In my creative practice, I am constantly aware of the transfer of power and agency between composer and performer, and I am deeply satisfied by the practice of handing a score over to performers and watching the ways in which they find themselves in the work. As a researcher, I am struck by how much attention is paid to the two-dimensional, stagnant artifact of a score in many musical analyses, but the performer’s role in shaping a listener’s attention to the score is often ignored. While the abstract work of the Ownership Continuum has been in play for my entire career as a composer, I’ve recently codified the language into a more usable framework and am expanding its research applications.
PRESENTATION: A Feminist Approach to Commissioning, Creating, and Rehearsing New Works
In November 2024, I will deliver a long-form presentation titled “A Feminist Approach to Commissioning, Creating, and Rehearsing New Works” at the College Music Society’s National Conference in Washington, DC. This presentation is a direct combination of the research and creative practice I am pursuing within this line of inquiry. My co-presenter, Dr. Caron Daley, has commissioned me to write a new work for her choirs at Duquesne University where she is the Director of the Choral Program. The piece will have its premiere performance in Washington DC at the conference and will be performed again at Duquesne later that semester or in the following Spring semester.
ABSTRACT: This workshop will explore a feminist approach to making new choral music from commission through performance. Counter to historically constructed practice, a feminist lens engages choral musicians in embodied pedagogy, democratic rehearsal strategies, attention to power relations, and shared ownership in the ecosystem of music-making (Abbate, 2004; Ahmed, 2017; Hooks, 2003; O’Toole, 1994; Pukinskis 2023; Scherer, 2020). The modular structure introduced via the presenters’ own anchoring case study invites attendees to incorporate feminist practices at their discretion and according to the needs and limits of their own programs or roles.
The first stage, plan, provides an immediate opportunity for collaboration as a substitute for transaction in music making. Using the presenters’ planning conversations as a foundation, we will invite workshop participants to discuss hypothetical collaborations, guiding questions and topics for consideration. The second stage, compose, highlights ways in which a composition’s construction and notation can enact power relations and considers opportunities for performer agency. Participants will identify ways in which composing–and the composition–can invite embodied attention to the performer. In the third stage, rehearse, presenters will demonstrate and engage participants in ensemble techniques that foreground musicians’ lived experiences with the music, including embodied learning, collaborative decision-making and reflective discussion, and iterative dialogue with the composer. In the final stage, perform, composer, conductor, and singers will reflect on the shared musical process and how it informed the ultimate performance. The session will conclude with a performance of the work, commissioned for a collegiate choir to be premiered in October of 2024.
PRESENTATION: The Ownership Continuum: Creating and Tracing Interpretive Agency in Music
In August 2023 I presented a paper titled “The Ownership Continuum: Creating and Tracing Interpretive Agency in Music” at the 6th International Conference of Dalcroze Studies in Pittsburgh, PA. The conference’s theme was Ecologies of practice in music and movement.
ABSTRACT: Music is an ecosystem; an interconnected community of individual entities whose collective work creates the environment in which they thrive. In western classical spaces, the composer has often been situated at the center of the discussion: an entity around which all other discussions of the music emanate. In non-western, non-classical spaces, however, the life of a song is bound up in the work of performers and audiences, those who assign value and imbue individuality into the musical frame of a composition. Drawing on the work of Daphne Leong (2019), Alexandra Pierce (2007), Pauline Oliveros (2005), and my own decades of experiential data as a practicing composer, this paper traces the transitions and distributions of musical ownership along a continuum from composer, through performers, to listeners, cycling and recycling along the spectrum.
A composer curates musical parameters–duration, feel or style, motivic material, large-scale form, but a score can also create or restrict interpretive space. By challenging the perceptions and historical frames of the composer in western classical traditions, I shift the artistic attentions of music-making into a more equitable balance, recognizing the ways in which a performer’s interpretive and analytic work shapes an audience’s opportunity to access or respond to a piece of music. I further posit that by framing a composer’s work as a form of collaboration, the world of a composition reflects an historical artifact and a current snapshot, ever-expanding to include the complex networks made up of each in-time, bodied iteration.
PRESENTATION: The Duality of Baltic Song Celebrations as Heritage: Making Sense of “Then” and “Now”
Conference on Baltic Studies in Europe: Baltic Solidarity
(Gdansk Poland 2019)
ABSTRACT: Music is the thread of Baltic cultural fabric. The Baltic Song Celebrations in particular are the most enduring national events for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, existing long before the countries were officially recognized in 1918. In current discourse, researchers face friction between whether these events are records of the past or orientations toward the future, and how new celebrations should be positioned. As each new iteration is planned and executed, a new pile of information is folded into the discourse of the celebrations, feeding each nation’s ability to layer the present among the past. However, because heritage is both an historical and contemporary record of culture, such duality also creates a tension between the “then” and “now.” To further complicate that pressure, the years of Soviet occupation document both the brilliant resilience of each nation through their song and dance celebrations, and also a lasting, significant cultural and historical trauma.
Research on the lasting cultural effects military and political occupation have on a community is limited—in the case of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, they survived occupation because of a pre-national identity documented in song and dance. In this paper, I argue for a shift in methodology and vocabulary of approach that considers research on oral tradition and diaspora as it applies to the Baltic Song Celebrations. Drawing from the defining characteristics and approaches associated with oral tradition, heritage, diaspora, and performance studies (Vansina 1985, Lowenthal 2005, Butler 2001, and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, respectively), I situate the Baltic Song Celebrations at the center of this four-part Venn diagram. While none of these fields encompasses the intricacies of the Song Celebrations on their own, a combination of their defining characteristics aids in understanding why and how the events have endured for these 150 years.
ORIGINAL WORKS which lean heavily into aspects of the ownership continuum:
Pivot (2021) for reed quintet
The Sea Cow (2018) for soprano and piano (self-accompanying)
Drift (2018) for flute and soprano
To Be Titled Commission (2024) for SATB choir
A Sense of Decency (2021) for SSAA choir and string quartet
We Are (2016) for SSSSAAAA choir
Requiem Fragments (2015) for SATB choir
Interpretive Agency: Flexibilities, Constraints, and Departure in Reena Esmail’s “Jhula Jhule”
In November 2023, I traveled to Denver CO to give a paper at the Society of Music Theory’s National (joint) Conference (with the American Musicological Society).
ABSTRACT: A composer can curate musical parameters–duration, feel or style, motivic material, large-scale form–but a score also creates and restricts interpretive space. While scholars have offered extensive engagement with the musical experience of the listener (Sessions 1962, Kozak 2020) and the performer’s role in communicating musical structure (Said 1991, Cone 1968) an underexplored portion of the musical continuum from composer to listener is the flexible, interpretive space from score to performer.
Drawing on the analytical frameworks of Daphne Leong (2019), Alexandra Pierce (2007), and Pauline Oliveros (2005) which center the performer’s experience as a crucial site of interpretive analysis, this paper traces the transitions and distributions of musical ownership along a continuum from composer, through performers, to listeners, cycling and recycling along the spectrum. Using Jhula Jhule (2013) by Reena Esmail as an analytic case study, I outline the limitations and affordances of the notated score (Figure 1) as a foundation for a performer’s analytical work. Adherences, departures, and movement beyond the artifact of notation are traced aurally, through three different recordings of the piece.
This paper highlights a crucial and under-discussed aspect of analysis: the in-time artifact of a performance. The proposed analytical framework accounts for the elements Esmail seeks to control in her notational choices while also documenting the room made for a performer’s own, individual interpretation. The first portion of the paper expounds the limits and freedoms offered by notation, and highlights points where the score encourages artistic choice (Figures 2 and 3). By building a clear sonic and gestural world with more fixed notational parameters, Esmail empowers the performer to make informed, interpretive choices in the more pliable moments of the piece.
The second portion of the talk engages the interpretive freedoms taken by performers in the three cited recordings from an embodied, or body-first perspective. With Pierce’s gestural models (Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 5) as a starting point, I further disengage the common conduit of score-to-listener in service of highlighting the embodied mode of knowing present in performer-oriented analysis. I scrutinize how the artifact of the score invigorates flexible performance outcomes through the omission of historically standardized expectations.
Esmail’s score bridges her non-western source material and the typical constraints of standardized western notation. She crafts an additionally unique entry into her work by including detailed program notes and links to her external source material on her website. This extra-musical offering provides a contextual support for performers, an effort which expands and deepens the ways to inform interpretation and performance practice. By challenging perceptions and historical, composer-centered frames in western classical traditions, I shift the artistic attentions of music-making into a more equitable balance between involved parties, recognizing the ways in which a performer’s analytic work and interpretive choices shape our attention to—and beyond—the score.
PRESENTATION: What it feels like to sing:
new Latvian choral works in a globalizing musical world
National Conference: Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies
(Seattle WA 2022)
ABSTRACT: The decade 2013-2023 is proving to be one of significant contribution and advancement for Latvian music, particularly among choral repertoire. To celebrate Latvia’s centenary, conductor Māris Sirmais developed a project commissioning new works from 77 Latvian composers. The project was titled “Latvijas Komponisti Latvijas Simtgadei,” and Musica Baltica published 19 of the works in an anthology, released at the completion of the cycle in 2018. Sirmais’ project as a concept and the contributions of each composer are a unique and real-time gift to the nation’s musical life, one that reflects Latvia’s choral repertoire at the crux of the shift between the first—and next—100 years.
In this presentation I take a performer-focused look at compositional trends reflected by these recent compositions. What ties the past to the present, and to the future, in Latvia’s choral music is the inherent singability built into each work; the new pieces are meant to be performed by both professional singers and amateur choirs. By shifting the focus of analysis toward elements necessary to learn, lead, and perform a piece for unaccompanied choir, I show how living Latvian composers are employing techniques that solidify their work in the modernizing national repertoire. Through focused case studies that prioritize the embodied experience of what it feels like to sing these works, I show how the collection leans into the deeply-seated historical trends of Latvia’s choral canon while also recognizing that success depends on a recognition of global musical currents.