For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) Episode 36: Juhi Bansal (part 3)
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In this week’s episode, we talk to Juhi Bansal about intersections between her life as a composer and a self-defense/wilderness instructor, her compositional process, and empowering women through music. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Juhi Bansal, check her out here: juhibansal.com . Parts of this episode originally premiered on Feb 2021, found on Youtube, click here.
This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!
Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022 Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021
Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes Interns: Roziht Edwards and Merve Tokar
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists sponsored by grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Nanette McGuinness, artistic executive director of Ensemble For These Times. In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Juhi Bansal, who we spoke to in February 2022. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]. You've written about nature in the environment, and you've been a self defense and wilderness instructor, any intersection with your compositions or process?
Juhi Bansal:
Um, cook maybe a couple of different points of intersection, I suppose it, uh, one is. So nature and wilderness, of course, I'll treat those separately from the self defense part of it. You know, there's a fine tradition of composers finding inspiration in wild places. That's certainly, you know, it's not a new thing. But it's something I feel like for each person who goes and discovers it, there's still something really personal about that kind of inspiration. So for me there, you know, there are a few different themes that tend to keep coming up in the music that I write women's stories is one nature and the environment is another one. And, you know, I don't write programmatic music. It's not like I'll spend weeks in the back country and then try to write music that is that experiential that tells the story. But I find a lot of inspiration and kind of colors and textures and natural sounds and trying to bring that into the music I write Absolutely. In a broader sense to I suppose the second part of your question, or asking about things like my background, as a self defense and wilderness survival instructor. One of the things I find really fascinating, and I'm working on a project with my husband, Nick Kirby's a pianist, right now on this as well, is this kind of idea of who we are as performers, and musicians. You know, there's like this, this very strong culture of like performance coaching, and building performance skills, for sports and athletics in a way that there isn't really in music, and then something, you know, like, and I have found really interesting. Because you see students struggling with a lot of the same things, you see the same younger musicians struggling with a lot of the same things. And it's interesting that we have this huge culture and training and resources to help athletes in some of those, you know, dealing with some of the same issues, but we don't have that really for musicians. So this is maybe a different way of answering your question about how some of these different elements come together. But another part of that that really interests me is kind of finding these points of overlap between musicians, as athletes, musicians, as performers, and kind of trying to draw from my background towards that as well, particularly in terms of what to do in teaching.
Nanette McGuinness:
Could you tell us about your compositional process?
Juhi Bansal:
Oh, I wish there were a standard process, I can try to tell you about my process. I mean, it always changes depending on what the project is, you know, I feel like right now in my life projects kind of come from two directions. Mostly, there's a prompt from somebody commissioning a piece, which automatically gives me some parameters and a framework as a place to start. So, for example, I have a project coming up in a couple of months, which is a piece for the Oregon Mozart players. And it's, you know, an orchestral piece that I'm writing and they had some feedback and some parameters that they gave me to work with it. And so my process there starts with just looking very carefully at exactly what the boxes within which I'm working, and then trying to think about, okay, where do I find inspiration for that? In the case of this piece, it's taking inspiration from experience, I had diving in hearing humpback whales underwater. So it was incredible. I highly recommend anybody who gets the chance to do that. Kind of, you know, brainstorming sounds and ideas and textures that come out of that experience and come out of those sounds. And I'm a pretty visual person. So it's a lot of sketching out words first and shapes and just very broad ideas. And then I improvise also, as you know, when I work with students, that's a big thing that we talk about. A hate that in classical music, often there's the sense that there's again, another one of these artificial hard lines between improvisation and composition, we're really they're the same thing and they feed back and forth so much. So a lot of for me, the process is like sketching, then improvising them, refining them sketching some more and kind of going in circles around the process until there's a finished work at the end of it.
Nanette McGuinness:
Does that imply that your works often involve a Lea toric core chance elements?
Juhi Bansal:
I'd say fifty-fifty. I love Aliah. Tori, it just depends on the project. So there's probably half my scores. Actually, a lot of them have some Aliah Tori in them other than like certain specific projects, were just given the parameters. It doesn't make sense all avoided. Awesome.
Nanette McGuinness:
You write eloquently about identity, sexism and empowering girls and young women, particularly in Bangladesh, could you discuss your work in this arena? And how it affects your music?
Juhi Bansal:
Okay, that's a big question. In a very, very broad sense, that like issues to do, women and girls and getting an education are things that have just always been really important to me. For the obvious reasons, I think we should all be caring about it, frankly. But also, you know, thinking about like women in my family, and even with a mom wanting to study music when she was younger, and she wasn't allowed to. And I've had cousins who are still an Indian family members who wanted to pursue education and weren't allowed to. So there's like, there is a personal element to it, as well as just the obvious, of course, all girls should be given an education and given those opportunities. So one of the volunteer projects that I did this was a few years ago, there's a group with, they recently changed their name, which is why I'm hesitating, they used to be called the Bangladesh girl surf club. Then it became the Bangladesh girls and boys surf club. And I think just in the last couple of months, they've actually been adopted under a larger umbrella group as well. But this was a group I got to know about through some volunteering I was doing here locally in Southern California. And, you know, this is fascinating story about this group of girls in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, which is one of the poorest parts of Bangladesh, which is already obviously such a such a poverty stricken country. And this group of young girls, basically, they saw a lifeguard surfing on the beach one day, and they asked him to teach them how to surf. And what I loved about their story. And what I loved about kind of volunteering with a group afterwards was that they built what started as just teaching the girls to surf turned into a school for the girls, so that they were, you know, given an education, and many of them had until that point, never gone to school. Often the girls in that community are married away, like 11 or 12 years older, much older men, the club, because of donations because of fundraising, because they were able to give food bags and aid to the families kind of then enabled also, the girls were not married away that early, they actually had kind of bought them literally the years to be able to go to school and be able to learn and be able to graduate. So kind of, you know, as a group I was volunteering with on and off for a couple of years, mostly through our work here in Southern California. But you know, their stories really stuck with me. And I got to know the founders of the club's we've had a couple of Skype calls on tiny screens with the girls and getting to hear their stories to the language barrier. And, you know, I think that's led to a couple of things. One isn't just in a very broad sense, wanting to push in every way possible for girls to have a voice. That's girls as composers, that's girls to have an education like in any way that we can talk about that and make that possible. I think I want to be doing that. More, kind of, I suppose more specifically to your answer about how that's inspired my work as well outside of outside of speaking about it. And outside of kind of trying to fundraise for it. We also did a musical project and want to say last year for the prototype festival that was also digital short about that same story about the girls and about their experience and about no fighting to be able to make choices and get an education.
Nanette McGuinness:
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Dawn Norfleet for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT Our concert season online and in the Bay Area where to make a tax deductible donation, please visit us at www.E4TT.org. This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors like you. "For Good Measure" is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and designed by Brennan Stokes. With special thanks to audio engineer extraordinaire Stephanie Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]
You’ve written about nature and the environment, and you’ve been a self-defense and wilderness instructor. Any intersection with your compositions or process?
You write eloquently about identity, sexism, and empowering girls and young women, particularly in Bangladesh. Could you discuss your work in this arena and how it affects your music?