Whenever my friends and I talk about our childhood dreams...
written by Hannah Boissonneault
Bahlest Eeble Readings Cycle 13 Fellow
Whenever my friends and I talk about our childhood dreams, we usually reflect, laugh a little, and ultimately, we shake them off. Some of my friends are doing the very thing they wanted to do since they were five years old, and some followed completely different, ultra-cool paths. Some talk about how they never found one dream that stuck with them, or how they pursued many until they found the right fit. Some tell me that they never found their own “passion.”
I think about this often: how do our childlike curiosities serve us today, and more importantly, how do we access that part of ourselves when we’re so far removed from it? So often we’re told to embrace our inner child, but what does that actually mean? What’s it like to honor the things that brought us the most joy in the pivotal moments of growth, of change, and of arguably the most curious time of our lives?
I can distinctly remember twelve-year-old me, which happened to be the year that I started playing the electric bass. It was the same year I discovered my love for performing and playing in bands. It was the year I started writing music with other people when I started truly falling in love with collaboration. It was around this time when I would begin to carry some aspects of my life with me (like my love for metal music), and slowly leave others behind as I grew older (like the gaudy purple eyeshadow I insisted paired well with my neon skater shoes).
This was also when I discovered film scores, and the seed of composing as my own expression was planted. Little did I know this seed would continue to grow, and this seed would slowly become a cluster of vines that stretched and pulled my life in many different directions.
When I was little, I never questioned what was under my umbrella of music. It simply made up who I was. It didn’t matter that these musical pastimes that I fell in love with were different from each other. Therefore, I found myself immersed in the many complex and diverse communities that made up these areas of music I was a part of and still didn’t fully understand.
As I got older, my dreams continued to grow. I wanted to be a bassist in as many bands as I could handle and compose concert music, too. But when I started looking into college, I quickly discovered that there wasn’t a clear path in academia that led this direction I wanted to go in. My childhood dream of being a “rockstar” suddenly didn’t align with my dream of being a “film composer” or “classical composer” in the eyes of a music degree. Suddenly, my big umbrella of music that kept the rain away was split with holes and torn into several different categories and communities that I would juggle to fulfill in order to be my whole self.
For so long, I viewed this duality that I felt within myself as a bad thing. I felt that I needed to pick just one dream and let go of any others. I traded my bass for a notation software that I had no idea how to use that would soon become part of my musical expression, too. I spent countless hours listening to music I had never heard before that would help to shape who I am today.
I quickly learned to not clap between movements, and to hold my breath during still moments in a concert hall when I secretly wanted to bob my head. I spent the majority of my time in college pushing aside the part of me that adored playing in dive bars and rooms full of sweaty people. I learned that it was much harder than I expected to find people to start an indie band within a predominantly classically trained music program. I stopped tending to my garden of seeds and desperately tried to catch up to the people around me who had been doing this their whole lives.
But I also learned how beautiful silence is within a concert space, all the nuances in sound when an audience’s attention is still and lost in the same musical experience, when we separate ourselves from the stage and feel like we’re just inches away from the sound. I learned how to play traditional jazz from the grace of a mentor who believed in me, and I learned to clap and holler after a killer solo. I learned from incredible composer mentors who pushed me to think beyond the duality I had built for myself. I valued the insightful conversations with friends from all walks of life more than anything; friends who encouraged me to just be me and look beyond the formalities within the institutions.
When I found GLFCAM, I was just about to begin my Master’s Degree. I was still grappling with all of these differences and discovering what makes each community I was involved in unique. I was beyond excited to find an academy that fosters a home for musicians who specialize in many different musical styles and backgrounds from all walks of life. When I applied, I had absolutely no expectations of getting accepted. And when the first meeting day arrived, I remember feeling like I was finally understood. I’m beyond thankful for my time there, and for all the wonderful artists I was lucky to learn from.
Today, my dream is still to be a “rockstar.” I still want to be a full-time touring musician. I still want to compose more for film and contemporary ensembles. I don’t view these things as different anymore: instead, I just see them as parts to what makes me feel whole. I tap into these different parts of myself every single day: the academic, the composer, the arranger, the headbanger, the performer, the songwriter. But most importantly, I learn from the communities and the people who are paving their own way within each of these areas. I learn from communities like GLFCAM. I learn from my mentors. I learn from my bandmates. I learn from the bands that we get the privilege of touring with. I learn from my composer friends. I learn from my performer friends. I learn from my family and friends. And at the end of the day, when I occasionally hear a knock from twelve-year-old me, I open that door. I listen to her, I follow her footsteps, and I take her seriously, because she’s much wiser than I am.
Hannah Jane Boissonneault is a composer-performer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Through her work as a composer, electric bassist and vocalist of her band Blank Slate, her multi-genre project Feels Like Honey, and the bassist and clean vocalist of metalcore band Spirit Breaker, Hannah strives to create music that interconnects various musical communities such as indie, folk, metal, rock, contemporary-classical, and jazz. She is an alumna of the 2019 Atlantic Music Festival, the 2019 Fresh Inc. Festival, the 2020 Collaborative Composition Initiative, and the 2021 Sō Percussion Summer Institute. She has participated in reading sessions with Roomful of Teeth and members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and has been commissioned by the Detroit Composers’ Project and various instrumentalists. Hannah recently completed her B.M. in Composition at Michigan State University. She is now pursuing her Master of Music in Composition at University of Michigan, studying with Kristin Kuster and Evan Chambers.
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