe Vera and I co-founded a new concert series in Seattle titled Women Who Score with the goal of showcasing musical works by women whose creative voices were stifled or silenced as a result of religious, racial, cultural, or systemic oppression. This Sunday, March 11 we are proud to present a special preview concert featuring music by a handful of history’s most influential women composers: Louise Farrenc, Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, and Libby Larsen.

But these women are just the beginning. Throughout our inaugural concert season, we plan to commission new works, highlight local living composers, and also pay tribute to historic women composers who paved the way for today’s generation of musicians. This series is about empowerment; about a community uniting in sharing the untold stories. With an open mind and open ears, we can work to diversify the world of classical music and continue to discover the musical voices of women across history.

Warmly,

Angie Drăghicescu
Artistic Director of Women Who Score

The Women Who Score preview concert is Sunday, March 11 at 7pm at Nordstrom Recital Hall. For tickets and more information, please click here.

Eric Salzman Remembered (1933–2017)

Posted on December 7, 2017 by Michael Schell

by Michael Schell

Eric Salzman’s death on November 12, 2017 closed out one of American music’s most multifaceted careers. An accomplished composer, producer, and critic, Salzman was a prominent advocate of new music theater and the author of several important texts on contemporary music.

It was in his capacity as a writer that Salzman probably reached the most people. His textbook Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction spanned four editions from 1974 to 2001, during which time it was the most highly respected single-volume survey of modern music in the English language. Concise and levelheaded, it’s also one of the few such books written by a composer. It provided thousands of music students and enthusiasts with their first coherent tour through the sprawling expanse of 20th century musical innovation.

Salzman also edited The Musical Quarterly, and wrote several articles for Stereo Review, including a 1971 feature on Edgard Varèse (with an accompanying two-page tribute from Frank Zappa) that helped stir up interest in the Franco-American master’s music among young and non-specialist listeners.

Salzman’s last book, from 2008, is The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body. Co-authored with Thomas Desi, it’s a fascinating and opinionated exploration of work outside the realms of conventional opera and Broadway-style musicals. Its subjects include John Cage’s happenings, Harry Partch’s corporeality, Philip Glass’s operas with Robert Wilson and JoAnne Akalaitis, the work of post-opera composers from Europe (Louis Andriessen) and Asia (Tan Dun), and newfangled interactive/intermedia creations like Tod Machover’s Brain Opera. An ongoing concern is the relationship between vocal technique and the musical genres based on it, whether the vibrato-heavy bel canto style used in opera houses, or the more “natural” (and often amplified) style of folk and commercial singers. Special attention goes to musicians such as Meredith Monk who have created a corpus of stage works based on extended vocal techniques. Also discussed are the trade-offs between voice projection and clarity of diction, a topic critical for any genre of sung music but one that is neglected in most books on music.

Salzman’s own stage works often inhabit the space between traditional operas and musicals. His one-act Civilization and its Discontents, written with Michael Sahl in the late 1970s, is sung-through like an opera but employs Broadway-style voices backed up by a small combo in the manner of today’s touring musicals. Its debt to Weill and Sondheim is obvious, both in the tonal, syncopated melodies, as well as the contemporary, adult-oriented subject matter. It centers on a love triangle between Jill Goodheart, a frustrated young New York thespian, Jeremy, her singles bar pickup, and Derek, her live-in boyfriend. When the latter unexpectedly barges in on the other two, the men recognize themselves as business partners and rather than fight, start negotiating a deal in front of the chagrined bachelorette. An alto-voiced emcee named Carlos Arachnid intervenes periodically to offer easy paths to fulfillment—kind of a Mephistopheles character for the self-help guru era. Back at the bar, the chorus intones the moral: “If it feels good do it”.

By contrast, The Nude Paper Sermon from 1969 is closer to the postmodern tradition of pastiche and collage. This 45-minute gallimaufry combines synthesizer blurts, poetry by John Ashbury, and mixed vocal/instrumental passages modeled after English madrigals. The latter are performed by a Renaissance consort led by Joshua Rifkin, an early case of archaic instruments being appropriated for avant-garde purposes (the viola da gamba player, incidentally, is none other than Richard Taruskin prior to his emergence as America’s most provocative musicologist). After six minutes, a spoken stream of consciousness joins the right channel, delivered by a young Stacy Keach. The whole mix was released by Nonesuch on an LP that was well distributed in North American record stores, allowing the piece to ride Keach’s subsequent Hollywood fame to “hit” status as a kind of American counterpart to Berio’s contemporaneous Sinfonia.

Another Berio piece, Laborintus II, got its American premier alongside Salzman’s Foxes and Hedgehogs, the latter eliciting a disapproving boo from Morton Feldman’s seat in the audience. Apparently this indiscretion was forgiven, since Salzman went on to produce the premier of Feldman and Samuel Beckett’s opera Neither. Salzman’s other credits as a producer include the revival and first modern recording of Partch’s Revelation in the Courthouse Park, and several recordings for Nonesuch and Koch International, including the popular Tango Project albums, which combine traditional and contemporary renditions of this popular dance.

Salzman co-founded the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia and was composer in residence for the Center for Contemporary Opera in New York. He also taught music periodically, and had two stints as music director of the outré WBAI radio in New York. Among Salzman’s last projects is a string quartet arrangement of five classic John Cage piano and prepared piano pieces, and the lovely a cappella “madrigal comedy” Jukebox in the Tavern of Love that was recently recorded by The Western Wind alongside Meredith Monk’s Basket Rondo. A lifelong New Yorker, he was married for over 60 years to Lorna Salzman, a noted environmentalist who was the Green Party’s 2004 presidential candidate. Their children include the poet Eva Salzman.

In an influential 1972 New York Times article, Salzman wrote “It is not necessary to call the new music theater into being; it is taking place under our eyes and ears; it is only the simple, encompassing definition that is elusive.” What is likewise elusive is a tidy summation of a career as varied as Salzman’s. Perhaps his most impactful legacy is embodying a 20th century composer’s commitment to tackling the most challenging and universal artistic problems anew, over and over.

Women in (New) Music: The Pure Cold Light in the Sky

Posted on November 14, 2017 by maestrobeats

Kin of the Moon is an improvisation-centric chamber series featuring three cutting-edge and iconoclastic women performers. Violist and composer Heather Bentley reflects on the music and meaning behind their debut concert, The Pure Cold Light in the Sky this Saturday, Nov. 18 at 8pm at the Good Shepherd Chapel.

by Heather Bentley

Kin of the Moon violist, improviser, and composer Heather Bentley.

It’s Armistice Day today, also known as Veteran’s Day, also acknowledged in astrology to be a particularly high vibrational day for the planetary deity Venus, who supports us to think with our hearts, and not just with our heads. It’s a good moment for reflection on this past year of seismic cultural upheaval that is continuing without abatement as I write.

The existential importance of music in my life has been magnified through the lens of all the enormous societal challenges we face. Creating Kin of the Moon is the outgrowth of a powerful desire to combine my private discipline of improvisation with my lifelong experience of presenting and performing concert music. Becoming an improviser in my late 20s was an attempt to liberate my own voice through my instrument. While I have always held composers like Brahms, Bach, and Shostakovich deeply in my heart as my best friends, there are aspects of professional classical music life that challenge my sense of creative agency.

I met Kaley Eaton on stage at the Royal Room, doing an improvised show with Steve Treseler’s Game Symphony. We’ve been close collaborators ever since, working together on her electroacoustic opera Lily, and co-creating our piece Atmokinesis for improvisers and SuperCollider processing. Leanna Keith is simply a spectacular flutist/improviser—we have been playing shows together since this summer and I couldn’t be happier with our Kin of the Moon team!

Here is our statement:

Kin of the Moon is an improvisation-centric chamber music series incubated in Seattle’s rich musical scene. Headed by violist/improviser/composer Heather Bentley, vocalist/composer Kaley Eaton, and flutist/improviser Leanna Keith, the group explores sonic rituals, promotes cross-pollination of genres, emphasizes the communicative power of specific performance locales and celebrates the creativity that multiplies itself through the collaboration of performers and composers. The artists of Kin of the Moon devote their lives to reaching higher vibrational levels through sound creation.

Kin of the Moon flutist and improviser Leanna Keith.

I was asked about the fact that our first concert features all women performers and composers. Actually, we were aiming to create the most compelling program to go with our new piece Atmokinesis and Kaley’s new sound installation wilderness, and it happens that we were very excited by Jessi Harvey’s quantum physics-inspired work The Multiverse and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Kate Soper’s Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say for voice and various flutes.

Kin of the Moon vocalist and composer Kaley Lane Eaton.

I am inspired to work with artists who exhibit a spirit of creative inquiry and practice a discipline of collaborative generosity. That many people who hold these qualities dear are women is not surprising. There are also countless men I have worked with who are equally inspiring in this way. And there are non-binary people I have worked with who are inspiring, generous, and boundlessly creative. Our choices about who we present and who we work with have everything to do with these considerations.

Back to Armistice Day. Last Nov. 11, 2016 was very difficult for so many of us. I am fortunate to co-own and operate ELF House, a music space/artist retreat on Whidbey Island, with the magnificent composer, saxophonist, and flutist Jessica Lurie. I went up by myself after the horrific election and had the opportunity to regroup. This is what I wrote, and it feels very much like a statement of purpose about my music:

“I’ve had a moment to recoup from the dreadful election result up at my sanctuary by the water on Whidbey. Here there’s no internet yet and the sunrise pinks up the sky and water birds carry on like nothing has changed—and in this world that is true. I needed space and time to reflect on how to carry on. First of all, I want to acknowledge
my sons Miles, 19, and Aaron, 29, for their response to the debacle of this election.
Representing the two halves of the millennial generation, Aaron reminded me to stay
levelheaded and through his lead, I greatly increased my contribution (now monthly) to
the ACLU, an organization that has stood at the frontline of defending the marginalized
in the US for decades. And Miles took to the streets to protest on Nov 9. Feet on the
ground. I know my sons are aware of their privilege as white, cis, straight men of
comfortable economic status. I am beyond proud that they immediately took steps to
exert what influence they can on behalf of those who stand to lose the most under the
new administration.

For myself, I needed time for darkness. I felt like it wasn’t time for kumbaya or sentiments that we can just unify now that the election is over. Or pretend that a nice concert can heal our divisions. This is what I think today, on Veterans Day: as artists, we are aware of our ability to conjure heaven on earth. The moments come seldom, and they are hard won through the assiduous honing of our craft, but the allure of creating deep, unassailable beauty and terrible and ferocious gorgeousness from a deep vein, is what compels us in the face of economic absurdity to continue. Relentlessly. This is the truth and depth and gift that artists hold and offer. Let our vein flow for the world. Let the truth of our witness and offering stand as a real testament to the fragile and tenacious beauty of existence in this sphere. Let us always, always encourage the outpouring of our colleagues and treasure our audiences and followers.

Let us actively conspire to collaborate. Let our vision extend to radical inclusiveness of those in our midst as well as those out of sight.”

Kin of the Moon takes its name from a W.B. Yeats poem, “The Cat and the Moon.”

THE CAT AND THE MOON
by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.