In addition to the transfers of musical agency between composer and performer, I think about where music happens, where music comes from. The impact of place on how music makes meaning also extends to how people listen.
KEYNOTE: The Road of Song: Body-Place Memory and the Latvian Song Festival
In Summer 2023 I was invited to give a keynote lecture for the College Music Society’s International Conference in the Baltic Countries.
ABSTRACT: History is documented in books and newspapers, in photos and recordings. But the past is also chronicled in physical memory—the experiences we hold in our bodies. It is preserved in the memory of place—the spatial memory of furniture in a room, traveling down a road, the smell of the air. Cultural and collective memories forge and feed narratives that imbue meaning into specific events, locations, and as is the case for many social movements—song. In 2023, Latvia marks 150 years of their national Song Festival. The celebration is, at once, an historical artifact and a distinct marker of the present; it constantly toggles between what has happened before and what is perched on Latvia’s musical horizon.
The location for some of the largest events in the Song Celebration—a forested, open-air stage on the outskirts of Rīga called the Mežaparks—has been home to the Festival’s grandest choral concerts since 1955. The amphitheater has been renovated and remade in its near-70 years, but the location of performance has remained the same. The place holds its own narrative history, influenced by and stored in the embodied memories of hundreds of thousands of people who have stood on its stage or taken a seat in the audience to participate in the festival traditions. What role, then, does place have in our conception of the Latvian Song Celebration? How does the literal, physical space influence, enhance, and limit the impact of the musical performances it holds? Further, how do participants and observers store the history of the Song Celebration in their own physicalized bodies? This keynote posits a topo-corporeal—place- and body-based—framework for approaching the Latvian Song Festival traditions, deepening the relationship between song, singer, and the location of performance.
COMPOSITION: Winter: Outside, In (2024)
Winter: Outside, In roots itself through all things “winter.” Having grown up and lived in northern climates, I have known the weather in this season to move quickly from loud and blustery wind to the muffled stillness of a quiet snow. I know the balance of gray days with brilliant, cold-weather blue skies. I know that many plants die in the cold, but others thrive; that some animals fall into deep hibernation while others scurry around and endure the elements. Mathilde Blind’s poem, “A Winter Landscape,” evokes dark, chilly, and brilliantly crisp winter air, encompassing the natural, northern environment of the season.
In “The Christmas Holly,” Eliza Cook invites us indoors and out of the winter’s cold. A festive carol is waiting, one that celebrates the warmth of community, sharing a table and a song, toasting the holly branches which not only live through the winter weather, but stand out brilliantly against the whites and grays of the season. This movement pays tribute to many of the long-standing musical traditions of December, including a local Pittsburgh nod to the late Robert Page who was such an icon of the concert at which Winter: Outside, In premieres.
These two movements are sibling pieces; they are performed attacca, though they can each, also, stand alone. Though they have distinct voices and musical footprints, motivic materials and textures carry through the entire piece as a way of sonically moving from the outside experience of winter laid out by Blind, into the warm, festive interior of Cook’s poem.
PRESENTATION: Return, Education, and Commemoration in Latvian Song Celebration Performances of “Pūt, vējiņi”
Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
(On-line 2021)
ABSTRACT: "Pūt, vējiņi” is a traditional Latvian folk song best known in its choral setting by Andrejs Jurjāns. The song has been programmed in many of the quinquennial Latvian Song Celebrations held since its premiere in 1910, often performed as part of the event’s closing concert. In 1985, "Pūt, vējiņi” was stricken from the festival; the song’s significance in Latvia’s cultural identity caused concern for the occupying Soviet government. However, after the close of the formal program, the 10,000-voice choir stayed on the steps of the Soviet-built amphitheater for an impromptu performance of two banned songs emblematic for Latvians: Jāzeps Vītols’ “Gaismas pils” and Jurjāns’ setting of "Pūt, vējiņi.” The festival conductors each took turns leading a verse of the strophic setting, so no single person could be named as leading the “protest.” In 2018, the festival’s honored conductors each took a verse to lead at the year’s closing concert, paying homage to the impromptu event in 1985.
This paper posits the return of the 1985 conducting format for "Pūt, vējiņi” as a mode of commemoration and intergenerational community-forming in Latvia. The complication of this work, however, is that the generation-specific interaction with the traumas associated with the Soviet occupation slows the intergenerational work of the festival. Latvians born after 1991 have a different connection to the Song Celebration than that of their parents and grandparents; their experience of culture preservation through song is historical rather than lived. Using past research on cultural memory (Anderson 1983, Smelser 2004), ritual studies (Bell, 1997), and recent work on traumatic stress studies and transgenerational trauma (Kazlauskas and Zelviene 2016, Rush 2020), I explore this particular recreation of "Pūt, vējiņi” as a complex recipe of re-summoning cultural trauma, experiential education, and commemoration.
Original works which lean heavily into aspects of place and how we listen:
Es savai māmiņai (2018) for SSA voices
Three Latvian Folk Songs (2015) for baritone voice and piano
Trīs dainas, no Mēness un Saule (2016) for SATB choir unaccompanied
Marta Sniegs (2012) for SATB choir unaccompanied
De Profundis (2013) for tenor and harp
Water on the Thirsty Land (2015) for SATB choir unaccompanied
The Mother Trees (2023) for 8-part treble choir
COMPOSITION: The Mother Trees (2023)
The Mother Trees is composed to be an observational or world-building piece, purposely lacking a large-scale, formal momentum. In its place, the sonic world slowly opens to reveal vignettes of motion before dispersing back out again.
The piece was built with the unique ecosystem of a vocal ensemble in mind, a way for singers to calibrate with one another and to depend on each other in a deeply intentional and responsive way; the sonic world of the piece unfolds as a series of individual contributions which rely on the interplay of single gestures to create the work’s wider sound palette. Just as the individual trees stand together to become the forest, The Mother Trees anchors its effect in the work of the individual voice as part of the larger workings of the ensemble.
PUBLICATION: Baltic Musics Beyond the Post-Soviet
Many of our contributors to the Baltic Musics: After the Post-Soviet conference in January 2022 came together to shift their presentations into articles for a forthcoming edited volume with the University of Tartu Press. My colleague and co-editor Jeffers Engelhardt and I have been working since the end of the conference to imagine next steps, and we are so proud of this volume; it provides a unique snapshot of a key, pivotal moment in Baltic and Soviet-related research.
Forthcoming, 2024.
CONFERENCE: Baltic Musics: After the Post-Soviet
Conference co-host
Held in January 2022, this three-day symposium brought together makers and researchers to explore Baltic Musics after the Post-Soviet. Together, participants investigated what happens as generations less impacted by the experience of Soviet occupation and coloniality create sounds and spaces. Events included maker presentations, research papers, performances, and the symposium welcomed three keynote presentations by distinguished scholars and composers of Baltic Music.
The conference is organized by Jeffers Engelhardt (Amherst College) and Katherine Pukinskis (then Amherst College, now Carnegie Mellon University) with support from the Amherst College Department of Music, the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, the Amherst College Department of Russian, the Amherst College European Studies Program, and the Amherst College Center for Humanistic Inquiry.