A Maxwell Tape
written by Gabriela Lena Frank
This Composing Earth blog is supported by New Music USA and featured on NewMusicBox.
An essential component of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music's Climate Commitment, Composing Earth is a commissioning program for composers who recognize that climate change — climate disruption — is a bona fide civilizational emergency.
Composing Earth asks for a two-year commitment from Composer Alumni of GLFCAM. In the first year, composers receive a study stipend to participate in a monthly discussion group with peers, Gabriela, and renowned scholar/communicator of climate science (and music lover) Dr. Rob Davies. These meetings provide an opportunity to review articles, books, documentaries, and online resources regarding the climate crisis, allowing the composer time to find their own personal stories which inspire their commissioned work in the second year. Along the way, "weekly musings" are sent out every Wednesday by a member of the cohort to the full group. Some of these musings, whether in the form of personal letters and other times developed into soulful essays, are featured in the series below.
Hello Composing Earthers,
I hope everyone is doing well. I confess I have no great revelations today, so I thought I would share with you a discovery from a few months ago.
Last Christmas, I received a beautiful gift from my parents. They were up in Boonville from Berkeley, enjoying our (long-labored) remodel of our central room that all of you know. Christmas was already a day or two past, and I didn't immediately follow when Mom gave me an old shoebox, nonchalant-like. The contents rattling around inside turned out to be Maxwell cassette tapes, the kind from the 70s with the extra boxy cases and orange stripes. When I opened the cases, my editor Dad's handwriting, familiar and precise, electrified me.
"Omigodddddddd...!"
Mom laughed. For years, I had been nagging my folks to find home audio recordings from my girlhood — Tapes of me at the piano as a baby and not yet fitted with hearing aids, tapes of my older brother sharing last night's dream years before he would become a sleep scientist, tapes of our close circle of friends in heated conversation around the dinner table debating Carter vs. Reagan... I remembered my Dad's old player, still functioning from his college years pre-Peace Corps and Perú where he met Mom, and how Dad would casually slip in a tape when he thought things were about to get good.
So, we made a plan to not fast-forward or rewind so as to not stress the reel, and I found the first cassette dated March of 1975 when I was two and a half. I’ve lived nearly twenty lifetimes since. With Jeremy's old double-decker on the dining table and all of us gathered around, I pushed play.
A bit of static, and then a song already in motion: Alternating G and D, thin and twangy and recognizable from our first family piano, a tired but earnest blond spinet; through it, an impossibly young voice, light and high and tremulous, hovering around the pitches, a singing time traveler from the past.
My past. My voice.
This went on for a while. Of course, I was weeping. Mom held my hand. Here I had the evidence that although those first few years of my life were largely in silence because my hearing loss hadn't yet been diagnosed, music wasn't dependent on a silly thing like, well, audibility. The tapes from immediately after I got fitted for hearing aids, when I was five, showed how quickly I became a confident improviser. By the time I was ten, Dad was relieved from his duties as I became my own engineer, "mixing" with multiple players and cassettes.
The tape I really want to tell you about is dated early 1983. My speech impediment was diminishing quickly by this time, and I headquartered a radio station from my bed with my mini Casio synthesizer on a pillow for jingos. I had my slogan ("Hey hey hey, K-G-A-B, K-GAB/all day all night/don't be wrong/let's be right!") and the news hour where I cautioned my listeners: "Well, folks, today we have some good news and I'm afraid, some bad news. So first, here's the bad news." From there, I proceeded to talk, appropriately somber, about the warming waters along the northern California coasts and the tuna, a warm water fish, that was swimming up from the southern Baja region. I declared that this was really bad news and improvised sad music in the background.
I never got to the good news; the rest of the tape is blank. What I do remember is, shortly before this "broadcast," learning about the warming of our waters from my sixth grade teacher, a self-professed tree hugger. I was completely freaked out as my family and I were frequent visitors to our local cold-water beaches. The frigid ocean brought out the boogie boards and wetsuits in us. It was the perfect temperature for the perch that flitted nearby, the bronze-green kelp forests we'd wander into, and the waves that slammed harder than any warm surf could (Surfers often talk about the extra "weight" of cold waves vs. warm). All sorts of creepy-crawly shelled creatures loved the cool temperature and we dug them out of the sand just for the joy of the catch before throwing them back into the sea. The day would end with packing up our wetsuits, towels, and blankets while violently shivering, making the outdoor hot water showers by the parking lot even more glorious.
I could not imagine all of this changing. The invasion of warm currents and tuna might have well been an invasion of aliens from my Mom's cherished 50s sci-fi B-movies. In those, skyscrapers blew up and there were lots of crying women and children needing saving. I didn't really want my world to change into a disaster flick, and so, with words and music, I fictionalized an alarmist radio show. Listening to that tape last Christmas, I realized I was processing eco-anxiety while urgently alerting the public, even if it was just the public of my imagination.
No fear of stressing the reel of memories... Fast-forward nearly four decades, and hey now? I'm processing eco-anxiety, going on honest-to-God real radio stations, and trying to alert the public with my words and my music.
I feel like Galeano's old, old man who copies and retraces his childhood drawings.
There are yet more tapes, reminders that I always had much, if not all, the aspiration and alarm I'll ever need as I consider my future relationship to the earth in this urgent time. After I finish listening to the rest of the tapes in my Mom's old shoebox – which held a pair of size six Clark's sandals, apparently – there's a tape that I would love to make. It would complete the tape I left unfinished when I was ten, unable to recover from the horror of warm water and tuna. Indeed, a tape that finishes with... good news. Good news, as yet undefined and likely to take me to the remainder of my days in fulfillment of a promise made long ago.
Much love to all,
Gabriela
Gabriela Lena Frank is the director of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. Included in the Washington Post's list of the 35 most significant women composers in history (August, 2017), Gabriela was born in Berkeley, California. Winner of a Latin Grammy, she has composed for leading orchestras and worked with luminaries like cellist Yo Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, the King’s Singers, and the Kronos Quartet. She also is a passionate believer in service, and has brought her love of music into hospitals, schools, and prisons. Learn more on Gabriela's bio page.