Not many people can front a rock band, sing Górecki’s Third Symphony, lead a marching band processional down the streets of the Sundance film festival and perform in a baroque opera of their own composing all in a month’s time. But Shara Nova can. In addition to her multi-faceted career as My Brightest Diamond, she will also be returning to Liquid Music on March 11th for the US premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider: Unremembered, a 13-part song cycle inspired by poems and illustrations by Nathaniel Bellows that explores the fragility and nuance of memories and emotions.
Composer and staff member of New Amsterdam Records, Molly Joyce spoke with Shara about Unremembered, her relationship with Sarah Kirkland Snider and the direction her own music.
You worked with Sarah in 2010 on Penelope. What has it been like collaborating with her for a second time on Unremembered?
Maybe the best way to talk about that is to describe the recording process for Unremembered. We recorded the whole thing in three days. It was like twelve hours of singing every day and some of the most challenging sessions that I’ve ever done. And a really wonderful thing happened because DM Stith ended up being in the same sessions. We were just throwing ideas back and forth while I was in the recording booth and I think that was the first time I’ve ever had anybody produce my vocals in that kind of way. So the process between us felt really collaborative. He could say things to me as a singer, giving me a different image or approach and I really responded to that. And then the vulnerability that I have with Sarah, the transparency in our friendship, I was able to expose a part of myself in those recordings that were very intimate. I was really on the edge of what I was able to do expressively. That comes from having years of a relationship and then building that with someone, where you’re able to go into the booth and be in a really vulnerable place when you record. That level of vulnerability is more rare than I think it is.
And when she was composing the work, did you two collaborate pretty tightly?
Not at all.
But she already knew what worked for your voice?
Yeah by that point we had a whole lot of time together, whereas for Penelope, it was a very new relationship.
Does it feel different performing or recording your own music versus someone else's? Do you approach it in the same way?
That’s the funny symbiotic relationship that I have with Sarah. When I receive a piece from her, even if it’s just a MIDI mockup, I’ll be devastated and so moved by the level of thought, detail and care that she puts into her pieces. Then the musical vocabulary feels very familiar to me and so I’m able to sink right into it. It doesn’t feel like putting on someone else's costume. It feels like a tailored dress that is made exactly for your dimensions. There’s a really big difference when approaching something that was made specifically for you. You have an easier time getting to interpretation quicker because you don’t have as much resistance.
And the freedom and the beauty of doing a project like Unremembered is that these are stories that aren’t necessarily going to be told in pop music. Maybe in a Tom Waits song or something. But to be able to jump into a character like the witch through the narratives and the storytelling or to be able to sing this beautiful poem about the death of a swan, these are the kinds of moments that remind me why I love classical music so much: because there’s not a kind of prescription about what songs need to be about that exists in popular music. Maybe that’s all illusion anyway. But I like the storytelling aspect because it’s almost operatic. And that’s why it's so fulfilling to do this music. To be in Nathaniel’s beautiful, twisted fantasy. And then thinking about the Salem witch trials and how women were treated. And then now to be on the forefront of women still having to articulate their rights and not step aside. These stories are still culturally relevant.
Going into your own music, when I started transcribing some of your music for you I noticed that you aren’t really concerned how it will look on the page. Whereas when I want to write music I have to go into music notation software. I guess I was amazed just receiving all of these files and how it still worked with the voice leading and harmony. Could you talk about your composition process of singing through everything as you write? Maybe if I had a voice like yours I would sing everything out too, but how do you approach composing with your voice?
I just had this issue with another piece too where it was like “OK, well you didn’t think about how the voice leading was gonna work”, and then I do have to kind of make sense of who’s doing what and re-organized the parts. But I know at least how the rhythm or the harmony is going to go. I have started to trust my ear more and more and just be intuitive about the writing. And a lot of times I have to be because the fastest way that I can do things is to sing them straight out of my head. It might be that way because I've sung in choir since I was a child, so I’ve spent so much time in choral music of all kinds. Whether that’s Bach or John Rutter or gospel music. My dad was a choral conductor so being in and around choirs is really natural to me. So I really focused my writing career on choral music in the last couple of years in writing for the voice, doing less instrumental work because there’s more of a gap for me.
I was thinking about your album, This is My Hand, where you are approaching issues of body image and whether or not you could really dance when you perform. What’s your approach to the physicality of performing something like Unremembered?
I live by the principle that the audience is going to respond to what information I give them. It’s not that they need my permission to respond in a certain way but how a person moves helps you interpret the music. I think in the classical tradition that wasn’t always the case. In some ways, it was about removing the visuals and the physicality. But for me as a theater/pop person, I want to feel this visceral movement. And if that means in a song like “The Swan” from Unremembered, for example, say I only raise my hands at one point. Then suddenly that imagery, even a minimalist gesture puts the picture more solidly in my mind. It’s both give me a stronger a connection to the music and the audience. So it’s not just that I’m vocalizing the music, it has shape in the body as a storytelling mechanism.
When I interviewed you last year you had this quote about putting on your own oxygen mask before putting on someone else’s. And how change begins within, which I feel like I live by now. I feel like in more of your recent work there’s a shift to music that perhaps is more socially conscious and active.
I look back at my third album, All Things Unwind, and there’s a song called “There’s a Rat” which is actually about Dr. Ossian Sweet who was an African American doctor from the early 1900’s who moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit and hundreds of white people gathered in his lawn to put pressure on him to move out. It’s a very traumatic story. Then there’s songs like “High, Low, Middle” which were looking at class. I felt like even using the marching band for the fourth record had social elements. The marching band is a symbol of All-American folk music. Like, here is a playground where class and public school education and music meet, All of these things manifest in the marching bands in public schools in America. In so many ways I feel like there were social elements I was trying to articulate and on the new album and still working with how to talk about racism. What is my response to injustice? There’s so many in which I feel like I have approached the subject but never fully gone there. Because it’s really challenging to figure out how to both have a humility in the writing such that you’re not brow-beating the audience, but also creating a space that offers a question or that invites empathy. So I wrestled with that a great deal and will continue to do so.
Going back to the “change begins within” notion, do you feel like you’re asking audiences to find change within and to look within to find that empathy?
That is absolutely all of our work. You know I take so much to heart in James Baldwin's words. I’m paraphrasing but he said something like “If the white people were to actually deal with racism they would have to look at their own insecurities and the things they are most afraid of.” And so that is my invitation: to begin to dismantle the racism in my own mind and, as I begin to do that, start opening up that process so that other people can see that as well. There’s so much to be said about white fragility but when you start actually digging into what white fragility is, we’re so afraid of being a good or a bad person. But there are aspects of our thinking that are not in line with the highest truth. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. It means that there are thoughts that you have or systems that we have grown up with that have created these patterns in our thinking and in the way that our entire society is built. It’s based on oppression and inequality. So it’s my job as a musician to become aware of my own racism and try to articulate that in music. Putting it into music is challenging, for sure. But music offers us a place where we can create empathy, where you could be listening or dancing side by side with someone who’s completely different from you. That’s the beauty of this crazy thing that we get to do which is make vibrations.
Is there anything else you wanted to add about Unremembered?
Just understanding the rarity of this performance. It’s just such an incredible thing that this music is being heard live. Just to get Padma Newsome from Australia is like a year's worth of paperwork. So I’m enormously excited to have the opportunity to perform this music live.
Sarah Kirkland Snider's: Unremembered will be presented at Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis, MN on Saturday, March 11 at 8:00pm.
Tickets and details here: http://www.liquidmusicseries.org/snider-unremembered/
Students and kids attend FREE.
About Molly Joyce:
Molly Joyce’s music has been described as “impassioned” (The Washington Post) and written to “superb effect” (The Wire). Her works have been commissioned and performed by several distinguished ensembles including the New World Symphony, New York Youth Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the New Juilliard, Decoda, and Contemporaneous ensembles. The 2016–17 season will see the first commercial releases of Molly’s music, both on New Amsterdam Records. These releases include an EP of two violin and electronics works, and a work on Vicky Chow’s album of electroacoustic piano compositions. As an active participant in other aspects of the music industry, Molly is currently the digital content manager for New Amsterdam Presents/Records and has served as an assistant to Glenn Kotche, Missy Mazzoli, and Shara Nova, among others.
Listen to her works here: http://mollyjoycemusic.com/
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