What story am I trying tell?
For some background on music as possibility and its role in helping us confront the toxic state of our politics in contemporary society see this introductory post. Today’s post examines one potential practice inherent in what music as possibility actually looks like in our day-to-day creative work.
A fundamental part of using art to bring people together to imagine better possible futures is engaging those in the room in dialogue, which happens through the art of storytelling. So when I think about how I can best reach that place of dialogue and exchange with the participants of a creative experience, I turn to the following question:
Whose music am I playing and what story am I trying to tell?
I find this question to be a powerful tool in framing my programming, artistic choices, and the people I collaborate with. I also find that this question resonates very well with the students I work with as a way to guide their learning and creative activities in service of social issues they care about. It’s important that we learn (and I didn’t learn this until after I was a student) how to connect our craft, often a solitary exercise, with the world in which we live. If we are trying to tell a human story, leading to human outcomes, then we have to use the language of humanity in our performances and teaching.
In this series’ introduction we discussed how the most powerful way to bring people into a space of possibility and imagination is through telling a compelling story in the language of emotions and values. All creative experiences exist at the intersection of three distinct stories: the story of the performer(s), the story of the participants in the room, and the story of the music/composer. The success of our ability to bring people together in the room through art depends on the strength of the link between those stories and the amount of resonance and relevance we can find within that link. When thinking specifically about the story of the music/composer, it is easy for us to resort to comfort and play standards by a select few composers that have bankrolled our field for the last several hundred years. However, there is an abundance of work out there by young composers of all ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, disability statuses, and more that need to be heard. It is our responsibility as performers to interact with those composers, learn their stories and how they relate with our own, and share those stories with wider audiences. Focus on creating experiences that are equitable and relevant.
All creative experiences exist at the intersection of three distinct stories: the story of the performer(s), the story of the participants in the room, and the story of the music/composer.
This goes beyond checking the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion box. There is a rightful zeitgeist in our field to diversify the classical music world, but what we often miss is the relationship. Programming work by a composer from an underrepresented background is more than just satisfying a quota, it is an opportunity to form an artistic and creative relationship that will affect how you perceive your own story and art. If you can, reach out to the composer of the work, ask about their story, ask about how this work came to be and what it means to them, invest in understanding how this music is a reflection of their personhood, not just a creative product to be bought and sold. I know from experience working with living composers that the opportunity to have a conversation with them about their music leads to the best performances and inevitably changes me as an artist.
We also should think about the audience we put these works in front of. We of course can play for who we usually play for, but how does our choice to perform work by an underrepresented composer take on more powerful meaning when we play it for a particular audience who will see themselves in that performance. It might mean stepping outside of our comfort zone and into a different role, not only the interpreter of artistic work, but a conduit for relationships.
Programming work by a composer from an underrepresented background is more than just satisfying a quota, it is an opportunity to form an artistic and creative relationship that will affect how you perceive your own story and art.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t play our favorites at all though. If we want to program a standard, do the deep research and learn how the story we typically tell about composers might not always be the whole picture. They often are not as pristine as they are presented, and oftentimes they struggled with challenges that resonate in contemporary society, such as Schumann and mental health crises as just one example. Ask ourselves how we can pull the subversive parts out of their stories and find their relevance in the modern day.
In an example from my own life and practice, I programmed the Allemande movement of Bach’s Second Violin Partita on a recital program that occurred in May 2021, just as the world was starting to emerge from the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than focus on the technical challenges of adapting a violin work for saxophone or the compositional devices that proliferate this masterwork, I approached sharing the work with the audience with the story of Bach’s life when this work was written and how it connected with my own in hopes that it would find resonance. I’ll share my words to the audience from that recital below as an example of how research and a search for connection can make our favorite works come to life in a brand new way, inspiring us to see our own lives in music that is hundreds of years old:
Bach’s set of 6 solo violin pieces (3 partitas and 3 sonatas) were composed in the year 1720, a particularly influential year in Bach’s personal history. While traveling away from his family with his employer, Prince Leopold of Köthen, Bach received news that his first wife, Maria Barbara, had died and by the time he received the news had been dead for four months. Upon returning home to his children, he continued to write music, but much of it seems to indicate the grief that he was now processing, especially since that grief was out-of-sync with that of his children. This perhaps most interestingly manifests in the inscription on the title page for these works, on which Bach writes “Sei Solo” and the year 1720. This is noteworthy as Bach very rarely inscribed the dates or titles on his manuscripts (many titles we commonly ascribe to his works were provided by scholars of his music after this death). “Sei Solo” is also a play on words in Italian, which could mean “Six Solos” but if translated grammatically says “You are Alone.”
The Allemande from Bach’s Partita in d minor was one of the last works I played before the world changed in March 2020. I prepared it as part of an international saxophone competition with players from all over the world coming together for nearly two weeks in Dinant, Belgium. That seems like a lifetime ago now and a world that doesn’t reconcile with what we’ve come to know over the past year. Yet, this work became one of the main ways that I stayed in touch with the saxophone anytime I picked it up during the pandemic. With no live performances to speak of, most of the time I engaged with the instrument was just to play for playing’s sake. This piece became my constant companion through those feelings of being alone over the past year and a tangible way to engage with those feelings of grief that were clearly a part of this piece’s composition. I’d ask that you hold space for that familiar feeling of grief during this performance as the starting point for our journey together.
