On New Beginnings...

...and meeting the moment...

Oh, hey, hi, it’s been a minute!

I’m in a bit of a holding pattern creatively, for reasons both practical and existential. On the practical side, I’m waiting to hear more details about a big potential project. If it moves forward the way I hope it will, I’ll need to organize the timelines on every project in my queue accordingly. It won’t be much longer before I’ll know how to move forward, so I’m biding my time.

But the existential side? Oh, no big deal…it’s just the question of how anyone makes anything when the state of the world is…

*gestures broadly at everything*

What does it mean to create, to perform, to present music in the face of the news of unfathomable brutality? I’m not sure that I have a coherent or satisfying answer to that question.

Somewhat coincidentally, I was looking to start listening to a new audiobook and dug up one I’d bookmarked when it came out but hadn’t caught up with: Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage by Tori Amos.

God, I loved Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes when it came out while I was in college…and I’m lucky my roommate loved it as much as I did because that CD was on constant loop in our dorm room. I discovered the album around the same time that I learned about the music of George Crumb and John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, so basically they’re the three core strands that became intertwined in my composer DNA. Each in their own way, they formed my aesthetic desire for resonance, drama, and intensity.

I went into listening to Tori Amos’s reading of her audiobook expecting a memoir (which it is), but also getting a creative manifesto. Those early songs that I fell in love with were intensely personal, but I hadn’t fully considered how overtly political some of her later songwriting became. She talks about her music needing bearing witness to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and, later, as a call to action against the first Trump administration’s immigration policies - policies which have only become more oppressive during the second administration. These lyrics to her song “Bang”, performed in an amazing arrangement below, are even more relevant today than they were when the song was written in 2017:

Bang the world now traumatized
By a cluster of hostile humans who side
With their warlords of hate
So we must out-create…

I’m not still sure that I have a coherent or satisfying answer exactly how and even what create in this moment, but I’m glad to have been reminded that the act of creating is in itself an act of defiance and of hope - and that still matters. Stay tuned…