Da Capo Conversations with Juhi Bansal and Sakari Dixon Vanderveer

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 79: Da Capo Conversations with Juhi Bansal and Sakari Dixon Vanderveer

Looking for a way to listen to diverse creators and to support equity in the arts? Tune in weekly to For Good Measure!

Today we revisit Juhi Bansal’s and Sakari Dixon Vanderveer’s perspectives on their compositional process. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Juhi Bansal and Sakari Dixon Vanderveer, check them out here and here. Parts of this episode originally premiered on February 21, 2022, click here, and May 17, 2021, 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.

Co-Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-Producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
With assistance from Hannah Chen, Sam Mason, Renata Volchinskaya

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness 00:00
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists sponsored by a 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 Da Capo Conversations, a mini-series where we'll be giving familiar segments a topical twist. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] Today we revisit Juhi Bansal's and Sakari Dixon Vanderveer's perspectives on their compositional process. Here's what Juhi Bansal had to say:

Juhi Bansal 00:40
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 within. 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 and hearing humpback whales underwater. So, it was incredible, I highly recommend [it to] 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. I 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 02:29
Here's what Sakari Dixon Vanderveer had to say:

Sakari Dixon Vanderveer 02:32
Funnily enough, even though most of my pieces are programmatic to some extent, I rarely come up with the imagery or narrative of a piece prior to composing it. Most of my compositions are written with specific performers in mind. So my first course of action is to get to know more about them in their artistic voice: I might ask questions about what they feel is missing in their repertoire, or what sounds or techniques they would like to explore further, for example. That approach might feel restricted to some composers, but for me, it actually is a lot more exciting and freeing to give myself defined parameters and create my own musical challenges. Since I tend to improvise pretty extensively while I brainstorm a piece, these parameters can often be a great jumping off point for thematic material. Generally, the imagery or narrative comes much later in the process. I wait as long as possible to see what images or emotions freely come to mind while I'm writing the piece. Sometimes that happens very close to the end of completing a work, but often, it happens when I'm more than halfway into the piece. In that case, I find it pretty easy to delve deeper into the program that is presenting itself.

Nanette McGuinness 03:48
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure's Da Capo conversations, and a special thank you to our guests 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, or 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 co-producer and audio engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]