Composing Parenthood
When you’re a composer like me, every life change and every person in one’s life represents a potential source of inspiration.
My wife, Shana, and I welcomed our newborn son, Gerald, in the very early morning on Friday, November 5. Gerald is our second child, and, so far, he is sweet, calm, and as accommodating to his parents as we could hope for. Our first son, Isaac, was born in February 2020, about a month before the COVID-19 pandemic ‘got real’ and his isolated childhood began. Even though only a couple of days have passed since Shana and I returned home with Gerald, Isaac has already shown himself to be an attentive and caring older brother.
When you’re a composer like me, every life change and every person in one’s life represents a potential source of inspiration. Almost all of the music I’ve written in the last 5-7 years draws on personal relationships and experiences. As someone who essentially became a new parent at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, childcare has been a wonderful and dominant part of my life over the last 21 months. Now is the perfect time for me to pursue a new musical project that will allow me to explore and reflect on the incredible joys and trials of parenthood.
I have a track record of writing pieces about other new additions to my extended family. My niece, Noa, was born in 2017, and my experiences babysitting her served as the inspiration for my aleatoric marimba duo, Noa, which I composed for Christopher Froh and Mayumi Hama as part of my participation in the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy for Music’s inaugural year. In March 2020, my other niece, Talia (Noa’s sister), was born, and I also marked her arrival with a percussion piece, Talia/Talea, that was also motivated by a partnership with GLFCAM, this time resulting in a solo vibraphone work for Joel M. Ross.
These works honoring and inspired by my nieces — Noa and Talia/Talea — draw on facets of their lives and my experience with them in different ways. Most prominent of these frameworks is the conversion of numbers from the time and date of my niece’s birth into different musical materials, such as interval classes. For example, in Talia/Talea, the persistent rhythmic pattern (shown below, the work’s ‘talea’, so to speak) uses groupings of 2 and 3 eighth notes because my niece Talia’s birthday was March 23, 2020.
Now that I am a father of two, I feel compelled to capture aspects of the transformative experience of parenthood in a new composition, or a new set of pieces. I came close to writing a piece about Isaac for saxophonist Jacob Swanson of Decho Ensemble during the summer of 2020, but, despite Jacob’s supportive collaboration, it was not the right time. I wrote a different new piece in 2020 — a substantial chamber concerto for percussionist Cameron Leach entitled This Could Be Madness, which will be premiered in the spring — which reflects my experience as a new father in a less direct way. The concerto’s title recognizes the arguable absurdity of writing a large work at such a volatile time in my personal life and more broadly, specifically with respect to the delays the COVID-19 pandemic has caused to live performances around the world (appropriately, the world premiere has already been rescheduled three times!).
When Shana and I were expecting Isaac, I recorded a group podcast with a few of the other parents in the Adjective New Music Composer Collective, of which I am a member, to discuss the challenges I should expect balancing my composing with new parenthood. The most consistent warning my colleagues gave me was not to expect to write anything for the first year of our new child’s life. Obviously, I defied them with This Could Be Madness, and my plans for this new work about Isaac and Gerald similarly violates their advice, though the scale and goals of my forthcoming composition project are much more modest. Unlike the percussion concerto, this nascent piece, or set, has no ambitious deadlines, nor do I plan another collaboration that could prove difficult to realize in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
As I discussed in my last blog post, one of my current artistic goals is strengthening my voice with self-produced electronic music, and this new project will explore this format. Earlier in Shana’s pregnancy with Gerald, I recorded a short improvisation inspired by the sound of his heartbeat over the fetal monitor. I was able to record Isaac’s heartbeat during one of our appointments in 2019, and anyone who has had children in the age of fetal monitoring know how important keeping track of a baby’s heartbeat is throughout the pregnancy, labor, and delivery. I envision one of the movements in this new work about parenthood will overlay evolving modular synthesis patterns that carry the pulse of Isaac’s and Gerald’s respective heartbeats.
In general, I expect this work to mostly featuring interweaving, contapuntal lines that draw on our sons’ interactions over the coming months. Another concrete idea I have at this point involves using the print-out of one of Shana’s non-stress tests from her pregnancy with Gerald as a graphic score. As you can see in the image below (and the image at the top of this post), there are two distinct lines and other intermittent visual elements that I can use to base three distinct musical layers. Although I plan on using a host of software and hardware elements to make this music, I have already imagined and audiated polyphonic melodies based on this visual score and the melodic sounds I have explored to this point with my Neutron.
As time passes in our parenting of Isaac and Gerald, I know new experiences will emerge that will form the basis for one or two other movements, rounding out the rest of this piece. I am excited to get started creating this music, and I can’t wait to discuss it more here and share it with all of you!
