What enables presence with complexity?

 

Just before I left for Stanford, I caught a recital by my former teacher, Harumi Rhodes. Afterwards, I remember going back to the plant-filled mobile home Phil shared with his housemate C---- and standing in the kitchen, my body filled with a warmth and sureness that felt unfamiliar.

 

Since then, this performance has joined with other experiences to sketch a picture of capacious love, a love with space to hold contradictions. This is a flower of gratitude for four of my teachers, Harumi Rhodes, Claire Chase, Matana Roberts, and Petra Kuppers. You taught me and continue to teach me how to be with complexity, how to hold the difficult things with the beautiful things, how to move.

 

Harumi: your performance of the Janacek Sonata with David Korevaar in August 2017 was the question that blossomed into the difficult liberation that has moved me these past seven years and that I continue to seek to inhabit. You introduced it with a few words that stand with the most powerful musicology I’ve experienced in any form: speaking from a little to the side of center-stage, you made the packed recital hall feel like a kitchen table in the early morning, nothing but you and us and the story you were sharing. You talked about how Janacek composed the sonata in the early days of World War I, surrounded by the metallic clash of violence. What you loved about the sonata, you said, was how he managed to hold this violence together in the same hand as incredible tenderness, without reducing the weight of either truth. Then you played. There’s that moment right before the last three shuddering gestures of the piece: my breath caught in the pivot of your arm that was both weightless and falling into gravity. (The moment is doubly seared into my memory as the height of sublime and ridiculous because when I caught my breath I choked on my own saliva and split into pieces trying not to shatter the transcendent ending with hacking coughs.) When I’d recovered my breath halfway down the collaborative piano hallway afterward, I had a visceral, powerful sense that if I knew that my possible future child (a child I hadn’t ever thought I could justify bringing into this broken breaking world) could experience what I’d felt in listening to your performance, the way you held tenderness and violence together – clear-eyed, without diminishing either the anguish or the love – then it would be worth it, worth the inevitable pain. I still don’t know if I can or will experience motherhood, but I’m endlessly grateful to you for giving me this experience and helping me to be able to recognize it and nurture it when I find it in other places and relationships.

 

Claire: I remember a moment of friction at Ensemble Evolution, the life-changing summer festival you co-directed at Banff with Steven Schick. Some fellow musicians had organized a group to play Julius Eastman’s Stay On It, and the leadership and framing of the rehearsals had become a lightning rod for difficult questions about racial identity, performance, and reparative justice. I was sitting at a dining table with the other musicians involved in the piece, with you, and with Rania El Mugammar, who was the conversation partner you’d hired as a guide to anti-oppressive practices, and I remember feeling small and a little like I used to when one of my parents would give me a lecture about something I’d done as a kid (oh shit, what have I done?). I looked over at you and you were leaning forward, equal parts concern and curiosity, not a trace of judgement, and I felt my heart blow wide open. Wow, I thought, this is possible. To meet difficulty sincerely and with curiosity, leaning into action.

 

A couple years later, while I was at Harvard assisting you with your beautiful New Music Ensemble and your Music and Community seminar, I got to experience your “Throw-Downs,” a first-come-first-served multi-genre musical sharing evening open to anyone who wanted to sign up. At first I didn’t understand how or why the title worked as a frame for such an inclusive and warm series of events. I’d been hosting similar open-ended evenings at Stanford, and I had always framed them as “sharing parties” or something similarly soft-edged: the words “throw down” brought up the kind of competitiveness I associated with toxic masculinity (colonialism, hierarchies, ego, etc. etc. etc.). But in getting to know you, to work with you and feel your endless generosity and humility and the sparkle you gave to everyone you worked with, I came to understand a flavor of challenge that was open-hearted and filled with humor. A non-zero-sum playfulness that could try on moves that made earth-shaking waves in colonial frameworks, and then as easily take them off again, like a glittering costume. Maybe this sounds like a kind of disingenuousness—that’s not what I mean at all. It’s your sincerity and integrity, your trust that your magic cocktail of curiosity and humility and perseverance and generosity are enough to hold and move you as you through and with any flavors of complexity.

 

And Matana, where do I begin. Your presence is a master class in love as action, the verb-form love (thank you bell hooks)[1] that holds space for tenderness and pain in its deep moving waters. In our Zoom conversation in 2020, I asked if you separated or tried to separate your art from your life, and you paused before saying that you tried, and the way you tried was by being in nature: birds, water, walking. For a long time since I heard your Coin Coin albums I’ve wanted to understand what it is in your music that makes such immense space for holding and speaking to the traumas of colonialism and white supremacy alongside and within the rich warmth of love and collective hope. I think I’m beginning to understand that that way of thinking (“what is it in the music?”) is limited in the same way that analyzing the impact of Harumi’s performance of the Janacek sonata by looking at Janacek’s score alone is limited. When I’m with you, Matana, I feel present, listened to, embodied. I understand myself as valued, just as I see the radical strength of your loving and valuing yourself in this world that is constantly wounding and re-wounding you and everyone else who doesn’t fit into the narrow boxes that white supremacist colonialism has dictated. I think about what you said about the collective energy that went into the difficult recording sessions for Coin Coin Chapter Four, and I wonder if it’s the seamlessness between the way you live your life inside and outside your musical practices that makes it possible for someone like me to experience your sounds as so capacious. Or rather, better: if it’s the love that you share with your collaborators, the way you talk and move, the way you uplift other artists on your Instagram page, the clarity with which your outrage moves in solidarity toward change, that I hear in the warmth of the sounds in your albums. You help me understand that none of this is a contradiction, that love is feeling and moving and being present with violence, tenderly and bravely.

 

And a flower for someone I’ve never met in person but whose teachings join with Harumi’s, Claire’s, and Matana’s in helping me make space for complexity:

 

Petra Kuppers, I met you in a Zoom room full of the usual pixelated rectangles, some five hundred or so of them I want to say, all of us enrolled in a course called “Bodyfulness” [2] offered by an online workshop platform called the Advaya Institute. Your rectangle appeared on screen like an oasis, a gift of color: you wore a crimson velour top, your peach-colored skin gesturing to the rose colored wall behind you, your soft hexagonal rose-gold glasses, and your pink couch. Without saying a word, you’d said: my body matters, my space matters, we are in relationship; I care. In response, my tension softened, and I felt delight. In the session you led, you talked about moving in and with pain, about the ways that disability offers an intimacy and a virtuosity of connection with one’s environment, one’s “eco soma.” [3]

 

In your opening meditation, you led us through our own sensations, the fabric of our clothes, the material and ground our bodies rested on. Perhaps your skin touches cotton, you said, and called up the hands and minds of the people whose lives are and have been bound with the history and culture of cotton production, the plants and the sun and the soil that became the fabric, the complex histories interwoven with the comfort of the fabric. Perhaps your chair is made of wood, you said, and called up the forests and breezes that intersected with the lives of the people who may have milled it, the animals who might have called the trees home, the cares or struggles of the people whose hands guided the wood through saws and the delivery people who moved this chair to where it supports you now. I remember feeling sheepish that I was sitting on a plastic office chair, when you suggested this: perhaps you are touching something plastic, shaped by human hands from the bodies of beings that lived millions of years ago, that died and were compressed over time by the weight and heat and pressure of the Earth, then extracted and molded into the solid shape that supports the curve and weight of your body. (Boom. Whoa.) In your voice, in the soft earnest contour of your speech, there was space to feel and breathe with all of this, the way that I hear and feel space in Matana’s voice, in Claire’s presence, in Harumi’s performance. (Shuffle any of those words and it remains the same: in Matana’s presence, in Claire’s performance, in Harumi’s voice).

 

Later, I read the introduction to your book Eco Soma, and experienced a new way of reading from what I’d known in years of academia, a feeling of pleasurably focused slowness. It reminded me of what I’d experienced when I sat and meditated with a candle flame for the first time. When I was young, my exposure to meditation had been through my dad, who I sensed approached it in the way he approached his trumpet: something to be mastered, even when the words he spoke were about letting go. In contrast, the warmth of the meditation candle was like a feeling of love, it drew me and opened up something in my body (just as the pink of your Zoom square reminded me that my body had room to unfurl). It was like the way that Harumi showed me that the deepest musical and physical attunement can be born out of love rather than fear and harsh discipline, something that had never before occurred to me. Your words felt like being with a candle flame. I breathed in what you wrote like a rush of oxygen: you spoke about the moment when things get too hard, when pain threatens to shut your body down, pain not just as an isolated physical phenomenon but as the full crushing weight of the patriarchal, racist, homophobic, ableist violence that weighs on us all constantly and differently, tiny cuts and huge ones all snarled together inseparably. In these moments, you asked, “how do we find a momentary balance, a resting place for yourself and others?” I loved this so much because it gave me company in my imperfection, in the knowledge that yes, sometimes it is too much. So yes, when it’s too much, what’s a momentary balance? Not a final solution (the echoes of the words terrify and also feel relevant)—not a final solution, just a point of rest that acknowledges the small animal of my body scrambling its way through an imperfect world.

 

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