On Mirrors and Collective Human Possibility: Between the Virtual and the Potential
written by Rajna Swaminathan
2019 GLFCAM Florence Price Fellow, Cycle 12
I
Locating the Potential
As an improviser, composer, and bandleader, I often wonder: from where does musical potential emerge? My experience as an improviser has taught me to rely on my body, and on the embodied presence of co-creators (audience and performers) to find forward momentum and creative potential. Being an improviser has involved embracing an openness in the body, creating a receptive space for something else to enter and alchemize with everything that you bring forth— who you are in that very moment. It can be a beautiful experience of surrender to the moment, surrender to those sharing the moment with you.
In my experiences as a composer and bandleader (which have long been intertwined roles for me), I have taken pleasure in a deep kind of specificity about what is to unfold musically. I’ve heard many composers discuss ways they can ‘control’ a particular sound or parameter, but that’s a word that sits uncomfortably with me. As a composer-bandleader, I have come to appreciate the give and take: you learn how sound and human energy combine, listening carefully to the ensemble’s dynamics to figure out how musical space can be organized and what kinds of improvisational openings are possible. The process of composing for an improvising ensemble is dialogic and collaborative in this way.
Writing through-composed music for classically trained musicians is new and challenging for me. I have only seriously pursued this path since I began working on a recent commission from the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series, and now my string quartet for GLFCAM. A serendipitous alignment in the universe allowed these opportunities to arrive at around the same time, and it has been daunting to rise to these challenges all at once while giving myself ample time and space to learn this craft. 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.
In my ensemble RAJAS — which features musicians with various improvisational backgrounds including multiple streams of Indian music (Karnatik music, Hindustani music, spiritual/devotional musics), Iraqi maqam, jazz/creative music, etc. — the band is the mirror. The Sanskrit word ‘rajas’ refers to the human drive toward change and action. I often stand at the helm of the metamorphosis of a piece over time, with multiple iterations transforming its flow and potential in the ensemble. I pay keen attention to how the musical forms sit in the bodies of the people playing them. Are they able to inhabit a phrase or improvisational space with ease? Does the music create any collisions (sonic or interpersonal) that might block the flow of performance? How does the music feel in my body as I play? The answer isn’t to remove all obstacles or challenges, but to find the right balance of what feels good to play and what inspires us to collectively expand and reach a new space.
To compose for this group of musicians— this family— I spontaneously create in the rehearsal room, feeling the musical potential through a tactile connection with my instrument (the mrudangam, a barrel-shaped South Indian drum) and through verbal descriptions of what I envision in real-time. We collectively weather the uncertainties of bringing disparate musical approaches together into a seamless ensemble sound. Rehearsal recordings — the composite interaction of sounds, my spontaneous verbal score, and even informal and joking interjections — help me put the musical puzzle together. Sometimes I only decide on a final set list once we’re at the venue, after our sound check, so I can take everything into consideration— the band’s interpersonal energy and dynamics, the sound of the room, the kind of social space we’re playing with (the audience). This is all just to get a space ready for something to happen, for the music to lock into its potential and be relevant. The performance ultimately brings unique discoveries and possibilities that can rarely be anticipated.
II
Staying Connected
As I began to compose for classically trained ensembles this past year, there was a feeling that so much needs to be set in motion— if not set in stone— before I can even interact with the players/sounds, audience, and performance context. The meticulous poring over dynamic markings and score formatting made it challenging to connect to the body-energies of the performers and the rich potential of the sound to move listeners. This feeling of disconnect, in addition to my own personal discomfort with reading notation while performing, had long deterred me from writing through-composed music of this kind.
The time spent with Del Sol String Quartet during the first GLFCAM residency was truly transformative, and helped me understand the beauty and expanse of the performers’ interpretive world. It was the first time I was hearing substantially through-composed fragments of my music live, let alone writing for a string quartet! In my reading with Gabi and Del Sol, it was exhilarating to feel such attention and care for my musical sketches and a passion for all of the potential directions they could take. Bringing my sketches into this social space, alongside other composers and their works-in-progress, felt essential to connecting to this world of musical potential.
Of course, there is some inevitable resistance as I start working within a different paradigm. I do still miss the feeling of being in the midst, the experience of guiding the process from within, feeling the sound pass through me and my instrument. There remains some unease at the separation of the composer from the performers, at the separation in time between creation and performance. Yet the experience at GLFCAM taught me that my familiar framework of musical potential and human connection can be reoriented to embrace new pathways. Both my piece for GLFCAM and the LA Phil commission ended up drawing on profound improvisational experiences— in fact, my string quartet began as a transcription and orchestration of a piano improvisation— and this gradually sparked new strategies for channeling the many sounds and human potentials I continue to absorb in my life.
After all, music never occurs in a vacuum — it expresses and sets in motion a network of human relationships and collective explorations of potential. As visiting scholar Doug Shadle pointed out during his lecture at the Boonville residency: we have to recognize the labor it takes, and the community engagement necessary, to make music happen. This can be said of any kind of music, but it was surprising for me to hear about classical, through-composed music from this ‘grassroots’ perspective. Doug spoke of efforts by early American composers to get their music performed under quite rustic conditions, and also read intense excerpts from the letters that composer Florence Price repeatedly sent to major orchestras around the U.S. to have her music played, imploring them to ignore her race and gender. In the candid discussion that ensued, Gabi described her aspirations with GLFCAM, speaking about how to widen the frame and spark interventions in multiple aspects of the music-organizing and mentorship process. As I reflected on all of this, it became a little easier to see myself as part of this particular historical thread: the composer or musician’s perennial hustle to survive while being a socially uplifting force.
III
Embracing the Virtual
Just as both the LA Phil commission and the string quartet were coming to completion, the COVID-19 pandemic began to sow great uncertainty into our present and future landscape. Each day, the situation has grown more dire; performances and gatherings have been cancelled. Our usual frameworks of time, movement, creativity, and human interaction have been warped, and there is no clear timeline for society’s recovery on a global scale.
As I write this, there is no guarantee of when or even whether my piece for the LA Phil will premiere. It would have featured me on the mrudangam, which makes the cancellation doubly disappointing. Aside from the high profile nature of the performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which inspired both excitement and slight trepidation, I was just truly looking forward to being part of a piece that had taken several months of devoted work. Throughout those months, on days when the pressure was high, I would tell myself — It’s just fifteen minutes of my life! I would try to imagine all the minutes of music I had improvised throughout my career, and sometimes it helped me relax. It’s disorienting to reflect now on those highly anticipated fifteen minutes of my life, and the uncertainty of their arrival. It’s disorienting to not know when I will once again be able to make music in the physical presence of others.
Though things are still up in the air, the pandemic has also brought on the possibility that we will have a remote GLFCAM premiere. [Note from Gabriela: Cycle 12 was indeed able to host its premiere remotely with the Del Sol String Quartet in June of 2020. Rajna’s piece, “Borne,” was wonderful.] Adjusting to these and other imminent life changes amidst a delicate learning process have left me wondering even more about the ways we communicate about music and how we make the magic happen, with and without the presence of other people.
If ever there was a time to learn to create music in solitude, and to be your own mirror, it is now.
It isn’t true solitude, of course, and there is a core shared experience in this pandemic. But it has greatly shifted our focus to the virtual, and shed light on how we struggle and cope in the absence of others’ vibrant physical presences. The enforced virtual nature of this time feels particularly ironic, as both my LA Phil commission (The Illusion of Permanence) and my GLFCAM string quartet (Borne) are meditations on the body as a site of memory, creative momentum, play, and self-knowledge.
The word virtual, outside of its common usage to refer to computer-based interactions, means ‘almost’ or ‘not quite complete.’ These meanings could describe the art of composition: a labor on sounds yet to arrive in the physical world. I’m not sure what this strange and depressing time holds in store for us, but many postulate that it is an opening toward reshaping the world we inhabit and embracing radically new ways of being. Having serendipitously entered this era with a stronger anchor in the virtual possibilities of composition, I feel there is a calling here…
Perhaps our imaginations will run wild during this time, and we’ll emerge with even more music to jump into together. Perhaps we’ll adjust to virtual possibilities and greatly reduce our environmental impact by avoiding travel. Perhaps musicians, and artists of all kinds, will be valued and treated in more ethical ways, and perhaps we’ll find more sustainable models for the arts to thrive. One can only dream of what we can possibly do collectively.
Rajna Swaminathan is an acclaimed mrudangam (South Indian percussion) artist and composer. Rajna studied with the renowned mrudangam maestro Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, and is one of only a handful of women who play the mrudangam professionally. She performs regularly with several Indian classical musicians, most notably her mentor, vocalist-scholar T.M. Krishna. Learn more from Rajna’s bio page.