swimming in deep waters
when drifting isn’t so bad after all, i.e., a bit about autotheory
Summer is more than halfway over, and my early mid-life crisis pre-tenure brain can’t decide whether it has become a brick or a neatly congealed pyrex of jello. Like every self-conscious, overworked millennial, I’ve been trying to keep my distance from the apps, partly out of concern for the well-being of my brick-or-jello brain and partly out of boredom from the constant stream of colleagues’ promoting their latest [insert professional achievement here]. Where did all the interesting content go?! She cried, melting into a cliché as she scrolled frantically through the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine.
Summer is more than halfway over, and my ennui is in full swing.
you up? you out?
Earlier this month, Patrick and I drove down to Pennsylvania—a little work meets pleasure—since I had been invited to give a masterclass at a new-ish chamber music residency program in the little town of Kimberton. The program is run by Robert Martin, founder and former director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, at the Kimberton Hills Camphill Village: a 400+ acre “intentional community” that is a cross between a new age commune and a care facility for individuals experiencing varying degrees of developmental disabilities. After retiring from his Bard position, Bob moved to Kimberton Hills to work pro-bono as its director of development in exchange for living on the idyllic grounds.
Aside from the usual eyebrow-raising ideas (in Camphill’s case, Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy), the community is quite impressive: nearly all the residents (abled caretakers and disabled “villagers”) contribute some work, whether working in the cafe, dairy, farm, orchard, woodshop, or craft center. Some of the output is sold to the public as a way of generating profit, but the village relies mainly on donors for its upkeep (enter someone like Bob). In addition to general development, Bob seems keen to start more robust programs connecting music and disability activism, as well as raising separate funds for a concert series and young artist chamber music residency program. For many reasons, I have a feeling I will return to Kimberton Hills in future years.
So, Patrick and I enjoyed our weekend in the country with Sherry (our host, also long-term resident and a rather fervent follower of Rudolf Steiner), Bob, his wife Katherine, their dogs (Wimzy, in particular), and the musicians Mia and Aimee. We admired some Cézannes at the Barnes Foundation, enjoyed summer sausages and cider at Excursion Ciders, visited the OG Whole Foods in Kimberton (apparently sued unsuccessfully by Whole Foods), and hiked around some waterfalls at the Finger Lakes.
Since last Wednesday, I have been idling at my in-laws’ cottage on Lake Huron, just outside the small town of Tobermory. Early in my relationship with Patrick, I discovered that middle-class (mostly white) Canadians must cottage, meaning they take up diverse water activities (canoeing, hiking, etc.) and develop a robust appetite for any and all land abutting water. After ten years with Patrick, I have self-cannibalized my (sub)urban proclivities and learned to swim in cold freshwater lakes, albeit with much hesitation.
There is a small cove here that is our favorite place to swim, which is only accessible by foot or bike (or by boat) and not marked on Google maps. On a sunny day, the water is clear and gorgeous, and the likelihood of sharing the beach with other people is usually very small. I’m afraid this cove will change if cars are allowed to drive in, but as I commented to Patrick, maybe that anxiety is as much about the environment as it is about my increasingly acute confrontation with aging and loss.
I like that Driftwood Cove is semiotically rich in that way.
the aquafabulist
An aquafabulist is my neologism for “a storyteller of water.” It could also be misheard as a reference to aquafaba, perhaps to mean “one who loves chickpea water,” or maybe it could be the title of a Eurodance song, “Aquafabulous.”
I have a fraught relationship with water. My birthstone is aquamarine; my horoscope sign is Pisces (if you’re into that). I was told as a child that I had a personality like water: sensitive to changes in my environment, easily influenced by stronger forces. I picked up regional accents wherever I moved, my handwriting somehow always morphed to look more like that of whichever harp teacher I was studying with.
After my first birthday, I accidentally drowned in my parents’ backyard swimming pool. My mother found me unconscious, floating face down in the water and my little dress fanned out like a lily pad. Apparently, I nearly died that day. I developed a pathological fear of water, to the point that I needed to be therapy scaffolded into swimming in deeper waters. On my first day of junior competitive swimming practice, I cried and refused to get into the water, opting to be viciously spanked by my mother for my stubborn disobedience.
My older sister was the better swimmer; her coach told us that she had potential for the Olympics. I, on the other hand, was plagued by weak lungs, likely congenital or related to my accident. When she quit competitive swimming because music became too demanding, I conveniently said I wanted to quit, too.
Every day at the cottage, I wake up to the sound of water. When the tide is low, the house is maybe 40 feet from the water. In high tide, my father-in-law contemplates sandbags. Patrick says to not swim on windy days because the waves can be dangerously strong, yet when I look out today, the water is lovely and blue, and I am tempted to swim despite watching the white caps rolling at a steady clip. My primordial fear of drowning mutes the urge.
How does one approach the way art thinks in its own terms without drowning the art in theory? (Critchley)
Instead, I stay indoors and do a safe activity (reading about autotheory), where I am instead comforted by Maggie Nelson saying:
“I like sliding through a text that is beyond me. I mean, you could read Deleuze and Guattari your entire lifetime, and depending on your knowledge bank, get something different out of it each time. Ditto Barthes. That kind of depth of field is fascinating to me, and it often derives from a writer drawing upon many registers at once (psychoanalytic, scientific, mathematical, literary, and so on). Not many people are going to have mastery of all these field—you just have to get used to swimming in waters that are way, way over your head, to enjoying the unfathomable deeps.”
waters way over my head
When I started getting into cultural theory in grad school, I felt simultaneously enamored and intimidated by these extremely dense texts—not unlike harboring a crush on someone way out of your league. I remember spending the summer of 2018 in Urbana pouring over Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, wondering how on earth I would apply terms like “intra-action” and “agential cut” and “posthumanist performativity” to a piece of harp music. Seven summers later, I still don’t really know whether my dissertation amounted to anything (not that it matters anyway), but the process of digesting thick language has stuck. This thick language, this deep and murky water, keeps me wondering and wading through the everyday of making music, teaching, and living.
This morning, during a brief text conversation with my friend and fellow harpist Parker, we got onto the topic of teaching. I mentioned to him that 8 out of 10 young harpists I encounter, whether pre-college, college-aged, or early career, tell me that they only want to play in an orchestra. Parker, who has chosen to focus his career on prestige (mostly solo harp) projects with well-heeled composers, acerbically responded that “orchestra is a fiction.”
I agree, in the sense that orchestras take up way too space in the imaginations of young harpists, given that livable wage orchestra jobs comprise a small percentage of all possible vocations in music and an even smaller percentage, if even any, in the development of impactful artistic movements and ideas (pop artists seem to dominate in that regard). There ought to be a more honest distinction between making art and making a living—not that one cannot make a living from art or that art is sullied by money. But making art is almost always inefficient because it requires deep thought, care, and time. To maximize its profitability is to minimize its inefficiency, to milk it for all its worth, and to say, what can I get out of it?
Or, what can it get out of me?
“At first glance you might assume [autotheory] refers to building a theory of the self, but what Nelson’s up to is something more like deploying her own experience as an engine for thinking that spins out into the world and backwards and forwards in time.” (Lorentzen)
Autotheoretical music is not the same as identity-based music. What I usually hate about identity-based art is its facile representational surface, its glossiness reflecting any absence of curiosity and depth. It is easy for me to be an Asian-American woman musician (after all, I can’t un-be that) and present a recital program of music by Asian-American women composers. The connection is easy, lazy: microwave dinner for virtue-signaling presenters. That is not autotheoretical practice.
Perhaps the composer who comes most strongly to mind when I think of autotheoretical music is Pauline Oliveros: deeply philosophical in her work, interested in animating feminist phenomenological concepts through sound. It would again be easy enough for me to perform an Oliveros work as a kind of affinity performance (I like her ideas and want to embody them for others), but there would have to be some sort of intervention, something of myself that Oliveros passes through or that Oliveros becomes a citation for.
A simple way to imagine autotheory for musicians is through a loose barrage of interrogations: What am I thinking about? How am I engaging with a particular work? Why am I engaging with that work? How does my engagement with the work transform it in some way? How does my engagement with the work transform me? How do I present my answers in a tangible form for others to experience? How does the creation of that form change the way I think, see, feel?
The overwhelming presence of the letter “I” doesn’t denote narcissism per se. Yes, it is very much recognizing about the limitations presented by one’s fixed embodiment and location, which means it is about the tension of relationality. It is about demarcating “I” and “you,” so for you to read my “I” is to feel the discomfort of knowing you are not the only one who feels “I.”
I hope that more young (and seasoned) classical musicians will incorporate philosophical reflection into their artistic lives, even if it starts with dipping a toe in the shallow end. Perhaps that process, when combined with experimental practices, will engender new and interesting textures in the musical landscape, rather than letting that landscape be overrun by status quo and market forces.
That being said, I’ll just share that I am working on a new solo acoustic program called “The Flowers of Evil,” which is inspired by Baudelaire and my current preoccupation with the excesses of modernity (the mal du siècle) and the double-edged sword that the so-called “good life” dangles over our heads. As with “River of Heaven,” the music is actually quite enjoyable (a mix of late Romantic and contemporary works) but is underscored by persistent threads of death and loss (à la “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”). Is it also my take on a climate crisis program? Only time will tell.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with one of Baudelaire’s fleurs maladives:
Free man, you will always cherish the sea!
The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul
In the infinite unfolding of its swell
And your spirit is no less bitter a gulfYou love to plunge into the heart of your image
You hold it in your eyes and arms, and your heart
Sometimes forgets its own murmur
At the sound of this indomitable and savage lament- excerpt, “Man and Sea” (trans. Brown)
Until next time,
Noël 🎄
The Corner of Wondrous & Powerful
👂🏼 Lately I’ve been letting Thomas Köner’s soundscapes slosh through me:
📖 My cottage reads: À Rebours (Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysman (another fin-de-siècle writer of the French Decadence movement) and very slowly getting through Joseph Schumpeter’s (the “creative destruction” guy) dense AF Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
👀 Patrick and I rewatched a few episodes of Fawlty Towers, which hasn’t aged well in some places but! is still a very good classic farce.