Ursula Kwong-Brown - Part 8

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 129: Ursula Kwong-Brown - Part 8

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In this week’s episode, we talk to Ursula Kwong-Brown about the power of text and spoken word, how text inspires much of her music, and her upcoming projects. 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/1903729/15653098

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.
• 0:57 Do you, for finding the text that's going to inspire you, do you deliberately go looking or does it just one day pop?
• 3:56 Well, we've talked about some of this. But as a wrap up question, do you have recent or upcoming projects you'd like to talk to us about or circle back to that you brought up?

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  00:29
You write choral pieces a lot. And your instrumental music is inspired often by text. So it sounds like as part of your compositional process, text plays a big role.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  00:41
Yeah, it does.

Nanette McGuinness  00:44
Yeah. And do you, for finding the text that's going to inspire you, do you deliberately go looking or does it just one day pop?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  00:54
I do read a lot of poetry in the hopes that I'll be inspired. And then in the hopes that it'll be poetry that I can get the rights to.

Nanette McGuinness  01:03
Oh, well, yeah.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  01:04
Because that's bad. If you're inspired, and you don't have the rights. Yeah, I just read. Yeah, I always read every everything that's coming out of copyright, you know. But I also like, read the new stuff, and like, The New Yorker, in the hopes that something will be, you know, I mean, I would love to do more young, young poets, it's just often a lot of, a lot of contemporary poetry, I have trouble setting. Like, I often have an easier time with things like Mary Oliver, or things that are like more traditional. I mean, I love some, like, I've been trying to set this poet Warsan Shire, who's incredible, like she, but it's like, very disturbing, a lot of it. And so for instance, I wanted to do something like a, like I've been trying to come up with a proposal for the San Francisco Girls Chorus, for another piece for them. And it's like this really profoundly moving dark poetry about what it is to be like, a refugee fleeing war torn, you know, countries. And it's so profound and, and also, like, I can't quite set it to music, and certainly not for children.

Nanette McGuinness  02:24
Right, as you were talking, I was like, for children? That sounds tricky.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  02:27
Yeah. And yet, it's the perspective of like, a 17 year old girl, so there's like a power there. But also, like, maybe I don't need to go there with them. So, you know, I mean, a lot of, let's just be honest, like a lot of contemporary poetry is like on the darker side of things, which is fine. It's just, it's not always what inspires music for me, like a lot of this darker stuff. I feel like it when I read it. It doesn't sound melodic. It sounds like something that should be spoken. Not sung.

Nanette McGuinness  02:28
Yeah, yeah. No, we had Surviving Women's Words, which was a series of commissions by women Holocaust survivors. Yeah. And one of the pieces, one of the texts, the poems was so awful that, you know, David Garner wrote it for me. And we talked about, would I be able to sing it? Or would I break down? Would it just be too hard? So he wrote it for spoken voice, which I delivered, we talked about this as well, just very neutrally. And the result is very, very chilling.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  03:30
It sounds like it, yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  03:34
Yes, sometimes the spoken word is just as powerful or more so than the, the sung word. You know, it's as much as compositional choice as anything else. Yeah. Well, we've talked about some of this. But as a wrap up question, do you have recent or upcoming projects you'd like to talk to us about or circle back to that you brought up?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  03:55
Well, I'm very caught up in the moment with this upcoming performance that's going to be at Columbia University on the 29th of February, that's going to bring together different neural sensors, like an EEG sensor that's going to generate sound and a heart, heartbeat sensor that's also going to generate sound. And I'm going to also play some keyboard and sing perhaps a little with a harmonizer, and lead the audience through some some singing exercises with me. Is the idea. And it's going to sort of be alternating with my my former boss, Darcy Kelley, who's is one of the directors of the neuroscience program at Columbia. And she's going to be explaining things about like the vagus nerve and how it contributes to your parasympathetic nervous system and like calming, and how breath relates to that, and how basically our ancient brains which is like our amygdalas, our hindbrains are still sort of running the show even though we have these, you know, prefrontal cortexes, which are really smart. That, that like when it comes to a lot of emotions that you're feeling things that are making your heart race or not, or digestion happen or not, like that's still in your hindbrain still in your animal brain. And that, you know, there are some ways to calm it basically, to slow your breathing, to sort of relax the muscles of your face, that that helps to relax your vagus nerve. Things that make you salivate, so cool, like I do a thing that makes like, makes you like imagine biting into a lemon. And like that alone stimulates your parasympathetic nervous system. So that's what I'm really thinking about at the moment.

Nanette McGuinness  05:47
That's very cool. And I think you also mentioned to me at the start that you're writing an opera?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  05:51
Yes, so yeah, my husband, Danny Erdberg and I are working on an opera about Carl Sagan and The Golden Record that he put together to sort of encapsulate all of humanity and sound, to send off in the Voyager into outer space. They had something like two or three months to, to summarize all of humanity. And so they did everything they could, including, like EEG recordings of, of Annie Druyan, who he met during that project, like meditating on her love for him. So it's also like this love story. And then, of course, musical samples and photos. And, you know, it was, it was a hopeful time, trying to summarize the good parts of humanity for future, you know, space races. To discover one day hopefully figure out how to play The Golden Record and decipher, you know.

Nanette McGuinness  06:55
Yeah, yeah, no that sounds fascinating. Both of those projects sound fascinating. So, is there anything else we haven't talked about that you wish we had? Or

Ursula Kwong-Brown  07:04
I don't, I don't think so. I, now I want to write like vocal music for you one day.

Nanette McGuinness  07:10
Fun, we should talk about it, would be great. Yeah, no, that'd be great.

Nanette McGuinness  07:14
[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]