Antiracism in the Arts with Aaron Grad and Britt East

Posted on April 12, 2022April 12, 2022 by Ludovica Punzi Punzi

Join Aaron Grad, musician and composer and Britt East, Vice President of EMS Board of Directors for an illuminating conversation about creating truly integrated arts experiences for people from all walks of life. It’s critical for us as white people to surface issues of race while we find ways we can help equalize power, and why traditional arts organizations must summon the courage to fundamentally rethink their programming and business models if they want to survive and thrive. Aaron also walks us through the genesis of his upcoming work, Many Messiahs, in which he reframes Handel’s masterpiece as a collective call for justice.

Early Music Seattle presents, For All Our Sisters, featuring music composed by Aaron Grad, June 12 at Town Hall Seattle. Tickets and information here.

“FOR ALL OUR SISTERS” IN TIME OF CORONAVIRUS

By Gus Denhard

Among many casualties of the Covid-19 outbreak was For All Our Sisters, the concert Early Music Seattle had intended to present on May 30 at the Nordstrom Recital Hall. This program, a Baroque cantata concert recounting tales of women through history, was to have been performed by Seattle Baroque under the direction of Alexander Weimann with poet Claudia Castro Luna as narrator. The concert would have also featured an original work by Seattle composer Aaron Grad, “Honey Sweet We Sing for You,” a retelling of the Sirens myth in music.

We have decided that the show will go on in a new guise. Our artists for this project – composer Aaron Grad, librettist Jennifer Bullis, dancer Milvia Pacheco, singer Danielle Sampson, cellist Nathan Whittaker, flutist Janet See, and poet Claudia Castro Luna; have committed to telling us the stories of women, each in their own way from their own spaces, using music, words, and dance in the weeks to come. Their video offerings – still in progress as of this writing – are rich and powerful, inspired by women’s heroic actions through history, but also heightened and informed by their personal experience of isolation.

THE MANY STORIES OF THE SIRENS

By Jennifer Bullis

Sometimes, a story you thought you knew becomes strange and unfamiliar. Such a change in perspective happened to me while researching myths of the Sirens in preparation for writing the libretto to “Honey Sweet We Sing for You,” a cantata created for the Early Music Seattle program For All Our Sisters.

Going into this project, my only knowledge of the Sirens was from their brief depiction in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, in which the Sirens’ seductive songs lure sailors to wreck their ships on rocky islands. To avoid this danger, Odysseus has his crew plug their ears with wax and bind him to the mast as they sail by.

Since Homer gives few details about the Sirens, I went looking for other sources. I learned that the most ancient depictions of the Sirens, on ceramics, show them as having the bodies of birds and either female or male human faces. After about the 5th century BCE, they were represented with female faces only.

At every point, the Sirens have been closely linked to music. Sources as far back as Homer’s time, in the 8th century BCE, number the Sirens as two, three, or four singers. Alternatively, “One played the cithara, the second sang, and the third played the flute.” A version of Jason and the Argonauts noted that before being transformed into birds, the Sirens served the goddess Persephone as handmaidens and musical attendants, who sang to her in enchanting harmony.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written 800 years after Homer, also connects the Sirens to Persephone. It’s in this version that I found most compelling material as to the power and necessity of women’s voices. Ovid depicts the Sirens as handmaidens picking flowers with Persephone in a mountain meadow, at the moment Hades breaks through the ground to abduct the young goddess and take her to the Underworld to be his queen. Persephone’s mother, the earth goddess Demeter, launches a desperate search for her. Demeter transforms the Sirens into human-bird hybrids to enable them to search and call out for Persephone over both sea and land.

When composer Aaron Grad invited me to write the libretto for this cantata, he wanted to give the Sirens a way to retell their story in their own voices. Our cantata picks up where Ovid’s narration leaves off. We depict the Sirens continuing to call out for their lost sister-goddess in their vivid, beautiful songs. We imagine these to be the same songs that sailors heard and to which they were fatally drawn.

The libretto of Honey Sweet We Sing for You urges listeners to unstop their ears to the cries of distress that women have been sounding for millennia. The Sirens’ song of enchantment, as it turns out, may have originated as a lament over the loss of their sister, a cry of rage over the violence done to them all, and their desperate, searching call for reunion and healing. We hope you will listen and enjoy in the weeks to come as Early Music Seattle presents musical, poetic, and literary interpretations of women’s stories through the ages. We’ll explore the Sirens myth, along with other stories of women both old and new.

FOR ALL OUR SISTERS PERFORMANCES

Posted on September 16, 2020September 16, 2020 by Ludovica Punzi Punzi

FOR ALL OUR SISTERS

In the last couple of weeks we have introduced the ideas and themes that motivated For All Our Sisters. A new work by Aaron Grad, “Honey-sweet we sing for you”, commissioned by Diana Carey for the Seattle Baroque Orchestra lies at the heart of this project. In the weeks to come, we will weave together music, poetry, interviews, and dance to help us understand the powerful women in our collective past and present—especially those whose voices have been silenced by history’s (mostly male) gatekeepers and myth-makers. Each Friday in Clef Notes and through our social media channels, Early Music Seattle will be presenting For All Our Sisters. Stay tuned as the stories unfold.

FOR ALL OUR SISTERS: PART 7

For All Our Sisters completes the story of music, poetry, interviews, and dance to help us understand the powerful women in our collective past and present—especially those whose voices have been silenced by history’s (mostly male) gatekeepers and myth-makers. In our final week, we present cellist Nathan Whittaker.

Photo credit: Chuck Moses

Click image to view, For All Our Sisters: Interview with Nathan Whittaker Seattle Baroque Orchestra cellist, Nathan Whittaker, speaks about his reasons for selecting the music of lesser known composer Imogen Holst for the For All Our Sisters project and reflects on ways white men can offer women and people of color space for their voices to be heard in the music world.

Click image to view, For All Our Sisters: Cellist Nathan Whittaker introduces and performs the Poco adagio movement from Imogen Holst’s Fall of the Leaf, based on a sixteenth-century tune.

JENNIFER BULLIS – PART 6

For All Our Sisters continues to weave together music, poetry, interviews, and dance to help us understand the powerful women in our collective past and present—especially those whose voices have been silenced by history’s (mostly male) gatekeepers and myth-makers. Each Friday in Clef Notes and through our social media channels, Early Music Seattle will be presenting For All Our Sisters. This week, we present Poet Jennifer Bullis.

Click image to view, For All Our Sisters: Interview with Claudia Castro Luna and Jennifer Bullis Washington State Poet Laureate, Claudia Castro Luna and poet and librettist Jennifer Bullis, speak to the power of poetry in overcoming barriers and offering people a voice in these turbulent times.

Click image to view, For All Our Sisters: Poet Jennifer Bullis describes her journey to understand the Sirens and let them be heard in her libretto for Aaron Grad’s cantata Honey-sweet we sing for you.

To view Part 1 through Part 6 of For All Our Sisters, click here

MILVIA PACHECO WITH DANIELLE SAMPSON & AARON GRAD – PART 5

Click image to view

For All Our Sisters: Composer Aaron Grad describes how he worked with soprano Danielle Sampson and flutist Janet See to create a socially-distanced improvisation with dancer and theater artist Milvia Pacheco.

Click image to view

For All Our Sisters: On this Rocky Island performed by Milvia Pacheco

“I believe in movement as a life generator, as an open door of depth change in our being, I dance because through dance I discovered the transforming power of movement.” ~ Milvia Pacheco

Dancer and theater artist Milvia Pacheco performs with the socially-distanced sounds of soprano Danielle Sampson and flutist Janet See. In separate recordings, Danielle and Janet improvised on themes from Honey-sweet we sing for you, the cantata by Aaron Grad and Jennifer Bullis that reimagines the Sirens myth from a female perspective. Aaron then merged their recordings into a new electronic composition.

DANIELLE SAMPSON & AARON GRAD – PART 4

Soprano Danielle Sampson joins composer and electric theorbo player Aaron Grad in an excerpt arranged from his cantata Honey-sweet we sing for you, a re-telling of the Sirens myth from their perspective.

JANET SEE – PART 3

Janet See, highly accomplished baroque and early classical flute soloist, shares stories about the path and opportunities that led her to become a successful musician and contrasts this with the challenges her mother faced expressing her creative voice in the 1950’s. View interview with Betsy Brick, EMS’s development direct and Janet See below.

Video Player

VIDEOS:
Click here, Flutist Janet See discuss the music and mythology in Debussy’s flute solo Syrinx, as well as the personal journey that went into transferring this work to the Baroque flute.

Click here, Flutist Janet See performs Debussy’s Syrinx on a one-key flute.

CLAUDIA CASTRO LUNA – PART 2

Click image to view Interview with Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna and poet and librettist Jennifer Bullis, speak to the power of poetry in overcoming barriers and offering people a voice in these turbulent times.

Click to view Claudia Castro Luna’s reading of her poem, Bowed Seas

Bowed Seas

Women have chanted
across the ages
the same songs
songs of milk and bloom
of water and salt
laughing songs
and songs of longing
and belonging
chants spun
from skeins of light
from cords of wood

Across the ages
women have
chanted what they know,
an anthology of suffering
in antiquity some sang
from a Greek island
their voices widening azure seas,
on a plaza in Buenos Aires
they sang with their feet
around and around
the island that became
Plaza de Mayo
marching for their disappeared
sons and daughters,
in Rwandan villages
the length of 100 days
that became an island
of genocide
women howled
for mercy, a cry
the rest of the world
took too long to heed

Across the ages
bird women, fish women,
mad women, whose women?
most often
women not for themselves
singing on islands
kept to themselves
then again,
no matter the weather
women also singing
a catalog of joys
songs of rising bread
songs of the mind’s wild fruits
songs of a certain beloved
rainbow and of glories after rain
songs of budding breasts
and of wombs tender
with planets stirring within

When their sorrow
obscures the sky
other women will rise
when their holler
reaches the moon
other women will rise
voices of the same river
same hands leaning in
across the ages
water of eyes
water of blood
birth water,
tides that bind
bowed seas

~ Claudia Castro Luna

AARON GRAD – PART 1

Interview
Local composer Aaron Grad shares the inspiration behind his work and pays tribute to the women in his life who have encouraged him to see it from a new perspective.

Click image to view interview with Betsy Brick (EMS Development Director) and Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad: “Both Sides Now”

Click here to hear, composer Aaron Grad introduce For All Our Sisters and perform an electric theorbo arrangement of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”

Category: For All Our Sisiters