Behind the Curtain with Nanette McGuinness - Part 6

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 105: Behind the Curtain with Nanette McGuinness (part 6)

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

In this week’s episode, we continue our conversation with For Good Measure’s host/producer and E4TT co-founder Nanette McGuinness, in our “Behind the Curtain” mini-series. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Nanette McGuinness, check her out here: https://www.e4tt.org/nanette_mcguinness.html.

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

Curious to hear a little music from our guest Ursula Kwong-Brown, who we spoke to in our most recent episode? Check out the world premiere of the piece she wrote for us, you can find it on our YouTube channel.

Chapters

• 0:00 Tune in next week for the first episode of the second season of For Good Measure. We have some exciting guests and conversations that we can't wait to share with you. Now we hope you enjoy today's final episode of our Behind the Curtain mini-series.
• 0:58 We continue today interviewing Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times and For Good Measure host and producer Nanette McGuinness.
• 1:09 Not only are you busy with your career, but you are also a mom, can you talk about this and how it may have impacted your relationship with music and your career.
• 3:12 Speaking of mother's your mother, Corinne Whitaker is also an artist. Can you talk about the projects that you've worked on together? And how was it working with her?
• 4:53 Well, as a woman and mother in music, were there any challenges that you faced?
• 6:31 Do you have any advice for aspiring and emerging artists?
• 7:48 What performances and projects do you have planned that we should stay tuned for?

Transcript

Stephanie M. Neumann  00:00
Tune in next week for the first episode of the second season of For Good Measure. We have some exciting guests and conversations that we can't wait to share with you. Now we hope you enjoy today's final episode of our Behind the Curtain mini-series.

Stephanie M. Neumann  00:15
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to for good measure interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists sponsored by a grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Stephanie M. Neumann, co-producer and audio engineer of For Good Measure, filling in as host for this episode. We continue today interviewing Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] and For Good Measure host and producer Nanette McGuinness. Not only are you busy with your career, but you are also a mom, can you talk about this and how it may have impacted your relationship with music and your career.

Nanette McGuinness  01:03
First, I want to say I adore my kid, I am so proud of who he turned out to be. He's just a wonderful human being. It did affect my career in some ways, in that I think he was in kindergarten and I was performing, I think I was performing in the Czech Republic. And when I talked to him and talk to his sitter and talked to my husband, I could tell it was destabilizing him, making him feel less kind of grounded and secure. Having gone for I think it was maybe three or four weeks. And after that I stayed more around, it was better for him. I did some performing in California, but I stuck closer to home. And I don't regret that one bit. But you know, there's definitely kind of this interesting gap in what I was doing. As a result. It definitely made me understand things in a different way, and relate to things even in a different way and have more empathy for things that I had before but more deeply. You know, pregnancy does change the voice often makes it richer and deeper. But mine was already on the way. I was singing soubrette. But we all knew I wasn't going to be a soubrette that it wasn't native to where the voice was going to be. And my voice actually developed later, you know, where a lot of sopranos they're at their full bloom or whatever. But mine wasn't. And so it developed more into the full lyric, almost a lirico-spinto that I became, but I was already on that path anyway. So, did it happen as part of the having a kid? I'm not so sure.

Stephanie M. Neumann  02:54
Speaking of mothers, your mother Corinne Whitaker is also an artist. Can you talk about the projects that you've worked on together? And how was it working with her?

Nanette McGuinness  03:06
Yeah, so my mom wasn't an artist when I was growing up. And then when my parents divorced, she became a very successful stockbroker, and then floor broker. Along the way, she started to develop photography, abstract photography, and then abstract art after I left home. We haven't done a lot of projects together, but we've done a few and it's been really nice. So my very first CD Fabulous Femmes, which I mentioned, her art is the cover art, and it's a preexisting piece that we used for The Film Noir Project we wanted to have some images, and some of the pieces, her imagery really seemed to fit. And David and I talked about it. And so we had her, give us some images to use that we projected. And that was really nice. And then more recently, I interviewed her for Meet the Artist. And then when we converted it to a podcast, I had her read her answers for that. And that was really nice. I drove down and we recorded her. It's seldom but it's fun. And I'm really so proud of what my mom has done. She does amazingly interesting, cutting edge, abstract digital art, and she was there before other people. You know, she was a real pioneer.

Stephanie M. Neumann  04:35

Well, as a woman and mother in music, were there any challenges that you faced?

Nanette McGuinness  04:41
Yeah. So first of all, I knew I couldn't do it all. You know, I knew I wanted to have a kid. I wanted to perform. And I had been on a path to teach in academia, but I knew I couldn't juggle all those things and do justice to them in the way that I wanted to. So when I thought about it, I decided I would teach privately, instead of continuing after getting my doctorate, and I think that was a good choice, it wouldn't have been fair to the students, the students that I have now know that I go away to perform or that during rehearsal week, it's going to disrupt lessons, that kind of thing. And so it involved making a choice about priorities fairly early on, in my career. And then, interestingly, in terms of being a woman, I was very lucky. Musicology, especially then was a man's field. But when I went into grad school, we had a big cohort of women, it was a large class, much larger than normal for Cal, and we supported each other, which is really great... In general, our society doesn't take kindly to strong women. And so that's always been a challenge to make my way in a way that worked and was successful.

Stephanie M. Neumann  06:14
Do you have any advice for aspiring and emerging artists?

Nanette McGuinness  06:20
There are many people who are good at music, many people. And many of them become doctors and engineers. The ones who become musicians are the ones who must, the ones whose spirits are incomplete, if they don't do it. If that's you, don't give up, hone your craft. Network, make opportunities, enrich your life, have a day job or something to fall back on if it doesn't work out, because you don't want to be age 40 and have nothing worked out and you know, just doing a job you hate. But, but still realize there's only one you and only one person with your voice. Whether you're a composer, a singer, an instrumentalist, whatever it is. You may have to change the way your path is working. It may turn out differently from what you expect. But if that's you make that happen.

Stephanie M. Neumann  07:31
What performances and projects do you have planned that we should stay tuned for?

Nanette McGuinness  07:38
So we've already talked about our plans for For Good Measure earlier, so that we've talked about. We have a CD coming out, Emigres and Exiles in Hollywood, which grew out of looking at those Holocaust composers who fled Europe for Hollywood helped create what is today's Hollywood sound, you know, when you listen to John Williams, or, or all of those famous modern movie composers. And so we're doing a number of works by those composers, either arrangements, or a piece of chamber music. We have a CD release, or I should say an album release because this is a digital EP, concert June 15, for that project and that's a multi year project. We toured it to the Krakow Jewish Cultural Festival in Poland, we've taken it to Paderewski Festival and UCLA, and the LA Museum of the Holocaust. So we've been working on that repertory and building it for a number of years. So this is favorite selections from it to kind of give a little window into what these composers did. Then, next season, which we have an exciting season planned for the Fall concert "In Motion." We're going to have three world premiere commissions. One by Ursula Kwong-Brown, who's coming up in our For Good Measure series, another by Darian Donovan Thomas, who was an earlier For Good Measure composer, and then the third by Mary Bianco, who is a Bay Area composer. That one will be with a guest oboist who's worked with us before, a fabulous musician, Laura Reynolds. Then the January concert, we'll have the next addition of our "Women and Non-binary Composers" that's going to have works from the collaboration with Luna Composition Lab alums, and other pieces by women composers. That one we will have soprano Chelsea Hollow. She's a coloratura who will join us. Then February. We have another call for scores with fabulous E4TT Emerita pianist Dale Tsang, there'll be a call for scores. And that announcement will go out in June, so keep your eye out, because at this point when we do call for scores, we do a very narrow window, so that we can keep the scores we get under 100. I can't say under 50, because we often do get more than 50, even with a very narrow window. Dale is fabulous, so it's worth committing to that to have her play your music. Then April of 2025, will be our next Commission's concert. And that one is women in transit, women crossing, and it's going to be new works looking at the effects of transition on women, women immigrating women in gender transition, and so forth. We were really lucky, we got a lovely grant from Chamber Music America to commission Nilafour Nourbakhsh to write a piece, and she's gonna have a colleague put together a film.

Stephanie M. Neumann  11:01
Oh, fabulous. Yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  11:02
Yeah, that'll be really great. And Han Lash, who is a dancer, as well as a harpist, as well as a composer, and non-binary, is also going to write a dance suite for that. So we're really excited about that. And then at the end of the season in May, we've been noticing how much good music is being written by Latina and Latinx composers. So we're going to do a program of that, we're naming it "Mujeres Ahora" and then we'll do a recording of that, that'll be our next one, hopefully, which we would release in 2026. Because we, the way we do our recordings is we record one year, and we release the next. So we're on this biannual cycle. And that recording will be of some of the music by the many fabulous women, queer, and non-binary Latinx composers we've worked with.

Stephanie M. Neumann  12:03
And it's amazing that you're providing those opportunities for composers, because I know that as a composer, we're always looking for people to perform music, and how do you find them. And so all of the call for scores and how you've curated your programming, it's, it's fabulous, I think it is.

Nanette McGuinness  12:28
And the scene has changed from when I started out as a singer. Back then, there weren't a lot of people doing modern music, you could count them on one hand, and everybody knew who they were. It was considered, I wouldn't say risky to your career, but you know that, that doing some of the stuff was, was harder, and certainly it is more challenging for the voice. And then somewhere, I think in the 90s, maybe in the aughts, it started to become something that singers did, which is great, because way back in the time of Mozart, they weren't singing Bach. They were singing Mozart, they were singing music that was being sometimes handed to them half hour before they had to form it, you know, or something like that. And so there has been a sea change among singers. And most of us now do modern music, which is really great. That's important. It's a career builder, can be, you know, that it can be an important part of building your career. But it's also a way to give back to the art.

Stephanie M. Neumann  13:40
Great, great. Well, thank you, again, for being here and doing this interview. It was really amazing to kind of dive a little bit more into your history as a musician, and in general.

Nanette McGuinness  13:57
Well, Stephanie, first, thank you for all the wonderful questions. And then, thank you for all the great work you do for For Good Measure. This podcast would not be what it is without you. So all of you guys at home listening right now or in your car safely clap for Stephanie's work because she's fabulous, and she makes this podcast work.

Stephanie M. Neumann  14:19
Thank you. [OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure and a special thank you to our guest Nanette McGuinness, 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 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 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]