SoundLives #21. Tina Davidson: Listening Through The Journey
Tina Davidson in Conversation with Frank J. Oteri
March 10, 2023, 11:00 AM via Zoom
Transcribed by Michelle Hromin
https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/tina-davidson-listening-through-the-journey/
(c) 2023 New Music USA

Frank J. Oteri: It was such a joy and a revelation to me actually to read this memoir that's just coming out this month that you wrote, Let Your Heart Be Broken. I really appreciated how candid you were in this book and that I was sort of able to piece together the story of various parts of your life that correspond to pieces of yours that I've known and treasured for decades. It's always a joy to have the backstory of things. But it actually got me thinking about how different words are from music. You as a composer are incredibly expressive and you write music that's very emotive and very direct. But no matter how direct it can be, music, specifically instrumental music, is an elusive medium because you can't indicate things explicitly the way you can with words.

Tina Davidson: Right, yes, and I think in the beginning of my composing journey, as a young person what I loved about it is I could be anonymous. I could tell my story and nobody would say, "Oh, is that about your mother?" or "Is that about your trauma?" And I loved the anonymity of it. It reminds me of a quote that the artist dilemma is to be heard but not to be found. And I loved that sense of wanting to be heard and accepted by others but also not wanting to be found. I think that's a dilemma for everyone as a person as well.

FJO: You know, it's fascinating, though, because at the same time, in your memoir, and also in program notes for your pieces, over the years you've always said that your process of composing is about discovering yourself. It is about discovering this journey. So maybe you're able to discover yourself in it, but maybe you're also able to hide a little bit.

TD: Right, well, I think that as I grew through my 30s and then 40s--I've been writing for 45 years--I found I resolved a lot of personal issues and had more courage to come forward and be direct, to say, "this is what I'm writing about." Certainly I suppose that the memoir is the full circle of that. When you write about yourself, you really make yourself incredibly vulnerable, and hopefully you can do that without making other people vulnerable in your life. And I worked really hard at being honest without calling people names or having judgments about their behavior necessarily. In fact, I sent the book several times to my ex-husband to make sure that it was okay that I was talking about him very referentially. But he was okay with that, and that's very important to me.

FJO: I see in your dedication, he was actually one of the people whom you thanked. I love that you're saying this because I felt the generosity in this book toward everybody, despite bad things that have happened. You know, people do bad things to each other; this is humanity, right? But that generosity, I think, bringing it back to music, also extends into your music and it's sort of communicative generosity. This difference between words and music that I keep coming back to is because I've always known of you as a composer and now I'm dealing with you as a writer as well. And in thinking about this, you talked about your trips to Sweden early on and not understanding the language and it sort of being this wash over you. Words mean a lot, but you have to understand the language in order to get the words. So, if you're hearing something in a foreign language, it makes even less sense than music, because in music you at least get the emotional content.

TD: Right. And I think in music you get the journey, whatever the journey is. And the journey, to me, is always a story. It's about me traveling and hopefully you listening with me through the journey of the piece and that wonderful sense that you can't actually touch music, you know, it's so ephemeral. You reconstruct that journey through memory. As you get to the end of the piece, it doesn't make any sense unless you could remember the beginning. So it's you as an active participant that really creates the pieces as a whole. I think that composers actually collaborate with everyone. They collaborate with the performers as the performers really inhabit your music and it has to be shaped on their body. And then the audience. You kind of collaborate with them as an extension of receiving it. And that to me is just very cool. I really love that process.

FJO: And certainly, part of that though with the listener, with an attentive listener, gets to this whole notion, "Is music itself a kind of a language?" There've been lots of debates about this and people used to love to say, "Oh, music is the universal language." But the problem with that is, depending on who and what your background is with music and your experience with music, you're going to hear things in a certain way. If you're trained as a performer, you're going to hear music in a certain way. If you're a composer, you're going to be analyzing it. And if you grew up in a certain culture that has certain music that's more familiar to you, it's going to create prejudices for you as a listener. You're going to be closed to certain things because of what you're used to. I want to believe that music can cut through those things ultimately because it doesn't have the barrier of syntax that a verbal language does. But it's not as glib as saying it's universal. So I wonder in all of that, for your ideal listener, what do you hope for in that listener, in terms of understanding?

TD: I think when you go to a place and you say, "music is a universal language," you might be putting on a little bit of emperor's clothing. You know, I think in the music field, certainly in the '60s and '70s, there was a sense of the preciousness of music, sort of the elitism of music, through the university composer, who cares if they listen, you know, Milton Babbitt, and I have always wanted to move away from that elitism because I can only compose what I compose. I can't say this is universal. That's kind of too much. What I want to say is, what I believe in is that when I write a piece of music, I try to articulate where I am the most the best that I can. And what I've noticed is that when it's out there, it's not that people get me, but they get themselves. And that's what I love. That it's almost as if something about my music or that experience resonates with something in them and they can experience themselves. And that's what I'd hope for.

FJO: That's beautiful. There's a passage in your book that I keep coming back to. I've read it over and over again. It's probably my favorite passage in the book at this point. It's your journal entry from March 16, 1989, which is the day that Jennifer Higdon, who was then a student, came over and you had a talk about music and she shared some of her work with you. You explain the difference between allowing music to flow as opposed to developing musical material from various procedures. It's very, very poignant. It sparked so many ideas. In fact, as soon as I read that page I went, "I have to talk to Tina!" This is the page that sealed the deal. You talk about composers having this assumption that listeners can actually follow developmental procedures in music, even people who aren't trained in music. It's a very specific kind of listening. So that was why I wanted to get at this question of what you're expecting from the listener. I thought it was just beautiful that you just said you expect the listener to gain their own story from it, but not necessarily to be like, "Oh, that's the inversion of that thing; oh, that's the retrograde."

TD: Right, right. That's why I love the idea of collaborating with the listener. I'm not telling them; I hope that I'm eliciting from them their own response. I was just teaching a lesson to a very talented young composer, and he wanted to talk about development. I finally said to him, "You know, I don't have a pithy statement that's going to make this alright for you. I don't have a how-to." A lot of development to me is that you're creating this scenario that it gets made to an energetic high point or there's some tension, but you can't keep on going there. You have to move it and then it's that wonderful transition to the next place that you wouldn't say, "Oh, yeah, that's where she got to." You would go, "Oh, how did she get there? That's exactly right. I don't know how she got there, but that makes sense." So it appeals to your sense of logic and to your balance of ear, and then it's "How do you tailor that transition?" which is what development is about. How do you move through something? How do you land and also depart at the same time?  I love sound. I always go back to just loving sound and wanting to know how it operates and how I can move it through these transitions in a meaningful way. There's always a kind of logic. I'm not saying a mathematical logic, but there is that balance that you're always weighing and a lot of times it just becomes intuitive, because you've done it for 40 years. And so it starts to be hard to teach, because you kind of have to do the work.

FJO: So, one of the things that I'm curious about. You talked about how you came to compose music and how you started out as a pianist and didn't compose until you were in college. But I'm curious, even before that, even before those moments, the story that you didn't share that I'd love for you to share here is your experiences as a listener: what you heard, what sounds were around you, what inspired you and what you were hearing when you were listening, how you were processing music early on. If you can trace those memories.

TD: It's hard because of how I grew up and being adopted by my biological mother and living in that kind of sense of not belonging and not knowing that I belonged. I was really in a cloud. And it's hard to go back because I don't think I had a lot of awareness. The murkiness of my childhood made it hard for me to always be present. I do believe that my childhood, even though from the outside I was this very cooperative, funny child, there was a real darkness in me. And I do remember being seriously depressed, although I don't think you could see it necessarily. Because I was very committed to this outside persona. That being said, I studied piano with a wonderful teacher at the university who gave me totally weird music, like Octávio Pinto, William Schuman, and Casallas. I mean, yeah, I played a little Bach and Beethoven, but honestly, my ear was really primed in an interesting way and then when I went in as a middle schooler, I went over to see Merce Cunningham. That's when the lights went on. That's when I realized that there was something in dance and music that was way beyond this sort of "classical perception" - that it was movement for movement's sake, not movement to be a ballerina, and that was a lightning strike for me. I just remember waking up at that point. I was maybe 12, 13?

FJO: There's a passage from even earlier where you describe something that I'd love to unpack that I read and I just thought, "Ah! There's an aha moment in here." You sort of had a love/hate relationship with practicing the piano and at one point, you took this book to the piano. You were reading instead of practicing, and you couldn't really deliver the piece in your lesson because you were so engrossed in the book and that was more meaningful to you. That's so interesting, because the book was communicating the way the music wasn't and this gets into this whole dichotomy of perception, perception of words and language. Obviously, that switch turned when you started composing, but maybe the music on the page of certain composers as this abstracted thing that was presented there as this sort of timeless thing, sort of out of its context of what it was, wasn't communicating.

TD: I was at that age when I thought that I could multitask and read and practice at the same time. I practiced, but it wasn't really until I was in high school. I went to a German high school, and I hung out with a lot of young German musicians who were very intellectual and very engaged and that just seemed really interesting to me. And then taking the year off from high school to college, I went with my family to Israel and then I was practicing 4 or 5 hours a day and that was where I started to really live inside the music, and started to wonder things like, "How could Bach have these exquisite, beautiful 2 measures embedded in this piece?" And he was so generous that he was like, yeah, I'm not gonna develop that, I'm just gonna move on. I found that amazing, but to live inside the notes at that point was very important to me.

FJO: Interesting. Where I thought you might go with this, because you do go with this in the narrative and you talk about when you finally started writing music, and they assigned you-- everybody had to write music, and you thought, "Oh, I can do that?" You know, a woman can write music? It's hard to imagine now. The 21st century has been so lousy, the pandemic and the wars, but one way it's been really good is that finally we're hearing from a much broader range of musical creators and there now are female role models for young composers who can say, "Oh, I can do that; that's something for me too!" But it's hard to believe, it's shocking in a way, as somebody who lived through the tail end of that period, that there was a time not all that long ago, all these female composers existed, but nobody talked about them.

TD: I had never played a woman composer. Nobody said to me, "Oh, you can't be a composer, you're a woman." But, there was no example of it. So it never occurred to me that I could write music, so that was sort of astounding. I held a lot of the European classical music ideas in my head, that all great music had already been written and that was the canon. And I think to some degree, it still is the canon with major orchestras. Not as much, but when you look at the percentages of classical music compared to contemporary music you go, "Hmm, I wonder!" I think music is one of those fields that holds that ideal more strongly than any other field. Certainly, you don't go to bookstores and there are no contemporary novels. You certainly don't go to art museums and not see anything contemporary. And you go to dance concerts, the audience is really vibrant and they're interested in new work. But I think that unfortunately, the music field has developed a story that hasn't embraced new work.

FJO: Well, for a long time within classical music there was this idea that the interpretation was what was new. There's going to be a star pianist or violinist doing a concerto with an orchestra. This is a classical music problem. There are so many other musics that are happening all around us that stay current, but curiously, they get into this kind of museum atrophy after a while too, you know? There's this whole canonization of jazz and how that's represented. And oldies radio, for rock. And look at Broadway: revivals tend to be more successful than new shows. There's a problem that I think attaches to the economics of all of this: music is a lot more expensive to make happen. Obviously, with books you have printer costs and what not. A painting on the wall, you frame it, you hang it up. There are expenses in renting the space, but not in paying 80 people [in an orchestra]. Or with opera, you know, stagehands and all this other stuff. People are afraid to take chances.

TD: I think they are, but again I think it comes back to this little bit elitist ideal. What I have learned in my life and what I love to do is to say, "You want to write music? Ah, sure, great, I'll teach you. You're in 3rd grade? No problem." We'll make instruments together; we'll use graphic notation. So my feeling is that when we make the art form really accessible to everyone, and we say, "You can do this," they're going to be more interested listeners because it will be their art form and they identify with it rather than its boxed art form, or classical music art form. The curative is to allow composition to be embraced.

FJO: It's something that anyone can do or should do. I think part of it is this canon with obviously very wonderful music of Bach and Brahms and all of these folks---

TD: --Love it--

FJO: But once again we've decontextualized it.  We don't play it to know necessarily what Bach thought about this music. We use it as a vehicle for something else. And I think this gets back to this whole question of who is represented. There were tons of female composers. There was a contemporary of Bach, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre who wrote wonderful music in that period. And contemporaneous to Brahms was Louise Farrenc. There's all this wonderful music that we don't get told about. That music is not getting performed and not getting published. That's starting to change. There also aren't biographies of these composers readily available and perhaps even more importantly, getting back to your book, autobiographies, because I think there's something about getting inside the mind of a composer because music is this elusive thing, to understand who that person is makes it somehow more real for people.

TD: I can only tell you about my experience and that's part of the issue. I can only tell you about my experience; I can't tell you how music is written. I can tell you how I've approached it and how I'm thinking about it, but I can't give you big blanket universal statements. I do want to say that one of the things that was really wonderful for me, especially as a young composer in Philadelphia, was to be in the company of amazing experimental composers. Now certainly, I always felt like I came out of an American experience of composing which was Ruggles and Ives and Cowell and Henry Brant, although he's Canadian, but then I hung out with people like Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Rzewski. Those composers were really informative to me. They didn't care about fitting in. They cared about their personal journey and that was terrific company for me. And I think it helped me develop this really strong sense of sound and how do I discover it and how do I follow it. A lot of my pieces I start with what I call "pre-sound" where it's just, the sound of the instrument--you know, the knockings. And then gradually I'll add tones and sometimes I'll try to distort those tones, but I love that kind of place where like, the birth of sound or the birth of us, and I do think it's relative to how I start to understand myself, that slowly, I started putting pieces of myself together so that I could write more music that was integrated this way as well as this, so vertically as well as horizontally.

FJO: In terms of that seed of how it begins, that same passage that I keep coming back to which is the big statement to me, that music is like bread. You create certain conditions for it. You pick the size of the pan. You have the ingredients that you put into it. But then it's important to just let it rise and not get in the way. There's an element of intuition there as well as an element of structure. You obviously choose the ingredients and choose the pan. And if you don't do it a certain way, it's going to be a lousy loaf of bread.

TD: That's the risk you take with your work. You don't always write great music. You have flops. I have pieces where I go, "Oh, boy, I hope they don't see the light of day!" I don't know why. It just didn't happen. I try not to revise a lot of things. If I have a piece that I don't love I'll just say, "Okay, next piece." I'll take those problems into consideration and see how I work on those in the next one. I'm always interested how over the years, my choice of the elements of my composition have slowly changed. I think there are some composers who can write in lots of different styles and that's not me at all. I have this slow evolution. Sometimes I'll shed something that I'm writing and I'll add something else. I was very rhythmic in my music and I still am. I actually write complicated music that doesn't sound complicated at all. I don't want to speak for all performers, but I don't think it is that complicated to play if you throw away the fear of it and you just say the downbeat really helps you go into these different kinds of measures. Then I moved into something where I was really more interested in harmonies and how they glow. They're almost like Venetian blinds. Open the blinds and there's all this light and you close the blinds and there's not much light. Right now I'm interested in tremolos and oscillation of sound.

FJO: I'd love to hear some of that work. To take it back, one of the things that I find interesting and that you definitely have a real affinity for it, and this is fascinating to me, as somebody who grew up with piano and piano being the centerpiece: you are so fluid with strings. You write so wonderfully for string quartet and that's been kind of a hallmark, that's a medium that you've returned to numerous times, beginning with a piece that you wrote for what was and still is in many ways the most famous string quartet around now, the Kronos Quartet. That began your journey of writing these wonderful string quartets. I wanted to talk a little bit about Cassandra Sings because I feel like the myth of Cassandra, the metaphor of this person telling the truth that nobody wants to listen to, it's such a poignant metaphor for so much of what's going on now. This whole pandemic where people didn't want to listen to it and that's why it's still going on. The climate change thing where it's like: it was so warm in the afternoon yesterday, and last night I got home and it was freezing. You know, this shouldn't be, these kinds of fluxes. But that's because people aren't listening to the truth. How do you convey that in a piece of music?

TD: Well, writing for the Kronos Quartet---I have to go back a little bit. I hung out with them a lot and I realized that I was going to create a piece that had to fit them, like a beautiful suit of clothing, and I had to take their personality into account. David Harrington, he's kind of thin and he plays in a dry way. The violist is really lovely. And the cellist, she's just out there at that point. So I really had that as a consideration. And the piece starts with this long cello solo which is kind of beseeching, and the rest of the quartet is trying to pull her down. Now, I can't say that I was thinking that exactly. It's not like I was trying to paint that picture. But when I write I hold the words or the title in my head and I ask the title to inform me as I'm composing. I really felt this sense of, not so much a lone female voice. but the voices that we are that cry out against what is what they're seeing and willing to go that far, to put themselves in danger. I think I was carrying that idea as I was writing that piece.

FJO: The next quartet, Bleached Thread, Sister Thread, I find fascinating because in the booklet notes for the CRI Emergency Music Recording that was released of it you include the poem by your sister that was sort of a starting point for this piece. I feel bad for all the people nowadays who only listen to music on streaming services; they don't get to read the poem. How do you convey those meanings? That really kind of plays off into this idea of the difference between text and music.

TD: Right, right. And it was really an interesting piece because it was both about the abrasiveness of close relationships that can happen. But also, I was just coming off of having open heart surgery and a 9-year illness and feeling this return of health. I just listened to that piece recently. It was fun to go back and say, "I haven't listened to that for 10 years! What was that about?" I'm really struck by the ending. There's this long sort of rhythmic passage that keeps on going and is kind of unrelenting at the end and I'm like going, "Whoa, how did I write that?" because it's long and as a composer that's a lot of notes. You get kind of tired!

FJO: It's interesting that you mention that relentlessness because another piece that you wrote that same year, Fire on the Mountain, the trio for piano and mallet percussion, I get the sense hearing it, to my ears at least, that it sounds like a kind of post-minimalism. You mentioned Terry Riley in passing and Pauline who didn't call herself a minimalist but was certainly a fellow traveler to a lot of that music at that time. I'm wondering if that's a sound world that you embraced, obviously in your own way.

TD: I was very interested in my own personal energy. Where did it go? If I'm exhausted, what happens? If I'm running, I'm running. And that sense of you're running and going to your physical limits and just being exhausted, what happens at that point that you're exhausted? So I think what I was getting into was that kind of restless energy that I have that has a minimalist sense to it, but where it's not minimalist is that the change is not at all prescribed. There's not, "Ah, I'm going to do this and I'm going to add a note and then I'm going to add 2 notes and then I'm going to add 3 notes. It's more intuitive. But I think what I was learning at that point and resonating with what was going on at that point aurally for me was a kind of interior restlessness. Sort of like a stream that's always moving, but it's hitting into different things and different places and maybe it's going down the rapids, but then it suddenly breaks open. What I think is characteristic of a lot of my music is that breaking open at the end. For me spiritually, at the end of all of your physical limits then you say, "Okay," and your heart just goes up to God. It's like, "Okay, I'm ready." And I think, where I was in my life, coming to terms with a lot of the very difficult things I had to go through was--you could call it forgiveness or radical acceptance--or you could have a lot of names for it. It was for me like supplication. Like, okay, this is what I've got and I want to move on, but I embrace it, in whatever way that is sonically.

FJO: Certainly, to take it back to string quartets, your next quartet after that is Delight of Angels, Talk about spirituality and ecstasy; that definitely conveys that.

TD: Right. Without giving myself airs, I was fascinated by that experience where you're dancing, you're dancing, you're dancing, and then you're the dance. You're no longer you. You're just the dance and there's no elevation about that.

FJO: The other thing about that quartet that we'd be remiss not to talk about with it, because I think one of the reasons you're so idiomatic with string writing is the very close working relationship and friendship you've had all these years with the members of the Cassatt Quartet. They commissioned that piece and they also recorded Cassandra Sings. They've been huge champions of your music and they also did a piece which is probably to this day my single favorite piece of yours, the triple quartet Paper Glass String and Wood. They did it as three multitracked quartets, but the original idea for this piece was that it was to be professional players and amateur players playing together. I'm curious about how performances panned out along those lines, because I know it through that recording and they're obviously professionals and they're perfect. So how does that play out in live performances with ensembles?

TD: I was in a wonderful residency with the Fleisher Art Memorial. What a fantastic job I had for three years to be in an art institution. Their theme was "culture builds community"; going out into the community, working with the community so they would feel comfortable to come in. I was doing a lot of teaching in public schools in Philadelphia in some of the really rough neighborhoods. Boxes of broken instruments were shoved in a closet, so they had nothing. These were in the 90s. I was tasked with if I want to share my love of composing with anybody, how do I do it? And one of the ways was I'll just write for kids to play with professionals, I mean, how cool would that be to play with the Kronos String Quartet? It would just change people's lives to perform with professionals, not to see them performing on the stage, but to perform with them. And so I wrote this triple string quartet and it's written sort of telescoping, so you can play it for 1 quartet, 2 quartets, and 3 quartets. Actually I created a version for 1 quartet and string orchestra as well, for student string orchestra and the 2nd quartet plays better than the last quartet. They were sort of aimed that way. When we did the premiere we did it with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and they worked with local kids and it was such a joy. Those kids were like, "Oh, did you see that quartet? They were smiling at each other and they were working together." I mean, they really got music - they really got infected. That's what I want to do. I want to be infectious! And break down these barriers that it's a string quartet up on the stage. It's musicians loving to perform together and they perform with kids and they share that generosity and that love of playing with others and so that was the goal of that piece and then I went on to write another piece that hasn't been recorded. It's for tiny little baby Suzuki players and they have a melody which they learn with their Suzuki teachers, and they are actually on the stage with their Suzuki teachers, so they're getting their cues from them instead of from the conductor because they're little. And then it's a professional string orchestra and they get the chance to play their own piece with the orchestra. And that to me is really important, to create works that are good music, you just love them, and that kids can play. There's this telescoping idea with it.

FJO: Now, so many decades later, people look back and people who know the full story of what happened in American music know that this Meet the Composer Residency Program in the 1980s was this watershed event that finally positioned composers and orchestras and got program directors and artistic directors and sometimes marketing directors, the hardest people to convince, mindful of doing new music. These composers had sort of embedded there as agents! But the story that people don't talk about is the follow up program to this, which you were a part of, the New Residencies program, that paired composers with communities. So much music came out of that. And virtually none of it has been recorded, which I think is a tragedy. I would love to hear the pieces that you wrote as part of that program. There should be recordings of these. People need to know the story of what that residency was about because I think whereas the first program was about getting orchestras engaged and excited about new music, this follow-up program was really about bringing it to audiences in a way that no other program before had done.

TD: Absolutely. I was in the second year of the program and my fellow composers, I think there were just three of us, Jon Deak and John Luther Adams. Each of us had a three-year commitment and they were really composers in the community.  My residency was the first residency where we didn't pick a radio or a university. I picked the YWCA to be my arm in the community. So it was Delaware Opera Company, Newark Symphony, and the YWCA. It was a time when composers and artists were asked to go into communities and into schools to teach because schools were sort of pulling away from arts education and there was a lot of fuss about that. Composers felt that they should just be writing music. Why should they go into communities? Having come from an institution where composers were supposed to be this sort of elite outsider, I can understand their position. I didn't agree with it necessarily. I was really fascinated by the whole thing. So that's where I started my young composers in the schools. And it was really hard. I came across building instruments with them because there was nothing in the classroom. There were no instruments. I also worked with women in a residential program who were homeless to try and help them understand themselves through music. That was what we were trying to get at. I was writing my own opera about my life story, while they were writing their operas and so, that was the genesis of that program and it was extremely informative to me as a composer. It was hard, because I was a single parent at that point and I was traveling down to Delaware and balancing a lot of balls in the air.

FJO: I would love to hear some of the music that came out of that. To bring it back to this book, because you talk very eloquently about getting these young kids to compose with their own instruments and coming up with their own notation systems. It's fascinating. I'd love to hear some of their work as well, I don't know how much of that got preserved.

TD: I have a few recordings. It was wonderful to see them on their own journey and I have to say that, at the end of the day, you have to get down to the hard tax, where you get back into those planning meetings and they say, "Okay, you've worked in all these schools and you've worked with homeless people. What is the effect? What are the tangible outcomes?" And I have to be really honest and say, "That is not my job." My job is to do the work and plant the seeds and hope that there will be some outcomes, but I can't be outcome-driven.

FJO: Well, it's ultimately about the art. It's ultimately about getting these people excited, getting everybody excited about the creative impulse that is innate to all of us. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we have this wall and say, "Oh, there are some people who are creators and the rest of us are going to have to listen to those creators." Why should we be listening to them? The reason we should be listening to them is to inspire ourselves to create our own things and to go on this journey. To take it back to your book, one of the things I found so inspiring about it and so clever is the way it was written. We've been talking a lot about structure versus letting things happen. But there was a very, very clear structure to this. You had these two different time points that kept going back and forth; two different narratives. One were these beautiful, aphoristic journal entries from the '80s and '90s, and then the other was more narrative, tracing your childhood. They go back and forth. I think one of the things that made it exciting was in a way, we're kind of waiting with you on that journey, discovering the story of your biological origins. I think if you would've done the book in a straight narrative from beginning to end, it wouldn't have quite had the poignancy of getting to that climactic moment.

TD: It's funny because you were talking about my residency and one of the big pieces that I wrote was my opera, Billy and Zelda, and it's really the same form. There are two stories: Billy is all sung through with five or six performers, and Zelda is a narrative, a story with a cello improvisation. And you go back and forth. Slowly these things that don't seem to have a lot to do with each other, except they're both about children who have died, start to be woven together. I think the book really talks about how I had to weave my life together and there were lots of conflicting stories. When I sent this out to other publishers, they said, "Oh, it's a wonderful story, you have to write it all in a narrative." And I was like, "No, that's not the way I hear it." I've experienced it in this sort of compartmentalization and that's how I want to write about it with my growing understanding of how I can integrate my personal life with my composing life.

FJO: It was interesting for me reading it. I'm also adopted, but I never traced my origins and I never want to. When I was a little kid I obviously felt like an outcast because of it, you know, a lot of the same stuff that you talk about. But as an adult I find it liberating not knowing what my origins are because it means that potentially any person and any music is part of me, is related to me. I can embrace it all without having to worry if any of it is mine because either all of it's mine or none of it's mine. None of it's mine is not a good option! But, I'm curious, though, I mean that's really informed my aesthetics. Learning that ironically you're adopted but you weren't adopted, I shouldn't be giving this away for people who haven't read the book. Don't listen to this part, turn this tape off!

TD: SPOILER ALERT!

FJO: Yes, turn this off if you haven't read the book because you should read the book before you listen to this! How has that informed you as a creator? What does that mean, that sort of re-finding yourself that way since your music is a journey about finding yourself? How does that very key part of your identity shape your music?

TD: Oh, it definitely has informed my music. The journals start where I already know this information, but I am dealing with the aftermath which is rage. I am so angry, and the anger is creeping into my music. At the beginning of the book, I say, "My daughter was my great opportunity." I realized I was in trouble, and I could either hand it to her and let her deal with my legacy or I could deal with it and she was a great inspiration to me. Definitely when you're adopted there is this sense of not belonging and I think because certainly when I grew up it was like, "Oh, aren't you lucky! You know, somebody adopted you! You were so lucky!" And then you're thinking, "Yeah, that's only half the story." And I am fortunate. But there is this hole that's in one's life about not being wanted. And I was also really scared that my real parents would be out there and come and claim me. They would take me away from what I had. And so to find out when I was 21 that I was living next to that person that I belonged to and I realized, getting back to words, how words can completely change your reality, just one word. It reminds me of a book, The Last of the Just, by Schwarz-Bart. The story is that he, at the last moment during World War 2, realizes that he is Jewish. He had not been told he was Jewish until the last moment and this completely changes his reality and he has to decide if he's going to go off to the concentration camps. You know, it's just that word. You're really the same person, but man, your reality is completely flipped and what do you do with that? How do you claim who you are when you suddenly don't know?

FJO: Wow. And, curiously with music, there's where the secrets come in, right? You can never know all of what's there, or each listener puts something else there that's their own as a listener that you might not have intended, but it's there and creates the journey that way and as you said at the onset of this conversation is what you hope happens which I found very generous and very beautiful. One thing I have to say: So I get to the end of this book, and the book--SPOILER ALERT AGAIN--pretty much ends in the 20th century. I was a little disappointed by the end of the book because I wanted more! I want to know what's happened in the past 20 years because I got so involved in your story and so involved in these characters and these narratives. And I wonder, is there a volume two in the works for this? You know, what's the rest of the story? There's obviously more to it.

TD: I'm thinking about that. There isn't a volume two yet, but what I am really interested in now is what happens to a creative artist when you go through your 60s and you go towards the end of your life. What is creativity? I think we have a lot of fantasies, you know, "Oh, you wrote music until the last dying breath," you know? "He's dictating the requiem as he's gasping for air!" But what happens to your creativity as you get older? I'm really interested in that, so I'm thinking about another book.

FJO: Good, great, you've got at least one committed reader here already, and I want to hear the more recent pieces. I treasure those two CDs of your music: all this fabulous music from the '80s and '90s. We didn't talk about every piece. I wanted to, but this is how these things always go, these conversations take on their own shape. You can't really structure them, just like music, they have to happen organically. But I still want to hear more recent things.

TD: Yes, I have a CD coming out at the end of the year, with the Jaspar Quartet, I do write a lot for strings, I love strings. I think my heart is a cello. Natalie Zhou and the Jaspar Quartet. A lot of piano and string music is coming out, so I'm really looking forward to that and I've just gotten some releases from choral performances to release, so I'm really, really excited about that.

FJO: That's really exciting because there you have music and words joined together. Thank you so much for your generosity in that book and your generosity in spending an hour chatting today. This was a long overdue conversation.

TD: Well thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
 
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