Art of Interference
S2E2 BREATH
Transcript
LK: Lutz Koepnick
EV: Emma Vendetta
MB: Molly Barth
TH: Tori Hoover
CS: Camila Sposati
PB: Priya Balakrishnan
Introduction
LK:
What you just heard is Molly Barth performing a brief passage from Kristina Wolfe’s recent composition Listening to the Wind.
EV
Molly is an amazing and very engaging flute player, and in today’s episode of Art of Interference we will talk at some length with her about her instrument,
LK:
. . . the relationship between music and the natural world,
EV:
. . . and how she uses her performances, her music, to express the precarious role of air, of breathing, in our contemporary world of climate change.
LK:
Good air and healthy lungs are surely nothing we can take for granted anymore. Just think of the devasting effects the pandemic had for people’s breathing or the importance breath, the right to breathe, has taken on in the Black Lives Matter movement . . .
EV:
. . . or of course the impact of recent wildfires, the deterioration of the atmosphere due to climate change, on inhaling healthy air.
LK:
Molly needs to work hard to ensure her lungs meet the demands of her instrument. It takes a lot of skill and ingenuity to play the flute like Molly. But it also requires plenty of stamina, of sheer physical exercise:
MB:
I do feel like I’m an athlete. I have to treat myself as an athlete. I think a lot about how much water I take in. I don’t drink coffee, in large part because it would dry out my lips too much. And I run, I bike, I hike, I walk. I absolutely need to have strong, healthy lungs to play the flute.
LK:
You are a musician yourself, Emma. Did you ever play the flute?
EV:
No, no, I have always been more attracted to string instruments, the violin, the guitar, the piano. In elementary school, our teacher made us play the recorder in middle school. I’m pretty sure the sole purpose of that was to convince us we all had at least one musical bone in our bodies. What about you, Lutz?
LK:
Well, I actually did play the recorder.
EV:
What!?
LK:
—all kinds of recorders—for many years when I was younger, played it in various orchestras, performed the usual baroque pieces, dabbled with very challenging twenty-century compositions.
EV:
Nice!
LK:
Unlike your typical elementary school kid, for me the recorder was something that transported me to other places, to other times.
EV:
But you didn’t graduate to the flute?
LK:
No, I didn’t. Not sure why. There is so much great music that has been written for the flute, old and experimental.
EV:
True, and as we’ll hear from Molly today, it’s also a beautiful instrument to practice the art of listening—listening to your own breath, listening to the voice of others, listening to the world that surrounds us, the wind, the movements of the air, the songs of the non-human or more-than-human world.
LK:
Good listening is a rare commodity as good breathing is these days. We all complain about being out of breath, being breathless, because we are no longer able to catch up with the speed of our present, the never-ending flow of information, the whirlwinds of consumption.
EV:
And all of this, of course, also makes good, patient listening, listening to or listening with others, ever more difficult.
LK:
Right. Molly Barth, our guest for this episode certainly has a thing or two to say about this, the relation of healthy breathing and good listening, and how climate change—the extractivist speed of the West—puts much of this on the line.
EV:
Molly is a Grammy-award winning flute player. She is as passionate about performing classical chamber arrangements as she is about playing contemporary pieces by composers such as Kristina Wolfe
EV:
What unifies her work is her relentless intensity, a sense of focus and commitment, of exuberance and virtuosity, that literally makes you hold your breath when seeing her on stage. And then reassess how music and breath, sound and listening, connect and reconnect us with this precarious world.
LK:
And aside of all this, Molly is also a much-adored teacher, a flute professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music, whose students deeply appreciate her boldness, but also her demands to speak and think clearly about what they do when enriching our breathless world with song.
TH:
From Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, this is Art of Interference: a podcast about creative responses to climate change. In each episode, we talk with artists and experts who work at the intersection of nature, technology, and science today.
Today’s episode is hosted by Emma Vendetta and Lutz Koepnick.
PART 1
LK:
The ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch once talked about a type of grass that, when swaying in the wind, produced sweet and harmonious sounds. He called that grass “flute.” Ever since, we have associated the flute with the power to evoke the wind, to be close to the realm of nature. Countless paintings of the past feature the flute as a shepherd’s instrument, a medium to communicate with animals and fill long hours spent under open skies. So, I was curious to hear whether the flute for Molly Barth, with all the formal training, technique, and athleticism it takes to be a good flute player, is still something close to the realm of nature.
MB:
I think so. I mean, the flute goes back 60, 000 years. The old bone flute that was discovered. I feel very connected to it. Many other instruments have, have more of a point of resistance on the mouth than the flute has, and comparing the voice and the flute, it’s very apt. It’s very direct. I practice singing and playing every day, singing and playing simultaneously. It helps to open my throat up and it is very direct connection.
LK:
You often play in outdoor settings.
MB:
I do.
LK:
And, recently you performed in Oregon at Crater Lake.
MB:
I love taking in the sounds around me, as long as they’re natural sounds and in Crater Lake that was just a wonderful opportunity. I did play solo music. I played a very crazy piece by David Lang called Thorn. It’s a very loud piece, attention grabbing piece.
LK:
It’s breathtaking for you. It’s also breathtaking for me to just, just listen.
MB:
I like playing outdoors because often the people that are outdoors don’t expect to hear a concert, so it’s an audience that wouldn’t necessarily be in the concert hall. When I was at Crater Lake, I was performing with the Brit Festival Orchestra, which is a summer orchestra based in Jacksonville, Oregon. And the music director, Teddy Abrams, had this incredible vision to bring together the Brit Festival Orchestra, the Klamath Tribal Unit, the National Park System, and that in itself was a very monumental occasion. Michael Gordon—
LK:
whose composition called Natural History celebrated its world premiere in 2016 at the rim of Crater Lake with Molly being one of the musicians–
MB:
Michael Gordon is a tremendous composer who spent many hours, many days, out in Crater Lake taking in the sounds of nature, incorporating those sounds into this orchestral work. And so he had a percussion ensemble pretending to be those little click beetles that exist out there. He had a choir mimicking the sounds of nature. And then the orchestra and the Klamath tribal unit with this huge, very, very powerful drum.
LK:
You’ve also done this other performance in Oregon, Philippe Hurel’s Loops.
MB: Yes.
LK:
At Mackenzie Pass, it’s a surreal, extraterrestrial kind of landscape, and we have you there playing in what is a pretty eccentric costume. What’s going on in that performance?
MB:
That was an incredible collaboration between an art professor at the University of Oregon. His name is Jack Ryan. And he created this very odd magical looking mask that surrounded my face. And he took many images of my face and placed them one side by side, the other. So I couldn’t actually play my flute. I’ve actually recorded the audio prior, and then I go out and I essentially move my fingers to the music that I hear over a Bluetooth speaker. And so I couldn’t actually play the flute in that instance because this mask was keeping the flute a good foot away from my mouth. That was in July and there was still snow and the lava flows. It was a beautiful, beautiful experience. High altitude.
LK:
If you perform at these high altitudes or in climates other than the one that you have typically in your studio or in, in auditoria, how does that change the play of your instrument?
MB:
Performing at a high altitude is a difficult experience, but if I have more viscerally captivating breaths because I’m in a high altitude, so be it. That’s, that’s the environment in which I’m playing it on that given day. When I’m giving a performance in a high-altitude setting, I need to arrive a day or two earlier than I otherwise would. Because I cannot make it through big phrases. I lose maybe one third of my breath capacity. So I need to build that back up. I definitely watch very carefully what I eat and drink, and I go for walks and runs and make sure that I feel healthy.
Air quality is a huge issue with wind instruments. For five years in a row, the Brit Festival Orchestra had to either truncate or cancel their summer series because of wildfires in Oregon. Unionized orchestras have, for good reason, air quality index capstones. the musicians are not permitted to play when the air gets to a certain bad quality. Global warming is real and it does affect how we can perform both indoors and outdoors.
INTERFERENCE 1
EV:
Alright, let’s take a break and catch our breath for a moment here.
LK:
Always a good idea.
EV:
Breath really seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. So many people go to Yoga studios to do breath work. Prana-yama, the practice of breath regulation, in Sanskrit literally combines the words for “life energy” and “control.” Or “extension.” And most of it is all about reducing the frequency of your in- and exhalation, to hold your breath, lengthen its patterns.
EV:
You know, there are really so many interesting artists who work with breath to address, or refocus, our relation to the world, the environment. For instance, there is Camila Sposati’s Breath Pieces, a series of interventions and performances done last year in Stuttgart, Germany. Sposati is a Brazilian artist. Her work often draws on indigenous practices and cosmologies. In Stuttgart, she first drilled a number of deep holes into the ground, stuck organ-like pipes into the Earth to make music with the planet, to play for the earth as Sposati herself calls it:
CS:
Play for the earth. So you just have the mouthpiece that you access the earth or communicate with the earth through your own breath. So you have three mouth pieces and then individually the person can play and communicate to the core of the earth which is 3,400 kilometers under us.
EV:
Sposati used dirt from these holes to paint the walls of a nearby gallery in which she exhibited various strange wind instruments, in all shapes and sizes, some circular, some looking like snakes, some with multiples openings for more than one player.
LK:
Were people able to play these in the gallery?
EV:
No. no. I think it was more of a “look, don’t touch” scenario, but they did arrange several performances during which community members could play them, some of them trying to coordinate their breaths on one and the same instrument to perform what Sposati calls “breath guided dialogue”.
LK:
This really sounds intriguing, but, well, these performers probably still have some way to go to play in unison.
EV:
But that’s the whole point, Lutz. The whole thing is about what it takes, to explore the time and space we require, to attune different voices, different wills, different entities to each other.
LK:
I like that.
EV:
In Sposati’s project, breath is what we share with each other, but also what connects us to the non-human or larger-than-human world. It’s what unites us.
LK:
How about the work of Siobhán McDonald. She is an Irish artist based in Dublin and works a lot with natural materials, withdrawing them from their cycles of generation, growth and decay. In 2020 she created Breathe, a multi-platform project that, in her own words, “responds to the broader context of air and how our breathing has changed due to the long process of human evolution and the fact that everything breathes, and everything is interconnected through breath.”
EV:
Sounds ambitious.
LK:
It is. But it is also deeply moving, quite literally. McDonald weaves together narratives of studies in human breath, medicine, and plant life to explore different ideas of coexistence. The resulting film features various sound recordings, chronophotographic images of plant growth, x-ray movies of human lungs at work, all set to a 3-minute composition by sound artist David Stalling that incorporates plant, tree, and human breath.
EV: So breath, for McDonald, is symbiotic.
LK: It expresses the kinship between humans and their environments, humans and plant life. After seeing this work, I feel I will never breathe the same again.
EV:
Which is of course what all good art does.
LK:
I wonder what would happen if you paired McDonald or Sposati with Molly Barth.
EV:
A respiratory festival, I suppose.
LK:
Interference at its best.
PART 2
LK:
Good air—good inhalation, good exhalation—are hard to come by today. The EPA’s Air Quality Index, or AQI, now reports local air quality numbers—the amount of pollutants in our environment—on every weather app of our mobile phones.
EV:
I check it every morning.
LK:
So do I. Climate change impacts air quality, as much as bad air quality adds to human-induced climate change. During the summer of 2023, Quebec wildfires generated AQI values well into the 300s in the upper Midwest and New England, numbers that indicate hazardous breathing conditions.
EV:
You really shouldn’t go out on days like that.
LK:
And seal your window. On the EPA’s color-coded scale, we have now entered not the orange, not even the red or purple, but the maroon bracket. There’s none beyond that.
EV:
And the extractive economies that make air so unbreathable – they also make for a more breathless life, don’t they? It’s the same kind of mentality that keeps us constantly moving, constantly working. And I have a hunch, really, that the noise of this age actually makes it harder for us to listen to each other, too. What do you think?
LK:
The more our breathing deteriorates, I think, the more we find ourselves out of breath, the less we are able to listen to others. Is that what you mean?
EV:
Yes. Literally and figuratively, right?
LK:
We should ask one of our colleagues in the science departments how to study this: this correlation between good breathing and good listening, which of course is also a correlation between open-mindedness and going with the flow.
EV:
Yeah, we should ask our colleagues in the sciences. But in the arts, as well. It turns out Molly Barth has some clear thoughts on this.
LK:
She really does.
++++++
LK
This was another passage from Kristina Wolfe’s Listening to the Wind, the piece we heard already at the beginning of today’s program. Wolfe is a Danish American composer, an experimental sound artist and ecologist. Her work explores all kinds of resonances between the human and the non-human world. And as it turns out she also is friend of Molly’s.
MB:
Performing music written by friends is the most magical thing in the world to do. My collaborations with composers allow me to get to know those composers as people, and then I can express their music all the better.
LK:
One aspect that I find fascinating about Listening to The Wind—and some other pieces is that it starts very quietly, builds up slowly, as if flute and breath have to find each other to make sound in the first place. In the collaborative joint performance of Julia Wolf’s Oxygen, also of 2021, you have 12 musicians who all perform a piece together, and before they ever actually touch their flute they breathe on stage?
MB:
Well, Julie Wolf is, by the way, not related to Christina Wolf. This was written during the pandemic, where oxygen became an issue and we realized that every breath in us is a very treasured commodity. It was a commission by the National Flute Association for 12 flutes, and 12 flute ensembles were assigned to premiere this piece all at the same time. So we premiered it in different areas of the world. And once all of those 12 flute ensembles premiered their own regional premieres, all 144 flute players of these 12, 12 member ensembles got together and we premiered the piece together in Chicago, Illinois, at the National Flute Association Convention.
LK:
Has anyone ever seen that many flutists on one stage?
MB:
The National Flute Association has mounted other efforts to get that many flute players on stage, but usually it’s to do more of a piece that’s very, very simple that we can convene and just have fun playing. But this was a piece that took tremendous effort, tremendous practice time for each of the ensembles, and then coming together to hear the experience of all these flute players in one room certainly required time to adapt to that sensation.
LK:
And this is not an easy piece, right? At times, the 12 play with each other, at times they seem to play against each other, in a setting that is very unusual. 12 flute players at once is not something we, we often encounter in concert settings. Is that challenging?
MB:
Flute players are trained to breathe, I’d say in a similar enough way, that when we are preparing our own parts, our breath is treated, I’m not going to say exactly the same, we’re all human beings, we have many differences, but we can anticipate the amount of air and the amount of energy required to mount certain phrases. And so I think when we’re playing a piece together and we’re feeling the same energy in, in the middle of a piece, our breath can feel fairly collective.
LK:
I love this idea of a kind of collective experience of breathing.
MB:
I had a very It was a really interesting experience in an airplane with a percussionist who was blind, and he played in an orchestra, and it was a, it was a nice one of those conversations in an airplane that you don’t necessarily expect to have, but you feel enriched at the end. He listened to the breath of those around him in order to come in appropriately with an orchestra. But for a blind person to play in a symphony orchestra where there is a conductor on stage but he can’t see that conductor, it was pretty powerful to think about how air is what he uses to play with these other people on stage.
LK:
For a composer to be a good listener is certainly an expectation, but maybe not something that is often talked about. For a performer to be a good listener is probably also a precondition to really achieve what you have achieved. Can you talk a bit about the importance of listening to your practice?
MB:
As a performer, it’s essential to have a good technical sense for the instrument. So when I’m practicing, I’m listening to every note. How did I start that note? How does that note move to the next note? So I’m thinking about the beginning, middle, and end of the note. I’m thinking about how much air I’m using. What is the dynamic of that note? What is the spin of that note? Am I using vibrato or not? How does my breath sound? The idea of breathing is central to the piece. So loud breaths contribute to the energy of the piece. But in much of the music that I perform, downplaying the sound of, of breathing is important, trying to make the breath. understated is important. So listening to all of those things is extremely important. I think that as a teacher, I listen more than ever and talk less and encourage my students to think very hard about what they’re doing and how they’re listening to themselves and to others. So it is, it is something that we need to hold on to in our society.
INTERFERENCE 2
EV:
A little while ago, Lutz recommended this book by journalist James Nestor called Breath: The New Science of the Lost Art. In pursuit of expanding research on breathing, Nestor participates in a Stanford study where his nose is intentionally stopped up, forcing him to breathe only through his mouth. The results? Not good. Sleep apnea, increased snoring, and dismal mental health for James Nestor and the other subjects.
Nestor’s nose was plugged for just 10 days, but his book is a result of over 10 years of research. In Breath, he details the slow shift from natural nose-breathing to modern mouth-breathing, an unfortunate reality for about half of us, which can come with asthma, allergies, and autoimmune disease. This health-harming phenomenon strays from millennia of breath practice and knowledge, like the ancient books of the Chinese Tao, the Hindu belief that breath is spirit, and the historic Grecian tradition of free-diving. So, breath should be on everyone’s mind. But as COVID, climate change, and James Nestor indicate, our breath has never been worse.
PB:
I’m Priya Balakrishnan. I’m a clinician scientist at Cleveland Clinic where I work in the pulmonary medicine department.
EV:
I spoke with Dr. Balakrishnan to get some scientific insight on our breathing. Fortunately for us, she has a global perspective on health and breath.
PB:
I’m actually born and raised in Malaysia. I went to study in the United Kingdom, but I met my husband who is American. I trained in Michigan for my residency as well as my fellowship. My first job after training was at West Virginia University and I think that’s where I got more interested in the environment, climate and interplay with medicine, especially respiratory disease because we saw a lot of miners there.
EV:
Mmhmm.
PB:
It’s actually a growing business, coal mining, although you think with carbon neutrality policies and things like that, but it’s growing and the number of young people, being involved in becoming affected by coal dust is increasing.
EV:
Dr. Balakrishnan’s work inspired her to join a research community within CHEST, the top American pulmonary research journal, to raise awareness for both clinicians and patients about how climate change affects pulmonary health.
PB:
We explore new studies, try to synthesize material for the general public or non-medical people to try to deliver a message about what’s happening and what’s changing to help people make important decisions about their health.
EV:
As a nonmedical person myself, I was curious about how breathing actually works.
PB:
I describe the lungs as a piece of sponge that you buy from the shop to, to do your dishes. It’s nice and spongy and soft when it’s new. But it’s just a piece of tissue. It doesn’t draw in air or let out air without the bone structure as well as muscles that we have around it. All of these muscles, including the diaphragm, they play a very crucial role to open up the lungs and exhale. Without these the sponge won’t work.
And another crucial part is for the air to actually get into the lung, you need the air to go through, your nose, your mouth, your airways, so your trachea. So all of these passages, so to speak, or highways they’re very highly regulated. There’s actually a filtration system in place. There’s a humidifier system in place which is why it’s actually very important to breathe the right way.
EV:
Can you describe for me a little bit about what Covid did to our sense of breathing and respiration as a part of daily life and how you saw that in the clinical world?
PB:
In 2020, it was all crisis mode. There was a total shift in terms of respiration and protection and what you want to expose yourself versus what you don’t want to and a lot more interest in filtration systems beyond the usual allergy issues that people have. I think it brought respiratory or pulmonary medicine at the forefront because of what we were asking people to do, which is wearing a mask, all of that make people think a bit harder and more often about their lungs. I think it’s a humbling experience for everyone. And I don’t think we’re fully learned from it, but it’s a work in progress.
EV:
Even experiencing like the sensation of your own breath in a closed-ish environment, right? I’m feeling the heat, especially in the winter of breathing through your nose or when you open your mouth and it’s closed to yourself. It’s Oh, I, I don’t think about this very often. I don’t walk around thinking about my breath.
PB:
It’s like a new skill set, which really we should have known from childhood, but that’s something that we never give thought because it feels like an automatic response, like your heart beating.
EV:
So, how is our breathing going to improve? Are pulmonologists ready to help us get there?
PB:
We’re in the phase where we’re acknowledging that there’s a problem with climate change and also the amount of allergenic materials out there, it’s more prevalent, there’s longer seasons just because of climate change. So, at least in the U. S., this curriculum changes now in a small percentage of medical schools. A lot of this is because of the young people advocating for themselves, so medical students. Even though it’s small, that’s encouraging because it’s going to change.
EV:
But if your physician is still playing catch-up to the current climate-related pulmonological research, you can also advocate for yourself!
PB:
We’re seeing that a lot where the patients will tell us, “Hey, something’s different for the past five years around my backyard. There’s now more fungus in, the woods underneath my basement,” things like that. You may not know the answers, but at least knowing, where to point your patients to is important. Doctors are learning as well as patients in terms of how to deal with the effects of climate change.
EV:
And, of course, there are some pretty great tools you can use from the comfort of your own home to improve your breathing experience.
PB:
Air.gov is a website, you can monitor your index locally. Plan your vacation, exercise, if you want to run outdoors or bike, whether you want to do it for that day or postpone it. I was just giving the patient a resource as to how to foolproof their home and they had shared with me that here were videos out there on YouTube on how to build your own filtration system for the home, and it’s less than 30 bucks to put it together.
EV:
And isn’t that just modern medicine for us? Some detective work, between YouTube, monitoring tools, patient stories, and increasing awareness in the medical community, we might eventually be breathing a little easier. Which is ever more important as we prepare ourselves for a climate future in which breathing is getting harder.
PART 3
LK:
Another piece I wanted to talk about with Molly was Shula Mitran’s “East Wind,” from 1987. The title of the piece refers to an episode of the Bible in which catastrophe seems to loom. The wind of the east threatens the west with calamities. But it is also the wind that opens the sea in order to allow for exit, for passage. It’s hopeful yet threatening.
LK:
It starts fairly simple, right? It starts on a very quiet note and then builds up.
MB:
There is one note in A natural that starts fairly simply, and then there’s a little germ of an idea, B flat, going to an upper octave B flat and back, and then wiggling around that A with the G below it, and then that builds in intensity, and then the A gets stated over and over again with more insistence each time, until it breaks down into a more lyrical passage consisting of other notes.
LK:
When reading about this piece, I had to think about the book by David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. It reminds of the fact that in Hebrew, the absence of vowels recognizes that breath is something that unites the world. Breath is something that brings the human into contact with the non-human, the invisible with the visible, and there’s a systematic reason why there aren’t any vowels in the alphabet, because it’s the reserved space for breath that’s that what holds the world together. And then he goes on and he talks about how Greek philosophy kind of tore this asunder. Breath, breath was, was, was something very metaphysical.
MB:
This piece has many powerful moments. She uses the extremes of the instrument. She goes higher than many flute players know how to play, and she uses the very lowest note of the flute as well. She has many accents and sforzandos, which indicate very aggressive motions. And then she has many lyrical, beautiful centering moments in the piece. She is definitely a human being who wants the world to live in harmony and wants everyone to prosper.
LK:
It sounds as if the piece is not just reflecting or resonating with the world, it seems to build an entire universe.
MB:
It does, and this is a mainstay of the repertoire for flute players, and with good reason. It really does express a full range of emotions, elevates the flute to a level that just showcases what the flute can do as a communicative entity.
LK:
It takes an enormous sense of practice, but also discipline and technique to play the flute. Are you always in control or are you sometimes being carried away by the wind that blows through you, that blows through the instrument, that delivers you to the world?
MB:
I hope I’m not always in control. I think that when I’m doing a recording, I have the ability to go back and clean things up and make the recordings feel structured. And then in a performance, my goal is to be transported by the music, because how else would I be able to transport others? To be present in the moment. is one of the best gifts that, that music gives us.
LK:
And that is probably also what Abram had in mind when he talked about the spell of the sensuous, that shudder we experience when unexpected moments of reciprocity connect us in new ways to what is around us, when we suddenly find ourselves in wondrous situations of mutual interdependence and kinship, of resonance and attunement—situations of entanglement with a world in which wind, breath, and sound, East and West, all fold into each other.
CONCLUSION
EV:
Wow. Listening to Molly, I feel it’s time to spend a little less time with my violin and banjos and learn more about the flute. It’s such an ideal instrument to approach art as a timely practice of entanglement. To make things happen by allowing things to happen to us.
LK:
All true, it’s a perfect instrument to tap into what numerous mythologies feature as the unifying force of breath, of lightness if you will. It’s probably wise not to romanticize this, though. So much in today’s culture of self-optimization seems to suggest: change your breath and you’ll learn how to change yourself and in changing yourself you will change the world. Unfortunately, things don’t always work like this.
EV:
It’s just another version of the kind of solutionism we talked quite a bit about in our first season–that rhetoric of universal fixability and unbridled human agency that has caused our climate emergencies in the first place.
LK:
True, but there are, as Molly’s work illustrates, so many good reasons why much of contemporary music about climate change pivots around the idea of breath, the precarity of in- and exhalation; and that this music often draws on the flute, on flute players, to address, or even redress, or environmental emergencies.
EV:
Which might also explain why Molly is such a dedicated teacher as well, concerned about what the next generation will do with the flute . . .
LK:
. . . and with making sure they’re not the last generation to do it. Currently, Molly is gearing up to perform a moving, quite lyrical piece by African-American composer William Grant Still, a piece that’s all about the bonds between different generations, about the obligations the present has towards the future, to times and histories that transcend the fleetingness of the Now.
MB:
The title is Mother and Child, and it’s a piece that I find very calming. William Grant Still, he just writes very touching melodies. I can play the beginning of it.
LK:
William Grant Still originally composed Mother and Child in 1943 as part of a suite for violin and piano; later, he expanded the piece to a version for string orchestra. But hearing its melodic lines being performed by the flute is particularly moving. At the same time, Molly is also working on a deceptively simple piece about presence and breath by an Icelandic composer.
MB:
The title is Lullaby, and the beginning of the piece simply is breathing in for seven seconds through the flute. Breathing out for seven seconds through the flute. A few times, just to get the listener into a world in which breath literally is the only thing going on on stage. Have the listener to sort of sit on the edge of the seat and, and think, what’s, what’s going on? Is, is there going to be music? And then they think that for a second, and then they realize, oh no, this is the music. And then they sit back in their seats and just take in the experience of the breath and only the breath on stage for at least 45 seconds before other music actually starts to emerge.
EV:
Ok, so I really want to hold my breath after this, but before I—or before we do—I want us at the end of this program to return once more to the quote from Plutarch you mentioned at the beginning of the show . . .
LK:
about the swaying grass that makes beautiful sounds . . .
EV:
Yes. Those little blades we all probably all once held in our hands, blew on them to make sounds. To emulate the wind.
LK:
As Plutarch indicates, the flute might be a very old instrument, much older than your banjo or violin, but it is also one that has, that insists on the future. That claims the future precisely because it has been with us in so many ways for such a long time.
EV:
And maybe that‘s a fitting end for today, to recall the deep time of music history and the obligations to the future that stem from it, and to give our listeners a moment of silence . . .
LK:
To take a deep breath amid all our emergencies, our frantic breathlessness and listen to the world, the air in all its richness,
EV:
. . . to listen to the present as a place in which our future can havea future.
