Nina Shekhar - Part 6

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 111: Nina Shekhar - 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 talk to Nina Shekhar about concepts on form, memory, and trauma in her piece "Don't Beat a Word" and being a Composer-in-Residence for The Crossing and LA Chamber Orchestra. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Nina Shekhar, check her out here: https://www.ninashekhar.com/. This episode was originally recorded in December 2023.

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.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/15258836a

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

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

• 0:46 You're the Sound Investment Composer for The Crossing and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which is a very cool title, and I'm very intrigued by it. Can you tell us what that involves? And how is it different from a "regular" Composer-in-Residence...
• 4:12 Your piece "Don't Beat a Word" is very atmospheric, and it's got textures and percussive elements, it's even got vocal gasps, and they're all meant to be, if I understand correctly, "tangibly felt as much as the music is meant to be heard." So what was...

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 conversation with Nina Shekhar, who we spoke to in December 2023. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] You're the Sound Investment Composer for The Crossing and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which is a very cool title, and I'm very intrigued by it. Can you tell us what that involves? And how is it different from a "regular" Composer-in-Residence appointment? Whatever a "regular" Composer-in-Residence is?

Nina Shekhar  00:51
Yeah, so um, that's actually the title is specific to the LA Chamber Orchestra. With The Crossing, I think the title is just Composer-in-Residence. Kind of a more playful, sorry about that. But no, no worries. But yeah, so the Sound Investment Composer Program is, I think, for LACO, it's been, I don't know, maybe 15 years. So these, they've done this. And, you know, it's, it's a great program, and that it's a way for, you know, people who support the orchestra to feel like they have, like, they know what's happening with that, like, and, and they can see, in real time, like art being made with their support. So it's like, they are like the sound investors, you know, and I am the recipient of this, they're investing in me to write a new piece for for, for the ensemble for LA Chamber Orchestra. And so through this, like over the course of the piece, or over the course of the year, I am kind of showing, like, in progress excerpts of my work, and getting to also workshop it with ensemble, which is really rare, especially in an orchestra context, to be able to have a workshop of your music in advance is like unheard of. So yeah, so as part of this program, I, you know, I have these different workshops where I can first work with a solo performer and try some different things, and then eventually work with the chamber ensemble to try some things. And then later, I have an orchestra reading and workshop with the full orchestra and then eventually, you know, the performance and, you know, these sound investors are present at each of these moments. And they get to see, like, the internal workings of this process, like what is it like, for a performer to kind of read through something? Or how does me getting to hear that like, change the way I think about things or like maybe, oh, I don't like what, how the sounds, I want to change it, like they get to see that like, seeing my creative process in real time. So it's a really cool program in that it allows people to experience that, that art making process in a much more intimate way than I think, usually, usually it's like kind of a mystery of like the composing process, and they don't get to actually see, like what goes through the composer's head. But in this, they can actually, kind of they have these these moments to really understand just our own thought process and how we work with performers and try new ideas like that.

Nanette McGuinness  03:56
Your piece "Don't Beat a Word" is very atmospheric, and it's got textures and percussive elements, it's even got vocal gasps, and they're all meant to be, if I understand correctly, "tangibly felt as much as the music is meant to be heard." So what was your approach to composing this piece? And were there challenges in sorting out the pacing and the compositional arc and making everything kind of work? Or did it kind of fall into place?

Nina Shekhar  04:25
Oh, it was a challenging piece to write, um, you know, this piece. I, you know, when I wrote it, I was really thinking about the concept of form and this is a piece when I'm thinking about, like, my mentors at the time. I was studying with with Ted Hearne, and he was trying to get me to challenge the way I think about form and he was saying, like, right now you treat form as like a vessel, like you have all these interesting ideas, but you're just throwing it into the same vessel rather than thinking about, "how do these specific ideas, how might that inform, inform the form?" Or like, actually, like change the way you think about the piece conceptually, and, and that was a really an eye opening critique. I was like, "Oh, you're right. Like, I've always been the same form." And I was trying to think about this idea of memory with this piece. And this idea of kind of this broken apart form, which you see, especially in the middle section, where it's like I, you know, with memory, and I was relating this to trauma, like, I know, in my own experiences, when I've had a traumatic incident, then my memory of that incident will kind of reorder itself or not become so clear and linear, like parts of it might get redacted, you know, which is kind of the whole concept of the piece. And even in the score, I'm in that middle section. Like, there are measures that are redacted there, like it actually looks like a broken apart score. And sonically, like you'll hear all these, and it's almost like if you see like redacted documents, and you see the big black Sharpie, marker like over think it like sounds like that, it's like a big Sharpie sound, that is like blocking out certain moments. And in that section, and the text for that section, or the whole piece actually is text I wrote that's very simple. It's like, always some kind of verb, some sort of pronoun, and then some sort of object. And then the texts, like the actual layout of the text, like in its true form is never actually presented. In the first section, the text is reordered, and pronouns are shifted. And then in the middle, it's like words are redacted. And at the end, it's like, those words are just missing, you know, or they're like in a different order. So it's never actually presented in its true form. And I think all of this was kind of related, again, to identity and my own experiences, but also just me thinking about form in a more conceptual sense and finding ways to explore that artistically.

Nanette McGuinness  07:30
So it can be said that his challenge did succeed in making you think about form and and has it changed that going forward?

Nina Shekhar  07:37
I think so I write I've definitely become a lot more conceptual of a composer since then. And like even the the Bach piece I was telling you about, like, it was a very conceptual piece, like every single element of it was me thinking about how can I change the way that we engage with this music or, you know, the, the fact that it was all spatially notated, and there weren't bar lines? How can I give performers that agency to move through the music at their own pace, you know, like, even decisions and notational decisions, like putting stems versus not like over the piece, or the beginning, actually, in the sport, there's mostly just note heads, it kind of looks more like Gregorian chant. And then over time, it starts to get more like stems and beams and like more rhythmic information, and even that was like thinking about sort of the history of Western notation. And like, kind of the way we engage with that. And so I feel like, he definitely my teacher, Ted, he had really inspired me to kind of think more conceptually in ways that might not be so obvious to people, like people might not know all those, what was going through my thought process when I made those decisions, but he's like, I want you to have intention behind why you're making those decisions. And he was right. And, and I think that that's kind of pushed me in that direction to think more critically, you know, even when I'm doing my own work.

Nanette McGuinness  09:09
Definitely. And, and the piece goes from, let's just say, less measured to more measured.

Nina Shekhar  09:15
Yeah, I mean, so it's still there's still no barlines throughout, but there is more rhythmic info. Yeah. And over the course of the piece, so it's interesting, even just watching performers engage with that, how have they taken that info, what they do with it. And what's great about it is that things are off from the actual spatial alignment, it'll still work. And that's the whole point of the piece. It's not supposed to be this extremely precise piece, which is different for me than maybe other pieces that I've written. So it kind of changed my own engagement with how I notate things.

Nanette McGuinness  09:57
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Nina Shekhar, 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 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 design 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]