Respite is a Burbling, Noisy Wind
Or, notes while I'm supposed to be on holiday but instead have busy thoughts as a woman trying to make music in a man's man's man's world
Inevitably, I am behind writing. Years of being a musician has taught me that discipline favors stability. But, that completely evaporates when uprooting oneself and two cats two to drive 20+ hours to another country to spend time with a long-distance partner. So, it has taken me about a week to collect my bearings (curiously, the same amount of time the cats have taken to adjust to their new surroundings) and feel ready to write again. This week, I've decided to share a bit about what has been going on lately, some things I'm working on, plus a shallow dive into the literary process behind my current research. It'll be a gentler feminism—my subtitle refers to the pressure to show certitude when you're a woman making music in a man's (man's man's) world.
salient updates (for those who care)
The spring semester is over, and now I can breathe! I cleaned my house! Mowed the lawn! Hung out with friends! Life is beautiful again!
At the end of the semester, I was quite surprised to receive a faculty award (for creativity activity/research), considering I am only year 2 into the job, i.e., lowly junior faculty. While I'm not sure the continuous burnout this past year was worth a plaque and a little bit of extra cash, it's still nice when others recognize your work. However, being raised in extremely meritocratic cultures (the nuclear combination of being a Chinese classical musician in academia) means I'm also highly self-conscious of the urge to do stuff for external validation. It's perfectly OK to faff around or feel like nothing monumental is happening in one's career. Maybe in year 3, I'll start asserting my right to be lazy.
Finally, I picked up my walnut harp in Chicago after a year of rehab (new neck and soundboard) at the Lyon & Healy factory. Not surprisingly, it has lost its old sound, which makes me a little sad, but the soundboard had been separating for a while. Despite the board getting an epoxy treatment from the beloved John Papadolias (still crying over the fact that he's not doing regulations anymore), I was told that it would only hold for a few more years, and that replacing it now would *only* cost $9k since the disassembly cost would be covered by the neck repair warranty. 💸 💸 💸 All I can do now is try not to feel poor whilst keeping my fingers crossed that some of the old richness will come back as the wood ages…
the annual northern migration
Since starting my job at FSU, I have been returning to Ontario every summer for a few reasons:
To spend time with Patrick. Long distance is hard.
To keep my roots in Canada. I feel like I barely got to know the arts community when I was living here, mainly because the pandemic shut everything down and there were very few pathways to put myself out there. For all you Americans who think Canada is the land of milk and honey and universal healthcare and public arts grants, there is a lot of weird insular, nationalist gatekeeping to navigate in exchange for those goodies. Even after five years of being a Canadian PR, I feel like I'm still figuring things out and learning to circumvent some of that gatekeeping by finding my own opportunities. It's just a very slow, frustrating process.
So, my next step is applying for Canadian citizenship, which I'll finally be able to do this summer. Maybe in a few years, I'll be able to change my bio to “Taiwanese-Canadian-American harpist Noël Wan…” 😅
Meanwhile, I've been passing the time in rural Grey County, Ontario. My in-laws decided to move to the country after they retired, and they very generously let me stay with them while Patrick ekes out a freelancer's nomadic existence for another month. Their house sinks into a rocky hill, surrounded by 25 acres of re-wilded meadow and forest. When you look into the distance on a clear day, it's possible to glimpse a sliver of Georgian Bay. Winters here are terribly bleak (varying shades of brown and grey that never stop bleeding into each other), but the summers are verdant, almost perfectly blissful. I think about the relentless burn of the omg-I'm-going-to-get-skin-cancer, Florida sun. Here, the sun is fuel, not a flame; it feels benevolent, always tempered by the shade of maple trees and an evening breeze.
Better yet, it's quiet and isolated. Lately, I've been mostly off social media because scrolling feels incredibly inane after about 5 seconds. I've gotten bored of everyone (including myself) writing, “Huge congratulations to…!” and “I'm so excited to announce…!” or the endless videos of “Wearing vs. Styling” that have exploded all over my newsfeed (spoiler: the outfits aren't that different). Even the cat videos have started to all look the same (which says a lot). It's possible that this sentiment has bubbled from the slower pace of life, or perhaps due my recently finishing Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, or both.
In between practicing for some upcoming concerts, I've finally been able to catch up on some reading—one of my nourishing activities. Admittedly, the stack I brought with me from Florida is a trifle ambitious, but who knows? Maybe I can get through 75% of it by the end of August.
in media res
What I love about reading, especially theoretical and literary pieces, is learning new things that I can archive in my mind to withdraw at a later point, typically when I am working on a new project (a recital program, a research topic, a performance concept). Every time I pick up a novel, a story, or an essay, I feel the heady anticipation of conceptual synthesis—assembling a particular collection of archived ideas—but also the possibility of being totally floored by some beautiful rhetorical expression, or perhaps being poked and prodded by a new interpretative angle to a familiar text, or better yet, being able to just wallow in a certain syntactical sequence.
Take, for example, the essay “On Edge” by Nathaniel Mackey, an incisive text about the cutting edge (in the sense of the avant and, literally, the edge that cuts) of speech and of word. He's mainly commenting on the tradition of Black literacy, particularly against the notion that orality (and specific types of orality) comprises the Black linguistic originary. However, the essay's message is beside the point; I started “On Edge” unintentionally, mostly because I had been trying to figure out the meaning of Mackey's term “sexual cut” (still trying to figure that out), which Fred Moten cites abundantly in Black and Blur, and went down a Mackey rabbit hole. At the end, the essay quotes “Manifesto of the Unborn State of Exile” by Guyanese writer Wilson Harris,
Language alone can express (in a way which goes beyond any physical or vocal attempt) the sheer—the ultimate “silent” and ”immaterial” complexity or arousal … the original grain or grains of language cannot be trapped or proven. It is the sheer mystery—the impossibility of trapping its own grain—on which poetry lives and thrives. And this is the stuff of one's essential understanding of the reality of the original Word.
the Word was made flesh
My brain started to go, Ding! Ding! Ding! and immediately something else floated to foreground of my memory:
In the beginning was the Word
And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us
Of course, I remembered both the order and the entirety of the verses (John 1:1, 14 KJV) incorrectly because I am an extremely lapsed evangelical. But, the phrase “the Word was made flesh” rang so persistently in my head after reading “On Edge,” because as a [pseudo-]scholar of feminist theory, I'm constantly over-pondering materialisms and phenomenology and whatever. (Patrick can attest that yesterday, I said to him, “I'm obsessed with the word ‘flesh.’” There is something unctuous about the word when said aloud: flllleshhhhh.)
Often when these connections happen, they are less about the meaning of the original material; I'm not really concerned with hermeneutics. I've been through enough church to know what “the Word was made flesh” is supposed to mean. What's miles more interesting is thinking about what it could mean, especially in the twin contexts of reading Mackey (political, poetic significance of the Word) and being a feminist materialist (political, philosophical significance of the flesh). I haven't had enough time to come up with any well-developed explanations, but man, does it give me something to mull over during my next flight.
What I am moving toward is how all this relates to my ongoing musical process/struggle as I start to explore practices outside practicing. As I've mentioned in an earlier post, I am working on some very new creative material this summer/fall, mostly because I feel compelled to better integrate my theoretical research with practical work. For those who are (still) reading this and don't know what I research: I study how a performer's social identity—mainly gender—emerges and is constantly negotiated through/within experimental artistic practices involving external, material environments and elements (e.g., instruments, stage objects, performance spaces, other bodies). I am interested in affect and subjectivity (how the performer vs. how the listener/viewer experiences a performance) and the social identity of sounds, which comes from my background as a harpist; the harp is constantly coded feminine, both visually and aurally, and indexes what I interpret as stereotypical female service labor (calming, in the background, beautiful, pleasant to look at).
For the past 6 years, I've been trying to enflesh the harp, to understand how its physicality, its material-political-social relations, and its embodied practices inflect and drive an ongoing, complex cultural narrative about the instrument. As a performer, though, what I did with/at the harp has always been the driving force behind how I thought about the harp. But, things have reached the point where the way I think about the harp has exceeded what I'm doing with it, so I feel like I have to restart the whole research process but in reverse.
So, what does that look like? Well, the body (flesh, matter, object) is where I am inclined to start. My medium will probably be electronic/electro-acoustic, since that allows me to engage with other theory I'm currently into, like transcorporeality and posthumanism. Vibration and resonance are fundamental to the harp's sound, but I like the idea of passing them through ideas like memory and imagination, kind of in a Mark Fisher-y hauntological way (I listened to a lot of Burial two years ago). Getting the harp to be absolutely fucking loud is also on my to-do list. Ha ha! Take that, Apple Music Classical Sleep playlist!
A snippet of one of my projects (a cut up and processed recording of my transcription of Ives’ "The Alcotts”)
Sitting in this quiet house in the countryside, I've decided to spend my time listening to a lot of music and working on small sound projects, learning what I like to hear and what I feel drawn to create. It's nice to feel a little lost; to develop a new process; to figure out how to wash, rinse, and repeat differently; to root around in the archives for material I forgot I remembered.
live long & prosper,
✨ Noël Éternel 🎅🏼 🎄
This week's Corner of Wondrous & Powerful
Reading [in progress]: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City. An entirely unintentional pairing.
Listening: Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972. My current preoccupation with distortion is absolutely 100% due to listening to a lot of Tim Hecker.
Watching: Pressure Point (1962) with Sidney Poitier. The racial commentary in this movie is very strange and jarring. However, there's a riveting scene in which the American Nazi actually gives an insightful critique of the racial politics of US liberal democracy (basically, being a Black patriot is pointless because American patriotism is racist).
just stopped by to say thanks for your writing and that Invisible Cities is (well, to me) just one of the best books ever ;)