Why do I feel like I need to hide my interest in social justice when I compose and market music?
For example, there is a part of Praise Gaia that came directly from my time spent at the Standing Rock in South Dakota. This Morning’s Paper is my response to how I move forward after hearing of tragedies, like the 3 year-old boy who died in Northeast Minneapolis after bringing his spaghetti dinner into the closet upon hearing gun shots. How do we respond when are inundated by news that feels close to our hearts and weighs us down.
A recent commission required me to set one of the most difficult texts I have ever encountered. Only Kindness, a setting of the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, was commissioned by the amazing Twin Cities vocal ensemble, CorVoce. How could I notate the raw pain and tenderness embodied in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, “Kindness”? Nye invites us to truly see what it is like to see ourselves as someone else – “you must see this could be you…” she says, referring to the man just shot outside the bus she was traveling in. She tells us that it is only when we lose things, that we can know “the tender gravity of kindness.” Then, and only then, “..it is “kindness that ties our shoes and sends us out into the day…”
It was this commission that reminded me of the connection between social justice and my compositional process. To realize again that it is my feet on the ground that help make my compositions uniquely mine. It reminded me that my life and art are one and that my compositions are often my experiences on the page in musical notation. While I was setting “Only Kindness,” a friends told me, “your whole life has led you to setting this poem.” I thought of that as I worked on it and it helped.
This is what art does – it gives us a new way to view life. Working intimately with a poem day after day, and week after week, allowed the words to sink deeply into my heart, through my hands, and into music.
And so I am learning to accept and embrace that social justice and my art are often deeply intwined. And that is a good thing!
Photo by Chehalis Hegner