It's so hard to pick one word to describe a piece, but something that I
really had in mind while I was writing my new piece was the word momentum. I
think that especially through music, because it involves time, it's really a
window into someone's inner landscape or something about their world or
their mind. I have a routine where if I'm in LA I'll get up in the morning early
and take a jog and then I'll come back and write for a while, and it takes a
while to have an idea, so I'll try to create ample space to write. I usually
start by making a drawing of the piece. So for this new piece I had this image
of this golden arrow that was shaped like a spiral, and I think it had to do
with the ostinato, it had to do with that momentum we were talking about, and I had
to do it kind of, the way that I wanted the piece to happen, where it had to come
from somewhere and then land very centrally, so it had to
move into you as you listen to it. It really helps to have those
shapes and that physical expression of the piece, just because it exists, and it's
something you can hang onto when you're bringing something out of the ether.
I try to make it a full-body experience. I think it's more impactful,
because that's where we feel music, and I'm really into expression and
expressing emotions, and through that, I think people connect, and that's the
magic of music. So I'll sometimes take the pieces on a walk or on a jog or like
move around the room with them, or I'll sing lines so that there's a physicality
to it, and I kind of bring it into my body before I put it on the page in
different ways. "When the World as You've Known It Doesn't Exist" is a piece that I
wrote right after I had finished doing "p r i s m," and doing that was such a full-on
experience that I felt disconnected from my own energy in a way that I've never
felt before. It wasn't depression; I just didn't feel
like I could move into the work, and so there was something that felt like
something was around the edges that I wanted to try to touch on.
I'm a five-foot-tall woman, so the fact that I think my emotions belong on that
stage is a political statement, so I just went very personal and was
writing about my emotional landscape for the past year, and that's what the piece
is based on. Project 19 with the New York Phil is a really exciting project. I'm so
grateful to be involved in it. All the other composers I'm obsessed with, so
it's incredible, it's truly incredible. I mean what the New York Phil is saying is
that these voices matter; these voices belong in our institutions in this major
way. The momentum that that's creating in the field, you can feel the
ripples. People are talking about this, and there's a lot of support behind the
pieces that we're doing. The New York Phil is a place where people look
to to see what is happening: what are they doing? Because that's the cutting edge,
and for the New York Phil to step up and commit to all of these commissions is so
incredible. It's setting a really high bar. The creativity was always there,
so there's nothing new there. What's changed is that I think a broader
audience is more interested in listening, and that's because of the work the
New York Phil's doing, where they're saying, You should hear this; this
matters. I love the idea of momentum because it is forward-moving, but it's
also just the beginning, and there's something so exciting about the idea of
momentum. Somebody had to start it, so that I feel like I'm getting to ride
this wave of momentum from female- identifying composers before me who
fought to have their voices heard, and the work itself will hopefully
send us into the rest of the concert and the rest of the evening.
I think art is the closest we can get to understanding someone else's experience,
so it's so important to show a wide diversity of experience, but it's also a
celebration of being alive and you know, that feeling anything is a privilege.
Truly, like the fact that we can. So that's what I aim to celebrate in my
work.