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III.

The sound of water is everywhere, but I can’t find its source. I have a sense of ghosts. I close this door and follow the sound through the corridor.

 

The practice-room cacophony feels distant, and I hear a rustling sound like wingbeats or breath. A moth flutters in front of me, iridescent. I follow it to another door and open it.

 

Inside, the ceiling vaults upward, a huge white adobe dome. In the center of the rotunda is a wooden plinth surrounded by colorful patchwork cushions. The air is thick with whispering voices.

 

I pick up one of the cushions: its stitching is tiny and intricate, running through wild juxtapositions of textures and patterns. There’s an answer in the satin and cotton canvas that meet through its threads, or else a question that I’m thirsty for.

 

I climb onto the wooden plinth and am surrounded by a cushion of humming voices. The vibrations hold me like water.

Breathing Rooms (Part I)

I’m sitting in a classroom with Matana Roberts. We’ve just met. They’re my assigned mentor at the Banff Ensemble Evolution festival, a summer program co-directed by Claire Chase and Steven Schick. We’re in a large, bright classroom, and they’re sitting in the center in a plastic chair, another chair pulled up in front of them for me. There’s something both heavy and light about their presence: the way they sit, in an army-green patchwork vest and palm-sized woven-straw disc earrings, makes the space around them feel inconsequential.

I feel small. I tell them how I’ve just started at a PhD program where the languages in which I think and feel and express feel like they are not real. That I’ve spent my life practicing aligning my sense of body and space and time and feeling and intellect, so that I can share something human with other people, through my violin, through my art. And I’m in a space where it’s not so much that those dimensions are frowned on as that they don’t exist, or that they’re dismissed as slightly humorous marginalia. I’m in an anechoic chamber and when I try to make a sound it falls and falls. When I try to describe what I’m missing I get blank looks, and the sense that I’m missing something shrinks until I’m not sure that I believe myself. The absence feels trivial, and yet somehow my whole purpose folds itself inside the space of that trivial absence, and wraps itself in something that feels like guilt or bitterness. I ask Matana about my feelings of doubt, the kind of doubt where I have an idea that lights me on fire one moment and then I turn around and can’t remember what fire feels like, if fire exists.

They are quiet and listen deeply. What they share (in their words, in their body) has to do with love, a fiercely generous compassion for oneself that radiates outward to everyone it touches. They share tools that they’ve come to use in their daily practice, tools for self care and for listening to oneself. Write a letter to your fear, they suggest. And then they tell me something that I hold and turn over and over like an ocean stone: Every idea that comes to you comes for a reason. It comes from your specific intersection with the universe: follow through with it if only to get to know that intersection between yourself and the universe.

 

That summer, I gather that trust into an installation that I frame as a celebration of embodied expressiveness and intimacy. [flower for Claire: that early morning meeting in which you reflected back joyful enthusiasm for this idea combined with Matana’s words to push me through trust into excitement and commitment for this idea.]

 

I invite fellow musicians to record a brief performance, and then with the generous help of video artist and percussionist Ross Karre I set up a system where they can watch the video they’ve just recorded and record a lip-synch-style overdub in which their instruments are wrapped in coarse silk, so that the only sounds that come out their instruments are the sounds of their breath and the friction and the sounds that their instruments make on the margins of what is notated in traditional Western compositions. I invite them to think of this overdubbed recording as a practice of self empathy, of listening to their performance and living their way into it as deeply as possible through this silk-wrapped setup. Their performances are gesturally rich and committed; bassist Lisa Mezzacappa dives forward into her instrument and her bow tears the silk off from where I’ve tied it around her strings. 

 

The installation is tucked behind a partially enclosed wall in the lobby of the Rolston Recital Hall at Banff— the cover of the semi-enclosed space gives me a feeling of safety to expand in. Levy Lorenzo has helped coach me through some basics of the programming language Max/MSP, and with more help from Ross I’ve managed to rig up a set of four speakers and a small video screen, which at the last minute I cover with a piece of the silk that I used to wrap the instruments. My idea is that the default sound will be a faint and tinny loop of the original performances that each musician recorded, leaking out into the main lobby from behind the dividing wall. When someone follows the sound into the nook behind the wall, and leans in under the silk canopy to watch the video, a light sensor causes the sound to shift to a rich, high-quality version of the second recording, breath and friction only, diffused through speakers at ear level so as to make it sound like it’s coming from inside their own body.

 

 

One person who ducks in to listen turns to me afterward and says it’s sad that the musicians’ voices go away when you get close. I’m surprised and then disappointed, because what I’d wanted to share was my sense of affirmation that the voice was there, in the breath and the friction and the presence of each person drawing a collection of notes through their arms and body and into music. I think there was also more than a bit of residual resentment at the ways the hierarchy of composer over performer, scholar over doer, text over sound, filtered into my internalized experiences as violinist with a habit for self-denial extending through many collaborations with composers and scholars.

 

I should say here that I am, of course, a scholar of the solidly nerdy variety, and I am married to a composer. (My composer husband reminds me: "You are a composer." The words still feel borrowed. .  .). I met Phil at the Aspen Music Festival, where I was the violinist (and only woman) in the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, and I spent long hours in the practice rooms putting together the weekly programs written by (again, all male) non-resident composers and conducted by the casually misogynist ----. Part of what drew me to Phil was his quiet attention to the way it felt to play his music, to the embodied gestures that his notes invited. And also the way his meticulously engraved notation offered care and gratitude for my time as a performer, in a culture where I often felt like a tool, used rather than collaborated with. I practiced his compositions as a refuge from the dense pages of notated music that dominated my assignments. In the meantime, I got to know the other composers in residence, who adopted me as one of their own, and from whom I learned the beginnings of a vast spectrum of sonic languages, which blew my mind and became the basis for my first (D.M.A.) doctoral project, Circling the Waves.

 

At Banff four years later, I was experiencing another level of shift, something that from my Suzuki trained perspective seemed like an utterly new worldview, but could be described more accurately a deep, multicultural, and intergenerational ocean of practices welling up in brilliant forms through cracks in the dominant institutions of Eurocentric art music that I’d been raised in.

 

In an ensemble led by violinist Mazz Swift, I experienced Conduction for the first time. Conduction is a gestural language for coordinated ensemble improvisation that was developed by Jazz legend Butch Morris [1], and that has now been developed into new languages by other artists, including Mazz Swift, Matana Roberts, and Tyshawn Sorey [2], all of whom, miraculously and thanks to the hard work of co-directors Claire Chase and Steven Schick, were present as faculty artists at that summer’s Ensemble Evolution program.

 

With Mazz, Conduction was like a live wire for sensing and responding to the energy of the group. She introduced us to a series of gestures adapted from Butch Morris’s vocabulary—one for holding a drone, one for “painting” gesturally with the baton, one for short pointillistic attacks—and then handed the baton to each of us in turn, forcing us into the uncomfortable and empowering position of leadership. She gave extra time and care to those of us who felt least comfortable there, helping us to become familiar with our bodies in a position of receptive and generous power. She described the role of conductor as one of paying attention, of conducting the energy of each person in the group the way a wire conducts electricity, and directing it to where it could most fully inhabit itself.

 

Being in the ensemble and knowing that this position of power was fluid and inclusive to each of us caused a shift in how I felt as a musician, and in how I made sound. The power structures were not fixed and identity-based, but rather fluid ways of facilitating co-presence. Knowing this, when I was in the role of non-conducting ensemble member, I felt more eager to give what I knew only I could offer, and to listen for ways I could support my co-conspirators in sound.

 

I thought of a moment with conductor Susanna Mälkki when I was at the Lucerne Festival Academy, an orchestral program dedicated to playing contemporary compositions from the European art music tradition. In a year in which the glossy program book featured a dainty hand circled in pearls and holding a conductor’s baton (“Prima Donna,” read the program book’s title, by way of announcing their intended focus on women in music), she was the first non-male conductor we’d had all season. I was sitting at the front of the third violin section that week, so I had a close-up view of Mälkki as she led us in the orchestral work by Helmut Lachenmann. I had never experienced anything like it. Her motions were precise, and she spoke quietly but with a power that drew each of us into the palm of her hand. I thought of the intensity of a dwarf star, of a type of power that worked by attraction rather than by explosion. That was my first experience of orchestral leadership that made me question and expand my ideas of what power might look like.

 

With Mazz Swift and my incredible colleagues at the Banff program, I received instruction in another spectrum of musical power relations, and it left me eager for more. I received this through a second ensemble led by Matana Roberts, for a commissioned piece they wrote entitled Ethos.

 

In our first meeting as a group, Matana asked us what the word “ethos” meant to each of us. The only thing that came to my mind was a ninth-grade-English unit on rhetoric in which I’d memorized the words “ethos, pathos, logos, and syllogism,” which blurred in my memory into a set of vague rhetorical strategies. Matana later shared their score, which opened with the following words:

 

ETHOS

 

(the fundamental character or spirit of a community; the underlying sentiment that informs the beliefs,

 

customs, or practices of a group.)

 

The score used two Conduction gestures and a group of verbal and musical signals linked to specific visual images. These shaping tools were available to all members at all times— another model for power relations in which no single person was ever assigned the role of leader. This co-constitutive power structure was further sculpted by their generous imagery and verbal guidelines (“no solos. only collaboration. no bullying. If you are going to go rogue, go forth in a way that actually adds to the whole.”) At the head of the score, just below the definition of Ethos, Matana had written this description of the piece:

 

Spontaneous visualization chance operation in real time for 6-12 improvisors. The goal is community.

anyone participant of said sonic community  can change the score of the score w/i reason. Instrumentation open to availability/ unusualness.no less than 12 to 37 minutes in duration. Timer needed.

( Chaos is possible.But chaos can also be an act of community depending on who you ask…:))

 

In the process of rehearsing this piece, we experienced moments of friction and moments of glittering alignment, all held by the deep generosity of Matana’s presence. The actual performance was almost anticlimactic, maybe because in the process of getting to know one another we had already achieved the goal of community.

 

In the months after Banff, I was studying for my Musicology Qualifying Exams at Stanford, which included six different areas bounded by historical time period and breadth of focus. For my contemporary topic, I had chosen to focus on a group of artists whose identities blurred the boundaries of performer and composer and scholar and doer, all of whom happened to be women or gender non-conforming.  I kept finding writings by women and nonbinary scholars of color that felt like callbacks to my experiences at Banff, pools of community-centered care in a desert of white-male-coded objectivity.

 

I listened to Matana’s Coin Coin records over and over, each time feeling more strongly that there was a connection here. The previous summer, the year before Banff, I had had a beautiful experience at a conference in Karlsruhe, Germany that was centered on the discipline of Artistic Research. I left the conference with an evangelist’s sense of excitement: this was what was missing in my experiences of U.S. institutions, this creative blurring of the line between theory and practice. But in reading and listening to Black Feminist discourses after my experiences at Banff, I began to feel that the disciplinary practices being invented and propagated under the names of Artistic Research, Practice-Based-Research, etc. were only part of the picture. Beside, behind, underneath them, in most cases unacknowledged, was a long-standing tradition of people whose truths simply could not be contained in the structures built around and by White European aristocratic masculinity.

 

Here is a garden in honor of a few of these people, a healing garden and a garden of thanks. 

. . .

[1] Morris, Butch, and David Henderson, “Butch Morris.” BOMB, no. 55 (1996): 32–36, accessed February 29, 2024, 
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40425880.
[2] Tyshawn Sorey and Claire Chase, “Tyshawn Sorey," BOMB, no. 148 (2019), accessed February 29, 2024, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2019/09/17/tyshawn-sorey/

To make a garden in this space I need to first remove some rocks. For this, I borrow the precise chisel of Sylvia Wynter’s words, joined by those of Katherine McKittrick.

 

Sylvia Wynter, you write in a language that meets up with the most traditionally rigorous critical theorists and wrestles the floor out from under all of them (yourself included), clearing space for something radically different both in tone and in content. Here’s the title of an article you wrote, for starters:

 

Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation— An Argument

 

You’re a dramatist and a theorist, and your theory dramatizes the language it inhabits, wears it like gold-plated armor. When I first read your words I balked. Unsettling the what, for why?

 

With the warm guidance of a group of fellow Stanford grad students, the Black Studies Collective, led by coordinators Matt Randolph, PhD History, Kristen Jackson, PhD Education, and Elea Proctor, PhD music, and in a session led by Elea Proctor, we talked through this dense text together. My flower for Sylvia Wynter intertwines with a flower of gratitude for Elea and for this beautiful, necessary group.

 

Sylvia Wynter: you begin with a quotation from Michel Foucault, in which he makes the bold claim that “man” (the concept) is a relatively recent invention within European culture, a result of a fundamental re-ordering of knowledge. You follow this with a series of quotes ranging from medieval studies to lyrics by the brilliant musician Nas (Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones), in the course of which you bring Foucault’s claim into a broader and more nuanced context. Your argument (the argument with which you end your dense glittering title) is this: that the idea of “man” as it was invented in colonial Europe is fundamentally racialized and racist in its conception, and only includes a small subsection of the human species within its limited boundaries. Or rather: that this act of violence (the invention of a concept of “Man” that pretends to be representative of humanity—that overrepresents itself—but in fact only makes space for the white male European aristocracy from whom its definition came, thereby cutting off all racially othered humans from its protection) is the root of what will be the defining struggle of our times:

 

The argument proposes that the struggle of our new millennium will be one between the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man,

which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves.

 

You build this argument from the work of decolonial scholars Aníbal Quijano (sharing his description of the “‘Racism/Ethnicism complex’ on whose basis the world of modernity was brought into existence from the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries onwards”) and Walter Mignolo (sharing his identification of the “colonial difference” that served as the foundation of modernity) (260).

 

From this crack, like a forensic archaeologist, you trace the fissures of “all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources” (260-261).

 

I’ve made my home within a small feathering of these cracks, one that presents in the form of disciplinary divisions of musicology, ethnomusicology, composition and performance. These divisions come from the legacies of what is sometimes called “European common practice” music [find a good source to cite here], in which the fluid and often collective cultures of religious and secular music-making solidified into a more individualized culture of composers, performers, and listeners.

 

Sylvia Wynter: you trace the ways that this racialized invention of Man was a deliberate strategy adopted by Renaissance humanist aristocrats to shrug off the power of the Church (see, e.g., p. 269 and 283-286 re: missionary priest Bartolomé de Las Casas and colonial apologist Ginés de Sepúlveda). Crucially, this hierarchy hinged on the supremacy of rationality over “subrational” (coded animal) others.

 

By inventing a hierarchy that was based on a division of rational from subrational (racialized) beings, the secular Spanish state in collusion with colonial apologist Ginés de Sepúlveda was able to supplant an older hierarchy that was based on supernatural purity over lay impurity (and which was getting in their way of territorial expansion through power struggle with the papal church, represented, in part, by missionary priest Bartolomé de Las Casas) (293-295).

 

Through this, they set in motion a world order that would lead to “‘the rise of Europe’ and its construction of the ‘world civilization’ on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation.”

 

Sylvia Wynter, your dense words are a counterspell that lifts the weight of assumptions that surround me, in the architecture of Stanford’s music buildings and the endless corridor of Indiana University’s “Round Building” full of cork-boarded practice rooms distanced from the silent music library and the hermetically sealed practice annex. In the space they open, I pour the rich (re)composing humus of years of embodied practice sessions, the water of gratitude.

 

Katherine McKittrick, in Dear Science and Other Stories, you trace lines from this invented hierarchy into the development of traditional Western disciplines. You frame your writing as a story—I want to share what you write about this story:

This story is about methods and methodologies. It thinks about methodology as an act of disobedience and rebellion and focuses on how black studies scholars have used and can use method to engender radical scholarly praxis. The story understands, in advance, that the commitment to disciplinary thought is thick and wide-ranging. Discipline is the act of relentless categorization. In many academic worlds categories are organizational tools; categories are often conceptualized as discrete from each other. Categories are things, places, people, species, genres, themes, and more, that are grouped together because they are ostensibly similar. Categories are classified and ranked [. . .] Disciplines are coded and presented as disconnected from experiential knowledge; experiential knowledge is an expression of data (The objective census numbers factually show that the poor living here experience . . .). Disciplines stack and bifurcate seemingly disconnected categories and geographies; disciplines differentiate, split, and create fictive distances between us.

Discipline is empire. (35-36).

In the space of your writing, you offer wonder and curiosity as an antidote to disciplinary hegemony. “The story opens the door to curiosity,” you write (7), arguing that “black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world, because thinking and writing and imagining across a range of texts, disciplines, histories, and genres unsettles suffocating and dismal and insular racial logics” (4). You offer a playlist as a chapter (“The Kick Drum Is The Fault,” pp. 122-124). In your careful playfulness, you reach out to vast communities of artist-scholars preceding and following you, co-habitating this space. Your garden is rich and deep.

On this rich, broken ground, I offer the sound of water, in gratitude for Indigenous scholars Shawn Wilson and Dylan Robinson, for musical healer Esperanza Spalding, for multi-hyphenate theatre artist Haruna Lee, and for movement leader adrienne maree brown:

Shawn Wilson, your book Research is Ceremony opens space in my heart for the buds of ceremonies whose names I’ve forgotten.

You write about how storytelling is relational, how it leaves space for listeners to draw their own conclusions and find their own connections with its testimonial (17). And you enact in your writing a ceremony of storytelling that honors an Indigenous epistemology of relationships. Your words guide me as I stumble along my path as a settler in search of a ceremony that is true to my forgotten roots and my hoped-for compass of solidarity and reciprocity:

I believe that Indigenous epistemology and ontology are based upon relationality. Our axiology and methodology are based upon maintaining relational accountability. With a deeper understanding of these concepts, I hope that you will come to see that research is a ceremony. The purpose of any ceremony is to build stronger relationships or bridge the distance between aspects of our cosmos and ourselves. The research that we do as Indigenous people is a ceremony that allows us a raised level of consciousness and insight into our world (11).

May the stories that I share work toward relational accountability with you and with all whom these words reach. May they become a ceremony of love.

Esperanza Spalding, I’ve only spoken with you once, in the context of the class you led at Harvard, Songwrights Apothecary Lab. Your warmth and spark lit fires that still burn new openings for me.

You talked about how “there is always a beyondness” to anything we work with: music, articles, bodies of knowledge. In a single sentence – “there’s no way to extract the phenomenon of music from the web surrounding it” – you turned the foundation of my musicological studies, the idea that context matters, into something alive, pulsing with possibility and responsibility.

You talked about reciprocality, changed the conversation around cultural appropriation from a question of forbidden territories into a question of “so what are you going to do,” to give, to change, in order to make your relationships reciprocal. You gently probed the ways that music is already inherited, collective, that in shaping it we are never alone, and then challenged us to use what we’ve received to give back intentionally.

Your music and your beyondness guides, inspires, and moves me.

Haruna Lee: When I was going through the Stanford course catalogue and read the title of your course, “Multi-Hyphenate: Liberating Our Artistic Selves,” I felt my entire body soften into a yes. We met over Zoom each week in the Fall of 2020, a time that I’m not sure has fully landed in our collective world body of grief, and one that I experienced from the privilege and isolation of my childhood home in suburban Eastern North Carolina. During this time, you held space each week for our small class to be present with ourselves and one another, and you opened my mind to a possibility that you shared from your own experience: that in this time of Zoom-mediated mutual isolation, artistic practice might best take the form of the cultivation of simple community spaces for collective presence and healing.

 

The warmth of the space you held in this class revolutionized how I approach my own teaching and how I aspire to frame my academic research. You made generous space for embodied presence, for curiosity, for dance breaks and shared food, turning the Zoom rectangles into a collective fiction that we could work around or with or against depending on our needs. In the context of your care, the unit you had on a dense European theoretical text made it seem like what it was: a fascinating, provincial, and unique perspective grounded in the quirks of the culture from which it emerged. It settled like a seed among a forest floor vibrating with multiplicity.

 

adrienne maree brown, I first read your book Emergent Strategy in Haruna Lee’s class, in brief and beautiful selections that we read aloud sentence by sentence, moving from one person to the next across the Zoom screen. After class, I took your book outside into the sun and began at the beginning. I felt like I was embraced through its pages; I felt your care, joined in your delight and wonder.

 

Your “assessment for creating more possibility” (190) opened a part of myself that I had been holding down:

 

What are all of your gifts?

Are you living a life that honors all of your gifts?

If yes, how did you create all this possibility for yourself?

If no, how can you create more possibility today? Tomorrow? This month? This year?

 

Your grounding in capacious love moves through my aspiration to move with all the complexity that I inhabit.

And as an anchor for the differences of approach and thought that are an integral part of this garden of solidarity, I place in this soil carefully shaped rocks from the shoreline of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s scholarship, in which she testifies to the power of writing as embodiment:

 

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: In your spectacular dissertation, you offer a perspective that surprised me at first. You mentioned Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure arguing that the spoken word was more pure than the written trace (diss, 17-18). To this, you responded that there must be such a thing as embodied writing, a body that is written, revising what you call “a tendency in African American literary theory and the spoken word movement to reconnect abject bodies to the potential of the word through a reclamation of orality.” (17)  You argue that writing is “dangerous because it is Black, deviant, bodily, unpredictable, diasporic. Who knows what will happen with those words once they materialize, when they can travel so far from the father-speaker. They could mean anything” (19).

You remind me that my advocacy for a healing of the wound that divided “rational” from “animal,” mind from body, could easily turn into a reactionary argument for artistic action at the expense of critical and generative engagement. The wound that placed an artificial white male European rationality in a place separated from embodied experience not only devastated the people who were forced into a category of so-called savage, racialized, subrational humans; it also hurt the people who stepped into the category of rational dominance and in doing so were distanced from the wisdom of their full embodied selves.

Writing has a body. Bodies have speech. May these rocks sustain and be supported by the life that surrounds them.

From here, the garden explodes without my help.

Sylvia Wynter,  "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation— An Argument," in CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, Fall 2003), 257-337.

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening for Indigenous Sound Studies (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).

Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008).

Esperanza Spalding, Songwrights Apothecary Lab (Concord Records, 2020), accessed February 29, 2024, https://www.concordrecords.com/collections/esperanza-spalding

See also: Esperanza Spalding, "about the lab" (accessed February 29, 2024), 

https://songwrightsapothecarylab.com/About

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017).

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996,” PhD disssertation (Duke University Department of English, 2010).

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