Tina Davidson

Composer

Composing a Life, Note by Note

Bearing Witness

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creating yourself

“What is composing music all about?” I asked the class.

I am teaching another Young Composer session, this time to sixth graders. I scribble their thoughts about music quickly on the black board: writing your own tune, expressing yourself, giving the beat, listening to yourself, being famous, making money.

I wipe the chalk from my hands, “Creating your own song, being heard, witnessing,” I suggest. They stop for a moment. “Creating yourself,” I add. They are quiet.

View from Ghost Ranch, pastel by Tina Davidson

Music has this element of bearing witness; it is that space where I reveal all that I am and dream of who I am becoming. I noticed it most distinctly when I worked with the homeless women, helping them to write operas about their lives. It was slow and oftentimes painful work as they pieced out their stories and wrote lyrics and songs. But it was there that I truly saw the raw power of art for the first time—the ability to transform, to reach beyond the “dailyness” of living to the reinvention of self.

To sing about oneself is to be visible. To witness life is to stand apart and speak one’s truth. To perform a work together is to collaborate for clarity of the moment.

Listen: Bright Flash of Wings for string sextet: http://: https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/a-bright-flash-of-wings-excerpt

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

I Can Also Tell You This

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A few things I have learned about opera

 “I can also tell you this” is the lyric written by my sister Eva Davidson for my opera, Billy and Zelda. My understanding of opera and song has deepened since I began to write several decades ago.

Opera, in its classical form, is theater in a continuous singing from beginning to end. It is a marrying of several art forms – theater, music and prose. Always shunning its more popular sibling, music theater or musical, it has no dialog. For some, the narration is held in the recitative, or “recitativo,” sung-speech that tells the smaller actions of the story.

Billy and Zelda

For me, the music of the opera – song – is when the voice disconnects from the flow of the story and steps forward to speak directly to the audience.  It is an opening the heart to the moment. The act of singing has sacredness about it. Emerging from the depths of my body, warmed by my breath, it is when I utter my most intimate thoughts: truth telling, a moment of revelation, insight or growth – this is where I am right now.

And always in the beauty of words, a rich variety of poetic words. I work closely with my sister, to capture what is at hand. She creates poetry, not libretto or lyrics – an essence of things. 

As I compose, I taste each word, like small beautiful stones. I pour through the lines looking for understanding. I live days between words. I lose some of my composing assertiveness and melding my music to a phrase as if in service. Rarely do I go straight through the poem in song, rather, I circle back to a line, a set of delicious words, or hard consonants to punctuate meaning.

My characters are learners; they enter the opera without realizing they have questions about themselves and life. They are on a journey of illumination. 

Set of Billy and Zelda

Billy and Zelda explores the mystery surrounding the deaths of two children. The work uses both opera and theater, intertwining contrasting stories about Billy, a young man killed in war, and Zelda, a little girl who has died of pneumonia.

But this is a ruse to talk about the rich life of relationships between parents and their children. The dead return to confront the living, the result of which is the love between them that endures through time as if it were yesterday.

Zelda Narrator, Billy and Zelda

The overlay is the pregnant neighbor who comes to the opera almost by chance. Listen to here in the final song of Billy and Zelda, https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/core-lullaby-from-billy-and-zelda.

Standing alone at end of the last act, she addresses her new, learned awareness of life; there is no protection for her child-to-be, only a willingness to love – a love that knows no safety from loss.

And I have to ask, is Billy and Zelda the only opera whose main character is pregnant, and whose subject is the greatest love story of all – that with our children?

BILLY AND ZELDA

“Blue moon, over the curve of the horizon, the earth proves spherical beneath the crush of chain link stars,” Tina Davidson’s opera tells the story of two children lost in death and found by love. Based on the poetry by the composer sister, Eva Davidson and a short story by Lâle Davidson, and the work is a uniquely moving experience.

Billy and Zelda is a passionate, melodic work which explores the rich life of relationships between children and their parents. A truly innovative opera theater piece, one part is all theater (Zelda), while the other (Billy) all song, with the two plots winding in and out of each other. Zelda is for actress and improvised cello and Billy is for five singers, string quartet and marimba.

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

LISTEN TO BILLY AND ZELDA: https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3/billy-and-zelda-5-songs-compilation

Let Me Play You My Song

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Young Composer Program

I have been hired to teach my Young Composer program to fifth graders in an inner-city elementary school in Philadelphia. The school is in an economically depressed section of town and many of the kids are at risk. The music program was cut from the school curriculum several years before, but I hope they might have some of the small hand-held percussion instruments. They show me to the closet. Inside is a dusty box with a few broken xylophones.

Looking around the classroom I see garbage cans, desks and chairs; we begin a drum circle. We walk around the room with chopsticks to find the best sound in the room. We catalogue all the sounds our body can make, teeth chattering, snorts, finger snaps, and thigh slaps. One of the boys turns red as he makes a rude noise.

Guitar: coffee container, paper towel roll, rubber bands, paper clips

At the end of the class, I say, “Let’s make instruments!”  The kids are delighted.  “What do you have at home that you can bring in to make instruments?” I ask.

“Junk,” they yell back.

They bring what they have from their recycling bins – and a shoebox becomes a guitar, tin cans become drums, plastic soda bottles become shakers decorated with strings of beads.

Suddenly they can’t wait to write music.

Graphic Notation

We begin with graphic notation – drawing the sound on large paper, where the shape and density of the mark indicates pitch. In groups of four, they write pieces based on a title, such as the ‘Haunted House’ or ‘The Pet Store.’ They invent notation by “drawing” the sounds they hear and then perform them with their hand- made instruments. 

Vibrations, invented notation

Then, reducing the paper, they compose with invented notation – looking at how long a sound lasted (duration), and how the sound moved up and down (pitch). They write works for more traditional instruments in pairs or individually, inventing a more exact notation as they go along. 

And always as a gift – they write pieces to share in performance with others.

Performing together

The classroom is filled with sound. Children run back and forth conferring with each other. They rehearse and revise their pieces.

I am swarmed and surrounded. They press up at me, their faces bright.

“Ms. Tina,” they tug at me, “Let me play you my song!”

YOUNG COMPOSERS PROGRAM

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.

HUSH for violin and piano

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between the strength of mid life and the frailty of old age

Recently I finished a new work for violin and piano, written for wonderful Hilary Hahn in thanks for her wonderful support of my work, including two recordings of my Blue Curve of the Earth (the most recent recording is on Hilary Hahn’s new recording, Retrospective).

My musical process is usually word driven, a new piece appears to me in the form of a title: a word or words that I am drawn to. My work then is to unravel the meaning in both spiritual and emotional theme. I write in my journal, I draw with my colored pencils or pastels, I take long walks. I often nap.

I am trying to understand my new piece I am writing—is it Hush or Shimmer?

I write, draw, compose what I know. This little island of time, so well carved out.

a home. warm rugs, comfortable chairs, back door open to the screened in porch so I can be both outside and in. filled with laughing children who sprawl on my back lawn between lessons, their feet in the creek. the evening alone. (how can I be so fortunate?)

I am home, I am here.

And, then the sands of time; this precious time between the strength of mid life and the frailty of old age.

What do I know? A spinning, both interior and exterior – energy arcing over the orb, light, glow.

A hush so I can be with life

A simmer of the great energy and love.

I am drawn to both.

(Journal, 8/17/17)

Listen to Blue Curve of the Earth performed by Hilary Hahn

MEMORY (WILD FRUIT) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano

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the graceful fall to the earth

Ensemble Nordlys ask me to come to Denmark in the summer of 2016. They will perform several of my works over the two week festival, including a new work I will create for them. I consult my journal.

New music is brewing: Memory    Wild Fruit    (Wild Strawberries)

Remembering that day, now many years ago, when we picked strawberries in Sweden – the hot sun, the long row, and the dark, staining juice on my hands? Sweet and sticky.

A sliding between who I was and who I am. The pull of the earth, of time, of memory, and the pushing against it – trying to free myself but also loving the graceful fall to the earth. Ever earthwards. Gravity. The delicious rise and pull.

There is an untamed and wild quality to memory. Like gravity, it has its own pull – forward and back, upwards and downwards. The music in Memory (Wild Fruit) slides, relaxing, but at the same time, resisting.