Nathalie Joachim’s Fanm d’Ayiti celebrates the women of Haitian song and aims to explore their individual stories as they relate to Afro-Caribbean culture, society, history and music. Fellow flutist Tim Munro sat down with Joachim to reflect on the scope of the project, and how the process has changed her. Below is an edited transcript of Joachim’s words.

In Haiti, the women are badasses. You don’t want to mess with anyone’s Haitian mother. You’re going to definitely be on your best behavior.

I started to focus on three artists: Emerante Morse, Carole Demesmin, Toto Bissainthe. I felt connected to them. Going to Haiti, talking to these women, meeting their families, seeing where they’re from, hearing their deep commitment to Haiti. It felt inspiring. The three paint an interesting portrait. They’re each from pretty distinct eras, musically, but each influenced the other. Many consider these women revolutionaries.

The piece of the puzzle that made Fanm d’Ayiti come together was being in Haiti, recording a children’s choir. They were singing the music for a Catholic church service, accompanied by a drummer who was playing these very distinct voodoo drum patterns. It was two worlds colliding: this Catholic religion passed on through colonialism, and a musical practice that came all the way from Africa.

Fanm d’Ayiti is linked by the idea of strength and freedom and empowerment. It is made up of music woven together with some of the recorded testimony of the women I interviewed, and the field recording of the girls choir, and recordings off my grandmother. Half of the material is completely original, the other half are some arrangements of these three female artists.

My entire piece has a religious lens. So many of the songs in the show are Haitian voodoo songs. All of the text throughout the whole show is very deeply rooted in religion, whether it is African religion or Roman Catholic. I’ve learned about Voodoo as a practice. There is a stigma attached, but it’s akin to Native American religious practice. Voodoo as a practice is more about storytelling than anything else. Many of the gods are tied to nature.

Nathalie alongside Emerante Morse (July 2017)

I’m at the end of this project, but it also feels like the beginning. The show has helped me focus a new direction, to connect deeply to something that has been waiting to be tapped into.

For so long I have been attached to the, like, “I’m a classical flutist, and this is what I do.” This is what the world thinks is the most “validated” training. The thing I’m “supposed” to be doing. I have never stood solidly on my ability as a composer. I had been actively writing music, but was very selective about what I was sharing publicly. Censoring my own voice.

Also, in the past I have shied away from what I knew to be my vocal identity, to make myself fit somewhere. I’m definitely not an opera singer…at all. And I feel like people look at me and are like, “This is an African American female, so she’s going to sound like a soul singer,” and I don’t sound like that.

The practice of music in Haiti is very communal, very relaxed. It’s not about who’s been playing the longest, who’s the best, who’s the most trained, who’s recognized as X, Y or Z. It’s just people sharing a piece of themselves as honestly as they can. It’s a style of music that really lacks any pretension, which makes me a better performer. It takes away this need to be perfect.

I never recognized that the many hours singing with my grandmother were also music lessons. To me it was just “Oh, that’s just my time with my grandmother.” But the second I started this project, I realized she trained me so well in the practice of folk singing and folk music in Haiti.

In this project I’m writing and performing in a way that I would have been scared to do a decade ago. So much of my musical instinct and influence comes from being a kid growing up in Brooklyn, with electronic music and hip hop steeped in my ear. That, combined with my classical training, is of course a valid practice of studying music.

Vocally, this project is the most I’ve been myself. Making music in Haiti happens without abandon. The songs have such deep meaning, and you just give yourself to it. It has resulted in me finding a vocal quality that feels like the most natural.

All of these things are coming together with honesty. Putting myself out there in this way is super-vulnerable. But at the showing in St. Paul and the taping for “On Being,” it was maybe the least stage-fright I’ve ever had. It felt normal. And right.

Tim Munro is a Chicago-based, triple-Grammy-winning musician. His diverse work as a flutist, speaker, writer and teacher is united by a single goal: to draw audiences into an engrossing and whimsical musical world.

Recognized for her versatile and innovative performing and composing, Nathalie Joachim is “an edgy multi-genre performance artist who has long been pushing boundaries with her flute.” (The Washington Post) Critics hail the Brooklyn born, Haitian-American artist for creating “a unique blend of classical music, hip-hop, electronic programming and soulful vocals reminiscent of neo-R&B stars like Erykah Badu.” (The Wall Street Journal) Ms. Joachim was recently appointed flutist of the four- time Grammy winning contemporary chamber ensemble, eighth blackbird. She is also co-founder of the critically acclaimed urban art pop duo, Flutronix, known for bringing their ingenuity and technical prowess to stages world-wide. Other performance experience showcases an impressive range, including featured appearances with Miguel Zenón, Vampire Weekend, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Richard Reed Parry and Dan Deacon. Ms. Joachim is a former faculty member of The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program (MAP) and is regularly engaged by elite educational institutions nationwide. This season, she joins the Perlman Music Program Summer Music School as Director of Contemporary Music. Notable commissions of her composition work include Land Bridge, an evening-length score for Helen Simoneau Danse (2016), Ulysses in 3, a collaboration with Ulysses Owens, Jr. as part of Park Avenue Armory’s Under Construction program (2015), as well as a piece for solo cello written for Amanda Gookin of PUBLIQuartet (2017). Ms. Joachim is the only person to have successfully completed the MAP, Pre-College, and College Division programs at The Juilliard School. She received her graduate degree education at The New School in audio production and sound design.

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On March 20, 2018, Liquid Music presents composer, sound artist and writer Brian Harnetty to perform his composition Shawnee, Ohio. Described by The Wire as "breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualising them", Shawnee Ohio evokes a historic time and place through the present act of sound archives, field recordings, and live musicians. In this essay, Harnetty reflects on his family background, the significance of Shawnee, and his process in creating the piece.

In 1872, my mother’s ancestors immigrated as Welsh coal miners to a town called Shawnee in Appalachian Ohio. Located in what is now the Wayne National Forest, my family experienced a series of booms and busts that resulted in labor strikes, underground mine fires, and the formation of the United Mine Workers. Shortly after my grandfather Mordecai Williams graduated from Shawnee High School in 1925, the whole family moved away, caught between a regional mining bust that would never recover and the Great Depression yet to come.

Almost a century and a half later, I continue to return to and evoke this region as the core subject of my work. Since 2010, I’ve been regularly visiting Shawnee. The streets are lined with two story buildings with upper porches and are being held up by the community of people that remains there after a century of economic decline. I’ve developed friendships with local residents, accompanied them on their jobs, and attended social events and festivals. I’ve also observed protests over the region’s most recent boom, hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Much like the author bell hooks, I “return again and again” to the homes of my family, searching for ways to deeply understand and help protect the soundscape and its people.

My piece Shawnee, Ohio gets its musical and visual material from these visits. One day, I asked a local historian if there were any sound recordings. Rummaging through a closet in his office, he produced a box of about forty cassette tapes. They were mostly recorded by him in the 1980s. The tapes contain oral histories of a generation of people now gone.

On these tapes I hear memory, laughter, embarrassment, music, forgetting, sorrow, friendship. I hear about everyday events—births, work, loves, deaths—directly and without mediation. I hear Jim Bath describing Shawnee, building by building; an unknown boy interviewing his grandmother about men who died in the mines; and Neva Randolph, soulfully singing of hope and change, even while on her own death bed. These people speak and sing in their own voices, unrehearsed. They are not famous or wealthy. Their agenda is to share, to remember, to learn, and to find ways to move forward.

“In ‘Shawnee, Ohio’ and all of my work, I contend that the simple act of listening—to places, people, to their stories and their sonic pasts—can transform their futures.”

— Brian Harnetty

Now, after 80 years of environmental recovery, the region and the forest are once again under threat. New fracking leases on public lands are greatly expanding gas and oil extraction there. Needless to say, the region is deeply divided politically and socially over fracking and energy extraction. Residents find themselves caught between the promise of jobs—however temporary—and fighting to end centuries of environmental degradation.

I cannot lay claim to these places and people; I don’t pretend to be a spokesperson for them or the region, nor can I identify as Appalachian. However, in Shawnee, Ohio and all of my work, I contend that the simple act of listening—to places, people, to their stories and their sonic pasts—can transform their futures. In this way, the lament of Sigmund Kozma as he describes a 1930 mine disaster becomes a cautionary tale for today, and the sung protests of Jack Wright against fracking evokes a spirit of hope that has stubbornly persisted for generations. Through listening, this project asserts the key to social change here necessarily involves connections and discussions over this shared past, the land, and the forest: public lands that can be reclaimed through many different voices of dissent.