Ursula Kwong-Brown - Part 4

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 125: Ursula Kwong-Brown - Part 4

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Ursula Kwong-Brown about the therapeutic benefits of choral singing and how she incorporates singing into her compositional process. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Ursula Kwong-Brown, check her out here: https://www.ursulakwongbrown.com/. This episode was originally recorded in February 2024.

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/1903729/15653003

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, Addy Geenen, Yoyo Hung-Yu Lin

Curious to hear music by Luna Composition Lab alums? Check out E4TT's annual concert of music by women and non-binary composers, "Midnight Serenades," on January 25.

Chapters

• 0:34 In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Ursula Kwong-Brown, who we spoke to in February 2024.
• 0:42 It sounds like you've done a lot of choral work. And I think you mentioned you were a choral assistant at, when you were at Cal?
• 5:13 You mentioned I remember this from when we talked earlier that you'd had trouble with your breath, and had to work on that. Do you want to talk about that?

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 Ursula Kwong-Brown, who we spoke to in February 2024. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

Nanette McGuinness  00:30
It sounds like you've done a lot of choral work. And I think you mentioned you were a choral assistant at, when you were at Cal?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  00:36
Yeah, it was actually, ended up being like the most I think I learned in grad school. That year, being an assistant, you know, director of this choir, oh, my God, because, you know, you're, you're, you're running the warmups, you're running rehearsals, it's like very good for your ear training. You learned so much about cut-offs and diction and breathing. And even if I couldn't do it, I could, I could help these other people do it. In some ways, I think the fact that I had so much trouble singing and had so much trouble breathing, made it easier for me to teach. Because nothing came to me naturally ever, when it came to singing. So I was able to, like, you know, pull out every trick I'd ever been told to, like, try to help these, you know, 100 kids. You know, I mean, you're a singer, like, you know, how hard it is to just simply inhale deeply and have a supported, you know, relaxed. I mean, I still can't quite manage it.

Nanette McGuinness  01:35
It's like this really natural tricky thing, you know, really hard to do when you do it deliberately. And yet the body does it all the time. It's the weirdest thing you know, when you think about it? It's a mind-body sport.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  01:49

And it brings together emotion. So inherently, right, like, when you sing, emotion is part of it. Because the human voice can't help but be emotional, yeah

Nanette McGuinness  02:01
Yeah. And I really think that a good vocal technique allows you to just kind of, you open your mouth, you open your mind, and the feelings and the music just come out with a direct connection when the technique is working, and you're not in the way.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  02:20
Yeah, it's something I've been thinking about a lot, because I'm doing this talk in in three weeks in New York with my old boss, who is head of the neuroscience department at Columbia, Darcy Kelley. And we're talking a lot about the vagus nerve, which controls your parasympathetic nervous system. And it also intervates your larynx. So by singing, you're actually using your vagus nerve. And so you can actually calm your nervous system by singing, which is fascinating, both by the pacing of it with your breath, but also, I think, by over sort of a relaxed engagement with it. Right, like using your larynx and, again, relaxed way instead of a tense way. And that's a different way of engaging your vagus nerve, which again, governs your entire parasympathetic nervous system. So this is your rest or digest system, in contrast to your sympathetic, which is your fight or flight. Well, thats, you know, you're running from the saber-toothed tiger. You want you want your parasympathetic to be strengthened generally, because most of us are not actually running from saber-toothed tigers, even if we feel that we are because we're stressed out. You know, we need to do everything we can to support our parasympathetic nervous systems. And we mostly can't because it's something you don't think about, but your voice is this interesting place because you can control it consciously and unconsciously, right.

Nanette McGuinness  03:48
Right. There's a lot of research that's been coming out in the last oh, three to six months or so about singing, and how it's good for people, and choral singing. And I'm sure that feeds into that, although they aren't talking about it in those terms, but makes it really interesting, I think.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  04:08
I should actually look into that, what this new research is.

Nanette McGuinness  04:12
Yeah, I was reading things about this. It's both looking at kind of societally, but also the good that is done to the human body by choral singing, especially, they're mostly talking about choral singing, not, you know, opera singing. But yeah.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  04:29
I'm just fascinated by this. Because everyone's trying to figure out ways to heal and to be you know, post-pandemic we're all trying to, find ourselves, whatever that means. And, and choral singing is just something that has been used by humanity since the beginning of time. I mean, there's there's a reason religions involve group singing. It's very powerful.

Nanette McGuinness  04:54
Yeah, yeah. It aligns people with each other at a number of levels. So yeah. You mentioned I remember this from when we talked earlier that you'd had trouble with your breath, and had to work on that. Do you want to talk about that?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  05:09
Yeah, so as a composer, I've always wanted to, like know enough of various instruments to be able to like, be dangerous. So I played enough violin and viola to at least, you know, play through fingerings. And with voice, I knew I was never going to be a singer. But I took voice lessons in high school for four years. And this is at the Longy School of Music in Boston. And I just remember my teacher being like, you can't inhale, like, you can't, like what's wrong with you, you can't inhale, you know, and they're like, sticking their fingers in the sides of your ribs and being like, "support," and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. And then I went to, I mean, I just studied with all these people basically, like, I started with Spiro Malas, who was husband of Marlena Malas at Manhattan School of Music in New York. And he was like, you can't breathe. I had this like fake vibrato that came from like, supporting badly. Then I studied at the Royal College of Music in London for a year where I was studying music and my poor teacher there had me try everything from like, leaning out the window and singing and like lying under the piano and imagining I had like a third eye, and like they tried everything. And finally I went to a gyrotonics person who was like, oh, you're totally stuck here in your sternum and like, did some side bendy things, and some twisty like side-to-side things. And was like, oh, hey, you're good now, like an hour later, and, and I got to write to my former voice teachers and be like, oh, I just needed to like an hour of physical therapy.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  06:44
Yeah, but what had happened is that I had whooping cough when I was 12. And I broke the top four ribs, and that they had healed in a way that had stopped their movement, like, like, my sternum stopped expanding, basically, when I inhaled because it like stuck because they all broke, anyway, it was, it was just, to me, it was also less than, than like, okay, you can work as hard as you can and try everything and imagine everything. But sometimes you just have to go like see a doctor. Like, sometimes it's not just you and your mind, you know?

Nanette McGuinness  06:44
Is that what?

Nanette McGuinness  07:14
Right, right. We sometimes get fixated on, oh, it's all in our heads or this mind body spiritual thing. And it often is, but sometimes there is something that needs to be fixed.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  07:27
Yeah. And ended up being very simple. And if I, if I don't do these sort of twisting exercises regularly, I still have trouble. But now I know to do them.

Nanette McGuinness  07:37
Right. And gyrotonics, I've never heard of them. That's a kind of PT?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  07:41
Yeah, it was just a type of physical therapy, really, yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  07:44
Now you can breathe and sing.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  07:47
Sort of, yeah, I at least sing to write. I often, often part of my process involves, yeah, singing to myself. And, I mean, I still think that like, even if I'm writing for a percussive instrument like piano, I sing a lot when I compose, like I think of, I feel like melodies are still like core to my compositional process.

Nanette McGuinness  08:10
Sounds like it, sounds good to me, speaking as a melodic instrument.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  08:14
I mean, I often, even in a piece that has no words, there'll be like secret words. Like, like, like, I have this piece called Sonnet XX for cello that was actually this Pablo Neruda poem, that went, "tengo hambre," I'm hungry for your voice. I'm hungry for, you know. And so I would, I still just hear the song when I hear the cello playing. I hear that I have to hear that text, you know?

Nanette McGuinness  08:43
Sure, no that makes sense. It was a tone poem based on the Neruda, and then you wrote it for cello, that makes a lot of sense. And people do say that the cello is like the human voice. You know, it has this wide range and wide emotional capacity.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  08:59
I mean, I adore the cello, yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  09:00
Yeah, me too. I love singing with it.

Nanette McGuinness  09:02
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Ursula Kwong-Brown, 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 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]