Composing a Life, Note by Note

I Can Also Tell You This

February 4, 2020 by Tina Davidson

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.

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.

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.

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

January 1, 2020 by Tina Davidson

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.

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.

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.

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

November 1, 2018 by Tina Davidson

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

November 1, 2018 by Tina Davidson

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.

RENDER for string quartet

October 1, 2018 by Tina Davidson

to relinquish, surrender, turn over

Out of the blue I have a private commission from Susan Grant and Lawrence Maisel. I am delighted – this is very special. Usually I am commissioned by an ensemble or an organization who has applied for grant money. In this case, private individuals want to invest their own money in a composer and the creation of a new work. I am grateful and eager to engage them in the process.

We meet several times in NYC to get to know each other. As we talk, two ideas emerge. First they are excited to be my companion as I create this work, and secondly, they are interested in my idea to create an alternate version of the work (or “telescoping”) to include student performers. We agree that I will write a string quartet for the Cassatt Quartet with the premiere in the spring.

As I begin work my new piece, the word “render” keeps coming up for me. I don’t know why. It is the process by which one melts fat or lard in order to separate out impurities. It is also means to be, become, or make; from Old French, render means “to give back, deliver.” And in artistic terms, it is to add color or shade an image.

I draw and think, not knowing how or why I need to write a string quartet with this word in mind.

“to cede, cough up, deliver, give up, lay down, relinquish, surrender, turn over, yield.” (Merriam Dictionary)

Of course – to yield, surrender! This life process of letting go of control, separating out impurities through heat and sometimes by force, then shading and adding color.

I write a large one movement piece for string quartet with two bookends – short pieces that include student performers in addition to the string quartet. The work can be performed with or without the bookends.

My music evolves over time rather than in big leaps. I always push at the edges of my content – not so much to create something new, but to nudge it to the next place – wherever that may be. So I am in love with the section where the uppers strings fall and slip down only to start over, while the cello swims up stream. I wake in the middle of the night to this section playing in my head.

I meet with Susan and Larry often over the next six months. We go to concerts or spend long hours over dinner. I arrange for the Cassatt Quartet perform Render for them and their friends before the concert. A casual affair in their large living room, we lounge, listen and talk late into the night about the new piece, music and the creative arts.

The premiere performance is at the Tenri Cultual Institute in NewYork City the following week. I now have a new piece, a great performance, and also two new dear friends in Susan and Larry – an unexpected blessing.

LISTEN: