Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s a product of its time. Compositions are microcosms of the world through which they have been created, offering snapshots of that second in historical past. For me, that is the great thing about composing: I’ve the chance to create work that tells the story of my environment.
However even works that aren’t meant to be programmatic nonetheless bear the markings of their period: who have been the performers, dedicatees, audiences? How has the composer chosen to make the most of totally different devices? What technical and technological developments needed to happen to ensure that that instrument to be considered as a device able to producing these particular sounds? What different sounds was the composer listening to or researching?
Like many composers, I’ve been commissioned to write down quite a lot of response items: compositions that present a recent response to present artworks, usually music. Response items give us the chance to view creativity as a series of dialogues with the unknown. However fantasies created from the unknown have additionally been traditionally utilized by Western creators to bolster beliefs within the cultural superiority of the West – or the white world. Creativeness, which so usually appears like a liberating phrase, can very a lot be used to codify suspicion, worry, and hatred.
In explicitly tying our current to the previous, response items pressure us as modern creators to confront the ethics of evoking and conversing with the unknown, which inevitably results in a dialog in regards to the energy dynamics of cultural appropriation. Within the almost 5 years since I wrote about programming with integrity, I’ve observed that modern discussions about potential cultural appropriation in older works have a tendency to start out with the worry-filled query, “Ought to we be performing this work?”
In my opinion, nonetheless, these conversations ought to start with, “How did this work come to be?” After we got down to carry out a piece, we should always take into account the political and financial contexts through which that work was written: who was funding it? Who was invested in it? We must always take into account the positionality of the creator: what privileges did they’ve (or not have) of their society? How was this work conforming to the music creator’s worldview? Or, in some instances, how would possibly this work have been increasing it?
There’s one primary query behind this lengthy checklist of issues: why ought to we carry out this music right this moment? This query is a reminder to embrace intentional artmaking. In a world more and more asking for musicians to launch content material rapidly and continuously, a gradual, considerate, deeply-considered choice about our work is an act of creative resistance.
On this context, response items are uniquely located as a hyperlink between previous and current. One instance is singer-songwriter Billie Eilish’s “GOLDWING,” an enchanting piece responding to “Hymn to Vena” from Gustav Holst’s Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda: Group 3. After Billie Eilish’s work was launched in 2021, many individuals in her viewers have been led to Holst’s choral work for the primary time. That is one potential impact of response items: the brand new work can contemporize the older one, making it freshly related to right this moment.
In different instances, the viewers would possibly already be conversant in the older work, which permits live performance producers to introduce new works to a built-in viewers. This was the case when composer Errollyn Wallen’s riveting setting of William Blake’s poem Jerusalem premiered on the Final Evening of the Proms in 2020, linking to the Parry-Elgar model normally carried out on the occasion.
This arc of connection between previous and new would possibly seem to bode properly for an trade that’s struggling to search out its monetary footing ever for the reason that pandemic started and streaming grew to become dominant. Increasingly, storytelling mediums are counting on “pre-awareness” – repackaging a identified cultural determine into a brand new kind, like toy firm Mattel organizing the Barbie film – to chop via the noise of our consideration financial system. When working with response items, then, it’s much more vital that we’re intentional about how we use them, significantly if the previous is elevating the brand new – or the brand new is rehabilitating the previous.
After I compose a response piece, I discover I must ask myself the identical questions of what makes the older piece related to me and related to right this moment. Typically, it takes time to search out these solutions. I had a novel expertise of this when the British ensemble Corvus Consort invited me to create a response to Holst’s Rig Veda assortment, the identical work Billie Eilish had responded to in her music.
In the course of the early 1900s, Holst wrote a number of works that filter sacred Hindu texts and Indian musical motifs via his British perspective. The preliminary query I requested myself was how to answer Holst’s aural references to South Asian music, significantly as a result of Indian classical music performs a big function in my follow.
Louise Thomson and Freddie Crowley — Picture by Tom Mungall
To do that, I studied Holst’s works and skim analyses by modern-day students Nalini Ghuman and Raymond Head. My course of concerned reworking Holst’s Indian-like gestures right into a sound world rooted in custom that also expressed my specific artistic voice. I used to be lucky to be working with residing musicians who have been respectful and honest of their efficiency, significantly when director Freddie Crowley and harpist Louise Thomson labored on the tanpura- and swar mandal-esque sounds I had written.
The subsequent factor I examined was the relevance of this textual content to me. For his four-movement piece, Holst created English translations of choose parts of the Rigveda, one of many longest and oldest texts on the planet. The Rigveda is the primary of the 4 vedas, that are thought-about by many to be the first foundational texts of mainstream Hinduism. Amongst its myriad verses, the Rigveda comprises philosophical discussions, deity paeans, and particulars of how one can carry out numerous rituals. It’s doubtless I’ve heard elements of the Rigveda earlier than throughout Hindu pujas (worship companies or ceremonies) – however I’ve not learn it like a ebook, and definitely not in its entirety. Not many Hindus right this moment have.
Subsequently, though I’m Hindu, it took me time to search out my place on this textual content and in Holst’s method to it. What helped me have been the insights of the non secular practitioners round me. Whereas engaged on my piece, Ushās: Goddess of Daybreak, I initially spent most of my time with the pitch-accented Devanagari script of the Rigveda and archival chant recordings. Finally, nonetheless, it was insights from my precise priest, Sri Ronur Murali Bhattar, that guided my musical creation.
Equally, I shared the textual content of my piece (Rigveda 1.113.19) with my non secular information, my grandmother Smt. Chandra Janakiraman. To my shock, she shared that the particular verse I had discovered about daybreak helped her higher perceive historic Sanskritic occasions of day. The truth that my grandmother, together with her intensive data of Hindu philosophy, may study one thing new from a mission that had begun with a Victorian-era British man’s curiosity in Hinduism gave me pause. This chain of responding to the previous – my response to Holst, Holst’s response to the Rigveda – had led to distinctive modern reflection.
After writing Ushās, I nonetheless felt it vital to answer Holst’s assortment as an entire – to really take into account the context for Holst’s work. In the course of the interval of Holst’s Rigveda-inspired composing, his authorities – the British Empire – partitioned Bengal on spiritual grounds, arrested native freedom fighters Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, (Sri) Aurobindo Ghose, Subramania Siva, and V. O. Chidambaram Pillai, moved the Indian capital to Delhi, barely elevated the variety of Indians allowed in legislatures, and proclaimed George V as Emperor of India.
In accordance with scholar Christopher Scheer, Holst doubtless grew to become curious about Hindu philosophy through the broadminded Theosophical Society, however Scheer underscores that Holst’s work can’t be separated from the bigger context of the methods employed by the British Empire to rule India – which included encouraging British folks to review the native texts of India.
Contemplating all of this, I made a decision that my second response, entitled Priestess, could be set in a wholly totally different language, religion, and society; I turned to Livy’s Latin account of women-centric gatherings in historic Roman society.
Rehearsal of “Priestess” by Shruthi Rajasekar — Courtesy of Corvus Consort
Livy’s textual content focuses on the later-banned Bacchanalia at these gatherings, however scholar Katherine McDonald notes Livy’s offhand point out of girls clergymen in that society, a sign of the facility they as soon as held earlier than the bans. In my piece, I centered the ladies’s pleasure of being collectively. I used aural creativeness to reclaim views of the marginalized.
The rehabilitative energy of response items have to be wielded fastidiously – simply because the previous helps make house for the brand new, the brand new can be utilized to guard problematic facets of the previous. But it surely isn’t about censoring our musical selections; fairly, it’s about taking the time to ask ourselves in regards to the ethics and context of the music we carry out – and the way/why we’re performing it for this second in time.
Although I set historic texts in my response items, the works have been made related due to the contributions of the residing folks round me. Their steerage, analyses, and discussions with me formed the story these items inform. This must be our collective purpose as music-makers: the music we current in right this moment’s world ought to really mirror who we’re – and who we aspire to be.
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