Lunar Module with Madeline Clara Cheng - Part 1

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 133: Lunar Module with Madeline Clara Cheng - Part 1

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 Lunar Module, a mini-series with the E4TT/ Luna Composition Lab Call for Scores winners and commissioned composers. Today we are joined by Madeline Clara Cheng, who we spoke to in May 2024. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more, check out her music here: https://madelineclaracheng.wixsite.com/music.

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),  in SF, CA on January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), in SF, CA on October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/episodes/16280398

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, 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 Lunar Module episode, we are joined by E4TT Luna Composition Lab, call for scores winner and commissioned composer Madeline Clara Cheng, who we spoke to in May 2024.
• 0:53 Please tell me about yourself, who you are, where you grew up, your background in music, where you're going next, or where you think you're going next, and what's important to you.
• 5:03 I am sorry to hear about your aunt that's really hard, and your own injury too. A lot of stuff in a young life. You want to talk about the injury, or...
• 7:58 What are you doing as an intern for them (American Ballet Theater)? What kind of internship is it?
• 10:01 Circling back, there's a term you used a couple of times that I think most of our listeners will know what it means. But just in case, you talked about STEM centric. Can you elaborate, define, you know, tell the folks listening what you meant.

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00
[NTRO 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 Lunar Module episode, we are joined by E4TT Luna Composition Lab, call for scores winner and commissioned composer [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] Madeline Clara Cheng, who we spoke to in May 2024.

Nanette McGuinness  00:35
Thank you for doing this. We're thrilled to have you.

Madeline Clara Cheng  00:39
Of course, I'm so honored.

Nanette McGuinness  00:41
Please tell me about yourself, who you are, where you grew up, your background in music, where you're going next, or where you think you're going next, and what's important to you.

Madeline Clara Cheng  00:53
Of course. So I grew up in STEM-centric Silicon Valley, and I was constantly surrounded by many friends who were very, very into tech and science. I think most of my friends actually ended up being computer science majors or, you know, bio majors. And I live just a few minutes away from, you know, like the Apple headquarters, and like many other East Asian children, I got started playing classical piano at a very young age. I also did a lot of dance and ballet growing up until I hit a terrible injury, but that really helped a lot with my musicality and my understanding or the way that I view music. I also got into saxophone, which was how I started playing more jazz music, which gave me a lot of creative exploration and freedom when I started to improvise for the first time, but still, music was always more of just an extracurricular activity for me and my family is Taiwanese American. Most of my family follows this more STEM-centric practices. Many of them actually grew up doing a lot of music too. So I do still like to say that I come from a very musical family, because everyone plays an instrument, but most of them also then ended up working in like engineering, or more often, health care. So for a while, I thought I'd follow that sort of music to Doctor pipeline as well. But one of those incredible musicians turned doctors is my aunt Christine, who's on my dad's side, and she and my dad, for so many years in their in their childhood, would, well, my dad would play violin, my aunt would play piano, and she's in like, a phenomenal amateur pianist, um, she did the Van Cliburn competition a few years back, so she's really, really funny. Wow, wow, yes. So my aunt was one of my biggest musical inspirations growing up, especially when I was first starting out on piano. And she always, like, really instilled that love of music into me. And then when I was in middle school, in 2017 she had already been fighting breast cancer for almost a decade, and it was, it was really hard on her, especially when she it was too painful to play piano anymore. And in 2017 she finally passed away, and it was one of the most devastating experiences for me and my family. So that was a that was a time when I knew I had to do something for her, some sort of tribute to to honor her memory, and I felt the only way I could do that was in some sort of musical form. So we were already planning to have from from a lot of her Van Cliburn friends in Texas. They were already planning to do a concert for her. And I decided to try my hand at writing my first real composition. And this was, of course, going to be a piano and violin piece that I ended up performing with my dad on stage in Fort Worth, Texas. So that's how I got started into writing music. I wasn't really planning on doing a ton of providing like, I didn't like start this, knowing that this would become a whole thing. But, um, as soon as I talked to people in the audience, after I talked to my family and friends who were felt really touched by the music, I kind of realized the power of of sharing art like this and how and you know, it was, it made me feel really connected to her. So that's, um, that's how I got into music. And I, I'm really excited to to keep sharing this, this love for for music for the rest of my life.

Nanette McGuinness  04:34
Wow. Well, we were very impressed with your compositional voice in the call for scores. It was actually hard to pick which of your pieces we wanted to do, because we really do like it and we're excited to have you write a piece for us as well. So that's really great. I am sorry to hear about your aunt, that's really hard, and your own injury too—a lot of stuff in a young life. You want to talk about the injury, or...

Madeline Clara Cheng  05:02
Yes, of course. So I actually so I did ballet ever since I was maybe five years old, and it was one of the most like formative artistic experiences of my life. I still absolutely adore ballet. If you look on any of like my YouTube or Instagram or any of any social media that has an algorithm, all of it is going to be dance routine. So I still, even even after my injuries, I was slowly recovering. Throughout high school, I still tried to take a few classes, you know, taking it easy on myself, but I started to dance a little bit more in in college, I still, I still love to watch performances of all types of dance, but, um, I remember, designed to try something new. So my first semester, I took like an international ballroom style class which had never done anything of the sort before. But I think it's so important to have like movement along with music. And I, I associate both of those very closely together, and I think that influences my my work as well, where I have a lot of visuals of like, Oh, like this, like the song that, or the piece that I had for for your January concert. That one, I had a lot of like, kind of, like starts and stops and like the way I visual visualized, it was a lot of like, like, big, like, sweeping motions that just like, like, swept into the air and into the stars. So I have a lot of, have a lot of movement associations in my music, and I think that, I think that comes through from the dance background. And I'll actually be working this summer, later in in New York City for the American Ballet Theater. I'll be interning for them this summer, and I'm so excited to do that, because, you know, growing up there, they're one of the coolest ballet companies around, and I absolutely love their art. I follow many of their principal dancers on social media, and so it's it really feels like a full circle moment, and I'm really excited to find different ways to connect music and dance. And you know, the injury has never really stopped my life for dance, if anything, it allowed me to kind of sit down make more it actually made allow me to make more music. I was spending so many hours every week in rehearsal for dance all the time, and it wasn't until like I was forced to not move anymore that I had that time to, you know, sit down, slow down and be able to write more about my thoughts.

Nanette McGuinness  07:28
That's nice. And indeed, the title of your piece that we picked, as I recall it, was, "Forget your scarf in my life." Is that...

Madeline Clara Cheng  07:35
Right.

Nanette McGuinness  07:35
Right. That really does lend itself well to those kind of broad, sweeping gestures that you said were your generational idea for that piece. So that's all of a piece in itself. What are you doing as an intern for them? What kind of internship is it

Madeline Clara Cheng  07:44
So I'm actually working in the development department, specifically in the institutional giving section, section. So for that, I'll be doing something that I have only a little bit of experience in, but that I am so excited to dive into the world of so it's more of the the grant writing and preparing proposals for corporate sponsorships and government foundations, which is something, again, that is a little bit new to me. But as soon as I saw this, I knew this would be a really fantastic opportunity. I'd never before in an interview been asked about my my, like, not composition, but, like, physical writing skills, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm so used to being asked, like, oh, like, how's your organization, how's your time management, communication, a lot of the more like basic soft skills, but never before about my writing, which maybe I should have expected coming into their interview, but it was, it was really exciting. I i That was one of the most fun interviews I've ever had. I just felt like we could connect so much about our love for performing arts as a whole, which I think is very necessary if you have to really advocate on behalf of a performing arts organization to get funding for that. But I'm building upon my experience of having done, if you're familiar with the music at Menlo chamber Institute in festival in the Bay Area. I was also development intern for them last summer. So I'm really excited to get to expand upon that world of you know, supporting arts organizations and making them actually happen.

Nanette McGuinness  08:29
Yeah, indeed, grant writing, development, organizational funding are the life's blood of any organization.

Madeline Clara Cheng  09:27
Of course.

Nanette McGuinness  09:29
And FYI, when we hire interns, we do usually ask them about their writing skills, like...

Madeline Clara Cheng  09:35
Right.

Nanette McGuinness  09:36
You know, are they fluent writers? Do they write well, and we don't mean compositionally, because those skills are also so important for marketing and PR and...

Madeline Clara Cheng  09:45
Oh, of course!

Nanette McGuinness  09:46
...development and everything so absolutely. Circling back, there's a term you used a couple of times that I think most of our listeners will know what it means. But just in case, you talked about STEM centric. Yes. And can you elaborate define, you know, tell the folks listening what you meant.

Madeline Clara Cheng  10:05
Yes, that probably makes sense, because that's something that I've heard from, you know, probably like kindergarten, first grade and up. And it was always just a term that, you know, means the same thing to me all the time, but I realized maybe not everyone knows what that is. So STEM is the acronym for, for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Some people like to use STEAM and to add arts into there, correct for most of the time. I've seen it as as just STEM and it kind of encompasses that whole more like, you know, like left brain kind of business, business and math, economic, science kind of side of things, um, which is really very interesting. Of course, there are many, many intersections with the arts, but I still feel like, um, at least growing up, um, around where I live, the arts never got quite as much recognition as I've seen in, you know, in LA where I live now.

Nanette McGuinness  10:59
Yeah, no there's been a real push to emphasize STEM and I was a science math kid too, so I totally get that. I just try to make sure that people listening know about everything we're talking about or define it in case they don't.

Nanette McGuinness  11:14
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest Madeline Clara Cheng, 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 Measue 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].