(photo courtesy of Fear No Music)
Hello, MYS Symphony musicians!
I’m so excited at the prospect of collaborating with you all to create the shared inspiration for a new piece written especially for you.
Inspiration, the seed that a piece grows from, can come from many sources. As I mentioned on Sunday, I once wrote a piece inspired by a painting that used sound effects on the cello to evoke a hike on a glacier. The main focus was the feeling of joy seen in the hikers in the painting, but the sound effects created a sense of place and transported the audience out of the concert venue and onto the glacier. It didn’t hurt that I performed the premiere in front of the painting, of course!
This piece, Shard, was built on a four-note snippet provided by the commissioner, Portland Cello Project:
Most recently, I wrote a piece inspired by a sculptural installation! Here’s the score.
In this superb performance of In All Our Names, there are several sources of inspiration woven into the music. Musical quotes include bits of Beethoven and a Billy Holliday song, and words are present in two forms: spoken (in translation from the German) and in musical cipher. Here’s the score.
Literature — both prose and poetry — have a great tradition of providing source material and inspiration for music, even apart from being set in music as art song, opera or oratorio. In Celilo Falls: We Were There, Ed Edmo’s poetry and personal reminiscence provided me with musical inspiration aplenty. Joe Cantrell’s photographs added another dimension to the work, but really the source of inspiration he brought me was his the thoughts he shared with me about the timelessness of the human presence on the landscape and the way we are All One.
Here is the score of Celilo Falls: We Were There.
Find a video of the premiere here: https://vimeo.com/760681370/3680ab61b8
Some press about the premiere of the piece which I think give some sense of what it took for me to do something like this with integrity and not cultural appropriation: https://www.orartswatch.org/resurfacing-celilo/ https://www.opb.org/article/2022/06/01/new-music-honors-celilo-falls/
This is the video about A Song of Our Warming Planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t08CLczdK4
Here are the scores I played for you:
Don’t get me wrong; music does not need “extra-musical content” to be worthwhile or effective. Not at all! Exploring musical ideas is thrilling, intriguing and enjoyable all by itself. I bring up these other ideas because the ability to use the emotional power of music to explore things of importance to us, such as social justice or climate change, is another of the great gifts of being a musician, and one of the best parts of being a 21st-century musician is the freedom to do non-traditional things in the context of a “classical” piece. It is worth noting that using unusual techniques — such as extended techniques on our instruments, speaking or singing, or using alternative instruments — doesn’t have to be difficult. They can be an extension of the musical ideas in a way that can be emotionally effective, and also just plain fun. Maybe you will think of something completely different than any of this, or maybe one of these things will resonate and spark an idea for something similar. Either way, I look forward to collaborating with you!
Cheers!
Nancy
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Nancy Ives, DMA
Composer; Principal Cello, Oregon Symphony
nancyives.com