For my mother, I am in her heart

Setting Es savai māmiņai for Artemisia Trio

Re-posted from 2018.

I think there exists a relationship in new music in which one party has to have complete musical trust in the other, and it is the composer who must trust the performer of their work. For me, Kaitlin Foley is one such friend (in addition to also being a great friend-friend). The musicianship is strong with this one; I know I can give her anything and it is safe in her voice and brain.

Here’s one of my favorite vocal moments from the ongoing Foley-Pukinskis collaboration:

So when Kaitlin approached me late last year and asked if I would write something for Artemisia Trio’s Mothers Concert, I said yes. She asked me to set a Latvian song about mothers. I love searching for texts, but with this piece, the research stretched only as far as my father. I asked him if he knew any tunes and I went with the first one that came to him. While there are literally thousands of Latvian songs about mothers (of this, I am sure), this one immediately invested me in the melody and text because of the person who shared it with me. Knowing my father’s song choice was somehow, even indirectly, a reflection of his mother, was important to how I connected and identified with the piece.

The events in my life and the wider cultural contributors I know make their way into my music in shapes and methods I am often unaware of until I have come out of the work and performance on the other side. For instance, my dissertation, which focused on parental bereavement, was not something with which I could directly relate. However, I was at the time of its composition, mourning a different unexpected loss, and I (unknowingly, then) composed through those feelings of my own sense of grief. I folded my own experience into the music without the intention of communicating those ideas to others, but instead, saturating the music with my own life; composing that piece became the processing of my grief.

My relationship with being Latvian really only becomes more and more difficult as I get older (read: learn more about Latvian history and the history of my family). On our trip to Latvia this summer, I faced some surprisingly deep sadness. The sadness comes predominantly from the fact that all of my own Latvian experiences came at great cost to my refugee father and his immediate family. In the time between my first and my most recent trips to Latvia, I have written a number of pieces somehow influenced by an aspect of Latvian-ness. 

Es savai māmiņai was a clear connection in it its origins (more on this below), but in listening to the recording of the first performance, this time midway through a two-week trip to Latvia, a new layer was peeled back in the subconscious contributions to how that piece came to be back in early 2018 when I was writing it. This post zooms in on a few elements and points of consideration that went into making this piece, supplemented with some sounds provided by Artemisia’s live performance in May.

I’ve set folksongs before, set folk texts, poems in other languages, poems in English – and the treatment of existing material in service of composition is really important to the pre-compositional process for me. I like to be clear about the ways in which I plan to engage with a tune, have approaches and techniques set aside ahead of time so I can draw upon the material in a way that focuses the new music and existing work in the same plane of exploration.

Es savai māmiņai’s  original tune sounds like this:

I like this tune because it doesn’t rely on the first five notes of a major scale in the same way many other folk songs do. For instance, Aija zuzu,  or the Latvian lullaby I heard every night literally moves up a scale and outlines a triad (do re mi fa sol mi do mi), which in many ways, limits how one keeps a melody intact at least in the ways that I chose to set it. Here is a quick excerpt of what the tune sounds like in my 2015 setting of the piece.

The melody for Es savai māmiņai starts on “sol” (instead of the expected “do”,) and has a lot of leaning towards things related to “fa,” or a IV chord. In theory class one of the things we talk about is how sometimes a IV chord feels like an extension or lean away from a I chord rather than its own separate entity. This is because the two chords carry a common tone; in the case of this tune in this key, the pitch “D” (which is “do” if we’re looking at things regarding solfege: movable do) is in common with the I chord AND the IV chord. Another option for a two-chord harmonization would be to include a V chord, which also has one pitch in common (“sol” of the I chord, or A), though this pitch commonality yields a different kind of effect.

Listen to I-IV-I keeping a common tone D.

Listen to I-V-I keeping a common tone A.

It would be very easy to get very technical here, but the gist of this is that the I-IV-I relationship yields a certain leaning affect for me as a composer and listener that feels a little closer together than I-V-I, which has a closed-open-closed affect. Note, of course, that everyone is different, so you may not feel this way in listening to these examples.

In thinking about how I wanted the tune to be included on a larger scale, the text shaped a song-long narrative arc of presenting the melody in a clear format and slowly being quilted into a gradually thickening harmonic texture. In setting an old tune, it is important to me also that the tune in its original form be presented clearly enough such that someone who doesn’t know the melody can identify from where the deviation and reinterpretation originated. For this reason, an iteration of the melody often appears in a relatively transparent iteration in the piece.

 In Es savai māmiņai, the “prime form” begins after a drone+bagpipe-y introduction. It’s as if the tune is warming up, stretching, and laying its groundwork.

Here’s a clip of the clearest presentation of the original melody:

Over time, as the verses progress, the harmonic density ebbs and flows as the melody is folded deeper into a thicket of twisty and turning chromaticism; it never technically disappears, but oftentimes it becomes so crowded by major and minor seconds, or descant-like lines that it’s hard to pick it out directly. Instead, the residue of its structure is what can be recognized.

Some of this complication mirrors a complicated relationship with my grandmother, which is perhaps stronger and deeper now than it was when she was alive. Some of this, I know, is a romanticized version, her Story as my Aunt Inese calls it, sometimes choosing dramatic closure over fact, but a lot of it also comes from having visited the places that were a part of her life when she was roughly my age, 70 years ago. It comes from seeing what she left and gave up in order to secure, or at least have a better shot at, the safety of her family. The crunchy, drifting aloofness of the last verse is a manifestation of my bond to my māte, and her bond to Latvia.

A strophic text is tough to set in a way that doesn’t make it sound like a Schubert lied, especially when the melody repeats in such an organized way. I knew I wanted to have some sense of repetition and verse in the piece, but I also knew I wanted each iteration to be distinct from the others. Additionally, this text provides its own narrative arc, one that expresses how a mother carries her child in her art, just as her child carries their mother in their own. Mother and child both play a role in holding one another close (literally and figuratively), and each voice holds the original tune at some point in the piece, cradled and bounded and supported by the other parts.

 The verses are glued together by little moments, in the first sections just a single sustained pitch, and as the piece progresses, the space between the sections begin to bloom and take on agency of their own:

This moment marks a mid-point shift in the piece; from here on out, things start to clump together again and get a bit crunchier, as the child looks for her mother in the light shining through the trees in the forest. To me, the text isn’t distinctly happy, or at least not without its nostalgic and sad moments, and so I didn’t want to offer a sense of stability and closure that could have easily been used to set the poem.

Composers have been approaching folk songs and melodies for centuries now, and each makes a choice in setting these melodies regarding how the original material is used and utilized in their piece. This isn’t the only way to do it, but it is one of the myriad ways to breathe fresh air into a tune that has been around for centuries. There are many pieces that weave fragments of the tune into thicker textures, that use interval patterns to write something completely new; the possibilities are quite literally infinite. The next time a piece like this happens, the approach will undoubtedly be different, the material new, and the outcome something changed.

 Listen to a live recording of the premiere below. Huge thanks to Artemisia Trio for their astounding musicianship, sensitivity to text, and dynamic storytelling.