Race & Music in America

Transcript for Student Voices

Eric Nathan and Katherine Freeze

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You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.

Katherine Freeze:

I’m Katie Freeze, a PhD candidate in the Department of Music. I’m speaking with Associate Professor of Music, Eric Nathan, about the recent panel discussion, “Race & Music in America”. Professor Nathan, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Eric Nathan:

Thanks so much for being here with me.

KF:

So, I want to begin by asking about your work as a composer within the academic context of Brown University. During the panel discussion on “Race &... in America,” you began your panel discussion by saying something super interesting. You said, “my research is my composing.” Could you explain what you meant by that and how you see your scholarly and creative practice engaging with the very pressing social issue of race in America?

EN:

Yes, well on a kind of very basic level, that we have scholars here at Brown who, their research may be on studying a tradition or a topic of some sort, and they do research into that and here as a creative artist, what the work that involves me throughout the day is creating music. And I do feel this is my research, of course, I’m continually experimenting, and exploring, and thinking of ways that I can communicate a feeling or an idea with sonic pitches and noise in my work, and so I’m delving into ideas of how we can communicate with sound. So I am in essence researching that as a practitioner. But also when I’m composing, I’m studying what other composers have done in their music. My office when I’m composing a piece is scattered with scores by other composers. It may look like I’m writing a research book on a topic; I’m learning and seeing, well, this problem, how did this composer approach that, and how did this composer approach a different problem, and maybe I’ll find my way without completely reinventing the wheel. And through this, I feel like as composers, many of us, our goal may be to try to communicate something about what it means to be alive today and share that with others. I think there are all different ways that composers may want to communicate and position their work, but for me that’s the center of it. And so, my work has gone across a wide range of surfaces and topics and some of them were engaging with my world today, and one of these pieces was a song cycle called, “Some Favorite Nook,” a project that was not commissioned and it was just my idea. And it was to look at the work and writings of Emily Dickinson the poet, but also the writings and work of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was a noted supporter of women poets but also a noted abolitionist and was the commanding officer of the first Black regiment in the civil war. And I saw their story as being very relevant to today and the continuous struggles for both racial and gender equality and equity, and so I thought that through this piece I was engaging with topics that were important to today, important to my life, important to my students, my community that we’re a part of here at Brown. And so, my music, I don’t have any one thing that I’m trying to say across every piece, but every piece is a different world that I’m diving into and then trying to say something about, so that was what this piece ended up being.

KF:

It’s exquisite, by the way, absolutely exquisite.

EN:

Thank you.

KF:

My next question for you is about the tradition that you are a part of, western classical music. As we know, Western classical music has for centuries been bound up in networks of political, social, and economic power, largely though, not exclusively, dominated by white, European men making music for white audiences. How do you see yourself inheriting, extending, and/or disrupting that legacy?

EN:

This is something I’m very aware of and have been thinking a lot about, thinking of the privileged position that I am in as a white, cis-gendered man, as a composer within this Western European, classical music tradition. This is what I grew up with; it’s the music of my childhood that I grew up loving and I played in orchestras as a trumpet player, I learned classical piano pieces, and also equally loved jazz music and was playing that and improvising throughout my youth as well. And so, there’s different musics that feel very personal to me that learning more about their histories one comes to further understandings of the implications, and so, in my work and in my teaching, and in my career, I’ve been working to help promote other artists, artists of color, artists of different genders, through my work as a composer in residence with the New England Philharmonic through the repertoire we teach in classes. But I think it’s important to not only present and uplift and celebrate the creations of a diverse range of artists, but to show and teach and discuss about the structures that have influenced the way Western classical music has discriminated against and structurally had racism and how artists were silenced over many years. And so, it's not just thinking about the works that are programmed, it’s who are in positions of power in the industry, thinking of how music is funded, who is in the ensembles, who has the opportunity to play. It’s really the whole ecosystem, and I think it’s really important today how we are looking at all these different rungs of how race impacts and has been impacted by these historical structures.

KF:

Who are the emerging or maybe already established classical composers of color you are most excited by today?

EN:

There are so many to list. Through my work at the New England Philharmonic, I’ve been supporting young composers through the Call for Scores program. I get over 150 scores and I have to select a recipient of the prize but also help advocate for programming of works on the general concerts of the season. One of the winners from 2020 is a composer named Sofía Rocha. I really love her music. There is such an intricacy to it but also a playful inner life to it as well, and so we’re going to be giving the world premier of her work, Replier. And another composer who was a recipient of this past year’s call for scores is Igor Santos, whose music, when I was listening to all the applicants, I kept returning to his score, and I felt I could listen to it continually, and continually find new meaning in it, and I was never tired to return to it. I thought, well, this is probably why this person should be the Call for Scores winner this year. Another up-and-coming composer who probably has more notice than me, myself, but someone whose music I’m interested in is Conrad Tao, absolutely phenomenal pianist, also terrific composer and advocate for other composers. And more established composers that I’ve been very interested in their music is one we actually just had to Brown, was Gabriela Ortiz, a Mexican composer whose work premiered by the New York Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, which I have found a really phenomenal, brilliant piece about Clara Schumann and her relationship with Robert [Schumann], and about the voice of a woman composer, as Clara, was silenced. And in some way Gabriela Ortiz now is taking the mantle in a very large and big way in the field. And Chen Yi, the composer, we are featuring her violin concerto this May with the New England Philharmonic. And actually, this fall I really enjoyed being a conductor, I conducted Hannah Kendall’s music, a female Black composer from Britain, and her piece has such energy and really something that was really thrilling to present.

KF:

Your description of all of these artists leaves me with sort of an image in my mind of this world of classical music being anything but dead and irrelevant. Rather, it is teeming with new life and creation. When you think about the coming three decades or something in the next three or four decades of the classical music world, what do you hope for in terms of what music is made, who’s hearing it, and how it may contribute to healing in our society?

EN:

I think it’s been so wonderful to see the incredible range of voices and how the past ideas of style and genre are really being shattered and broken, and how artists like Tyshawn Sorey’s emerging ideas of jazz with classical music, Vijay Iyer as well, and you start to realize that we’re all “music-ing” and we’re all creating something and communicating it. I teach about genres in my course, “From the Blues to Beyoncé,” it’s for non-concentrators who don’t have any background in music, trying to get a basic understanding of what makes the genre of Motown the genre of Funk, the genre of Hip-Hop. But in the end these are just descriptive terms that may do more harm than good in how we actually are thinking about and really listening to what people are saying. And so I’m hoping that the sky's the limit for what people will be creating and listening to, but I also think it’s important to look at the whole range of how race is impacting the landscape across all different rungs of the industry and across the different musical industries, and across all different races too. We had the violinist Jennifer Koh come to Brown two years ago to perform right before the pandemic began, and she’s become very vocal in writing in the New York Times about the issues of anti-Asian hate and the racism that exists in the music field for Asian musicians; we’ve heard articles from George Lewis, a Black composer who teaches at Columbia University, who writes about how to decolonize the classical and contemporary music world. And so, I’ll be including some articles along with this podcast to look at, that can help show various approaches for how we may continue to move forward and recognize the situations that exist and how to do better in the future.

KF:

Thank you so much, Professor Nathan.

EN:

Thank you for these wonderful questions.

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Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu.