Blog

written by Aakash Mittal

Three Musings on Healing the Creative Spirit 

The first piece that I composed was titled Some Last Minute Blues. It was my sophomore year in high school and I had been playing saxophone for less than a year. Yet I was obsessed. I was listening to jazz and practicing morning, noon, and night. I must have been around fourteen or fifteen years old when the assistant band director, Mr. Perez, challenged me to write a tune for our jazz combo to play at the upcoming High School Jazz festival. Being a teenager, I waited until the last minute to write the piece. Hence the title. 

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written by Jonathan Mitchell

I. “...from material…”

It’s 2018. Professor Smith points me to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs, musical settings of religious verse by George Herbert. Gabriela Lena Frank visits the Blair School of Music for the first of several times that year. For my senior recital, I have the idea to write a large cycle of piano pieces—wordless songs, maybe—inspired by Chicago’s architecture. (Pick a topic already, Jonathan.)

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written by Roydon Tse

“Process vs Result”

The GLFCAM experience was different from any workshop or mentorship programs I’ve done in the past. It has an emphasis on the idea of process rather than outcome. I have been part of many workshops where one simply writes a piece, sends it to performers, and then show up to the rehearsal and performance. Done. Rinse. Repeat. GLFCAM, however, invited me to converse with the musicians from the get-go. Relationships were formed. There was mentorship that felt intentional and genuine. All these things felt so valuable and rare in the small world of music composition.

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written by Aida Shirazi

I was one of the composers of GLFCAM’s Bahlest Eeble Readings in 2019 and felt exhilarated to work with some of the most talented musicians of my generation under the mentorship of Gabriela, Tony Arnold, and Manuel Barrueco in the eleventh cycle of the program. Our first round of workshops happened in Boonville in November 2019, but alas the Covid pandemic didn’t allow for the second round and our world premiere performance to happen in April 2020. Nevertheless, my friendship and affiliation with GLFCAM has been ongoing ever since.  

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written by Ben Shirley

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to belong...anywhere. I wanted to know the big secret everyone else seemed to know but me. How do you live, how do you make sense of the seemingly mundane slog through existence? How do you connect with someone? How do you care about anything? For crying out loud, how do you form an honest relationship with another human being? Where was my tribe? What is my identity?  

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written by Carolina Calvache

My name is Carolina Calvache. I am a pianist and composer from Cali, Colombia – a beautiful city at the southwest of the country. I came to the US to study jazz and be immersed in that style of music by writing and performing for the last 14 years. When I was back home, I started my interest in composition and showed my ideas to the classical composition teacher. He was not very encouraging, he told me, “Your melody does not make sense”… Basically, he did not like what I wrote. I was vulnerable, trying to show my music to someone. But that response did not help me get better and rather shut down my interest.

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written by Monica Chew

It’s taken me several decades to come back around to the idea that there’s more than one way to do it, as far as classical music is concerned. The voices from my classical music education reverberate through my head whenever I sit down at the piano.

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written by Seare Farhat

My conversations with Audre Lorde have been numerous, healing, inspiring, and entirely in my head. She has described herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” and for me a voice of conflict and liberation. Lorde has defined liberation in her work as the rediscovery of the self and the reclamation of our past into the future. However universal her thoughts on liberation are, she is still adamant in centering herself in her discovery. When I first encountered her work, I did not understand the gravity of her subjectivity as revolutionary until I was required to question my own sense of the subjective. As a subjective artist situated in a context that did not value her personhood, she was distinctly aware that her silence and trepidation was a manifestation of her oppressor within her. The liberation of her art, and other oppressed artists, therefore became an urgent necessity for the community at large.

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written by Kenyon Duncan

As I sit down to write, I must admit I’m only partially focused on the words I’m typing. Another part of me is listening to the first rains of the season as they graze the rooftops here in Boonville, CA. The air is crisp and sky, dark today, almost as if apologizing for the sweltering, stagnant heatwave that crawled through the Anderson Valley only 2 weeks ago.

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written by Jeremy Rosenstock

I’ve been thinking about this blog post almost as long as I spent considering what to compose for GLFCAM.

Given the parallel, I should begin by saying that I usually compose for myself. It’s far easier to create a recording if I’m the performer, producer, and composer. It’s difficult to pick instruments knowing that each addition reduces the possibility that it’ll ever be played again. I’m not an optimist when it comes to these sorts of things. I assume the first performance is the last, unless proven otherwise.

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written by Hannah Boissonneault

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.”

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written by Clifton Ingram
2019 GLFCAM Julius Eastman Fellow, Cycle 12

Lately, I’ve been noticing more that my work from the last handful of years has grown increasingly apocalyptic. To my ears, musical material is spread thin, technique obscures gestures, and a fragile vulnerability haunts even the most luminous of resonances in a hushed landscape.

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written by Kyle Tieman-Strauss
2019 GLFCAM Fortuna Calvo-Roth Fellow, Cycle 11

To me, the best kind of music-making is enveloped in one’s community. No matter where you live—big city or rural town—you can find pockets of wild, outrageous music, and if you can’t, you can mind-trick your friends into creating one with you.

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written by Rajna Swaminathan
2019 GLFCAM Florence Price Fellow, Cycle 12

Writing through-composed music for classically trained musicians is new and challenging for me… What feels particularly difficult in this process is transitioning from a social, dialogic workspace — where the resonance of the music-in-process and the presence of the people playing it can spur the imagination forward — to a relatively solitary workspace, where it feels like you have to be your own mirror.

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written by Molly Joyce
2019 GLFCAM Chabuca Granda Fellow, Cycle 11

I have an impaired left hand from a previous car accident, and for nearly twenty years, I assumed I wasn’t disabled. I assumed I needed to conform to the norm and hide my inabilities; hide what I couldn’t control, and ultimately hide my disability’s possibility.

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written by Adele Faizullina
2019 GLFCAM Cynthia Jackson Ford Fellow, Cycle 11

I was born in Uzbekistan, and when I was six years old, my family and I moved to Tatarstan. When I was seven, my parents did their best and found a music teacher for me: An amazing teacher and fantastic blind musician, Yevgeniy Fralov, who taught me the braille system.

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written by Iman Habibi
2019 GLFCAM Lucy and Jacob Frank Fellow, Cycle 9

A few arts organizations around the United States had cancelled or postponed events. Philadelphia had only one known case of coronavirus, and we were barely alarmed. However, as I made my way through the backstage corridors of the Verizon Hall that morning saying hello to several musicians and staff, it was slowly becoming apparent that something was not quite right.

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written by Kai Ono
2019 GLFCAM Dave and Gunda Hiebert, Cycle 9

“Music is basically a few great moments and really clever wasting of time in between.” One of my great music composition mentors told me this years ago.

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written by Samuel Winnie
2019 GLFCAM Anita and Leslie Bassett Fellow, Cycle 9

If you imagined that my daily time spent consuming media in the years following my undergraduate degree were a pie chart, about ninety percent of that chart would consist of my aforementioned comfort zone. That remaining ten percent, however, would constitute the music and other media that was beyond the confines of my box.

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written by Aeryn Santillan
2019 GLFCAM Kelly Livingston and Ron Samuels Fellow, Cycle 11

When I was growing up, my mom never liked cooking, so in time, neither did I. My grandma —She cooked. She often cooked for us as we sat in her kitchen, her small TV playing Univision or Telemundo. I watched her quickly make a meal, and never thought I’d have the skills to handle a knife the way she does. If not for her, I don’t know how many more cut-up hot dogs or McDonald’s I would’ve ended up eating.

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