A Sense of Memory
This is a re-post from 2020.
Sparked by the question “what does your music sound like?”,
I consider who makes their way into my head space as I compose.
I added the finishing touches of A Sense of Decency on January 15, 2020 which would have been my maternal grandmother’s 100th birthday. The Radcliffe Choral Society (RCS, who commissioned the work) and the Parker Quartet digitally premiered the work in January 2021. As I continue to grow and work more as a composer, I have come to realize that I tend to carry a memory or a person with me in the process of writing a new piece. It isn’t that I’m implanting my relationship with them or my experience directly into the work, or telling a story, but each new piece tends to push me towards memories of someone or something that I have known, or wished that I had known. Perhaps I think about them more as I’m composing, or the process of writing that music or working with that text leads me to them.
My grandmother, Margaret (Margo), was a Lieutenant in the US Navy and served as a nurse on the USS Consolation during WWII. She played early club women’s basketball at Syracuse University. She was one of the first transatlantic stewardesses, flying the NYC-Oslo route as a flight attendant on American Overseas Airlines (which was acquired by Pan Am in 1950) and traveled with Nobel Prize winners to and from their award ceremonies. She hated wearing a seatbelt because she lived through the times when cars didn’t have them at all, when they were required to exist but not to wear, and then when it was required to wear them. She passed her driver’s test (again) at 90 when some of her children were worried about her driving and celebrated with champagne (and then someone else drove her home). She insisted on wearing shoes with heels until she passed away at 92.
She surely had her faults and her less-than-perfect moments; in 2008 she suggested she’d vote for Mitt Romney because he “looked the most presidential.” She told me my curly hair was too out of control for my personality and gave me a book about manners for my sixth birthday, but she was also an emblem for me of a woman who had no problem being in a room full of men and not taking any of their bullshit.
I strongly identify with many parts of my grandmother’s history and personality as a woman and a composer, and as I worked with Justice Ginsburg’s writing for this commission, I was drawn to RBG’s story and the moments when she was perhaps the only woman in the room, looked over or sidelined because of her gender.
When I met with RCS in April 2019 to talk about what kinds of texts they would be interested in singing, they said “no more gardens and no more love songs;” too many pieces for women’s voices chose texts that were about the same, stereotypical things. They wanted new music that was challenging and gritty, beautiful and brave; so much repertoire is written for treble voices that unfairly assumes it must be easy and never dissonant, and I mean for both of those words to imply so much more than their first definition.
Challenging and gritty. Beautiful and brave. Dissonant, complex. These are some of the adjectives I associate with Justice Ginsburg, with my grandmother. They are the adjectives I strive for in my own life and I see in my female-identifying friends and mentors. They are (some of) the adjectives I keep in mind in my research agenda, in composing, and teaching; where can I push my own boundaries or the perceived boundaries of my fields of research? How can I continue to refine and craft my own definition of beautiful work, in writing or in music? In what ways can I make space for my students to take risks in their education, to encourage them to be curious and explore?
This piece has simple moments, it has beautiful moments, it has what I lovingly call “crunchies” and also melodies and part writing that feel good to sing. It pushes at tonality in weird places and the harmonic journey is not always expected or intuitive, but the writing works. I carried my grandmother, my Gramma, with me as I wrote A Sense of Decency, and though almost everyone who hears this premiere will not have met her, it is not my intention to tell you who she was with my music. Instead, I think I may challenge my audience (via program note) to carry in with them the women in their lives who have modeled something to which they look up, those who occupied a space or paved a way, who called out, advocated for, tried something new, pushed back, who honored, who welcomed, who fostered a community, who represented, who demanded more, demanded better.
