Lunar Module with Madeline Clara Cheng - Part 3

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 135: Lunar Module with Madeline Clara Cheng - Part 3

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/16322752

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

• 0:48 You've talked a bit about this, so you may not have more to say, but if you do, are there other aspects of music that interest you?
• 4:37 So advocacy, writing, are we leaning towards investigating law?
• 7:22 Let's switch gears here a little bit and go to the piece that you're writing for us, that we're excited to have you write for us. Any thoughts about that? Or is it still in the early goose stage?

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 Lunar Module episode, we continue talking to E4TT Luna Composition Lab call for scores winner and commissioned composer [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] Madeline Clara Cheng, whom we spoke to in May 2024. 

Nanette McGuinness  00:35
You've talked a bit about this, so you may not have more to say, but if you do, are there other aspects of music that interest you?

Madeline Clara Cheng  00:43
This would actually be a little bit tied into possibly my future goals for for the arts, because, of course, there's no there's no telling for sure, but I also know that after having, like, grown up around around some some musicians in my family, or some of my friends, and then now being immersed in an environment where, you know, I can't, like, look in any direction without seeing an artist...

Nanette McGuinness  01:08
[laughs]

Madeline Clara Cheng  01:11
Exactly, but I have, I have such a strong passion for advocating for artists and for their rights on on their behalf, and I do that a lot already. When I have to help my friends say, like, well I I'll often be the person that my friends come to when they're like, Hey, I just got this contract for a performance or I just got this contract for a commission, and it's really long, can you read it? And I'll be like, of course, yeah, I'd love to do that. And I'll be like, Are you, are you sure you know you want to, you want to agree to this, or like, you might want to double check on this, on this, like, date that you agreed to. So I always, I'm always trying to be really good about, like, reading every word of of like, every contract, of every agreement that I receive, because I want to make sure they're not getting screwed over, or even when they're just, like struggling to write an email to get more, like, financial aid, for example, I love helping them with that. And in a lot of the theater spaces that I'm in, or any other event spaces where they happen to have musicians as part of the show, I'm always advocating for them as well. A lot of times people think it's like, it's okay to not, you know, to not pay the performers, or be like, Okay, well, we're all volunteering our time to make this production happen, so they should too. It's complicated in a school production, especially when it's like an independent student production, you don't have a lot of money to go around. But when you're in a theater space where you have like, 24 hours of rehearsal a week, and then you're asking the musician, the musicians, to be there, for the theater kids it might be more of something that they can put on their resume as something like, oh, I, you know, I stage managed this production, or I produced this show. But for musicians, it's, it may be fun for them, of course, they love music, it's passion, they have a passion for it, but it's also work for them. So I'm always, like, very conscious of, you know, like, how much time are they spending here? Like, how much time had they had to, had to commit to this? How many rehearsals do they have to be there for? How are they being how are they being compensated? And same thing for any other, any other performances where I know they're more of, like a work for hire than maybe one of, maybe part of, like the, you know, initial creative conception of the project. So that's also why I'm doing the arts. I'm in internships too, because I feel really committed to cultivating the success of performing arts organizations. And, you know, this is more greater entertainment industry but I also really closely followed the recent writers and actors union strikes. I'm also really inspired by how much support and emphasis a lot of like European governments tend to put into arts and cultures that have gotten...

Nanette McGuinness  03:54
Totally different model, yeah.

Madeline Clara Cheng  03:56
Oh for sure, so I I'm always thinking about how we can, you know, better, support our artists.

Nanette McGuinness  04:02
Oh, that's lovely. And I mean, it's tricky in a school production when it's students, because it's considered part of their degree. So you know, and yet you're often one is often bringing outside people in, and it just gets, gets really tricky. You are right about different models for the arts and for supporting the arts, Europe versus here. So advocacy, writing, are we leaning towards investigating law?

Madeline Clara Cheng  04:31
I do actually have a minor in business law and another one in music industry, so I'm, I'm certainly like looking into studying that more because I I feel like it's so, it's so important, and I'm just so drawn towards that. I'm really excited to be taking a music law class this semester, and then hopefully, like an employment law class in a future semester. I just think it's I just think it's so, it's so necessary because even even though, like we say, so much we care about our artists like, I just keep seeing so many different, you know, major entertainment organizations and also performing arts organizations, just treat them like they're, I don't know, like, even just like, the word like human, human resources, to me is such an such an interesting thing. It feels like we're like, tools or part of this like, this like cog, in like a greater machine, bring the incredible creative value that artists do.

Nanette McGuinness  05:26
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that the, you know, the individual isn't really the focus, as opposed to the function, or the group, a little bit like managed healthcare, where, you know, instead of going to a doctor, you go to whoever in the group is available or whatever. Yeah.

Madeline Clara Cheng 05:43
Yes. On the health care note, because, because I know this, since a lot of, again, a lot of my family works in healthcare, my my family has often kind of had to air out complaints about the management of hospitals, because very often they the managers don't have a medical background, and it's not that they're not great business people or don't have that acumen for running an organization, but they just don't, they can't empathize really with the people that they're working with. So that's another reason why I'm, like, very interested in arts management and, like, interested in people who actually, like, you know, both care about the arts and have that background and know what it's like to see it from an artist perspective.

Nanette McGuinness  06:30
Absolutely, if you have people managing who don't know how the sausage is made, then it's going to be a mismatch at some point, and often a big one. So no, that's, that's very interesting and admirable, actually, that's wonderful. And it's so it sounds like you've got so many things bubbling in your brain that it's, it's really hard to know, and we'll have to check back with you in a decade to see where you land.

Madeline Clara Cheng  06:54
I'm curious to know where I'll be.

Nanette McGuinness  06:57
I think that's okay. That's really good. You know, talented, creative people who are smart have trouble deciding, in the decade that you're in. So yeah, let's... let's check back. Let's switch gears here a little bit and go to the piece that you're writing for us, that we're excited to have you write for us. Any thoughts about that? Or is it still in the early goose stage?

Madeline Clara Cheng  07:22
It's so definitely in the early stages, but it's it's actually because, ever since I decided that I wanted to write for vocals, because I I've discovered, like this past year, that that is very artistically exciting to me, to get to work with the human voice that I'm working with a poet who is one of my, one of my good friends from I've known her since elementary school, and we, we grew together, and she's a fantastic writer, but her name is Abby Williamson, and she's like working on the text right now, and I've been like looking over some of her past drafts. I tend to be very inspired by text. The piece that I had in January was based off of a poem as well. But I would say that the like I mentioned movement a lot, text is the other big thing for me. I have like, a folder in my in my desktop that's just like bits of like poetry, or bits of just not, not even, not even things are intended to be artsy, just like things that people like say randomly, that I just like save and keep away for in my little piece inspiration folder. And I always like refer back to that when I need some sort of like spark to go off of. But I really love text, and I'd say that's been one of the biggest inspirations as well for a lot of my music. And I really like being able to work with, you know, I mentioned lots of interdisciplinary collaboration, so I like to work with, you know, real life people who are actively creating music, since a lot of it's very easy to just, you know, go into the public domain space and find like an old, dead dude who has written this beautiful piece, but it's also, it's also very fun, great work that that, you know, young, hip, cool people are putting out right now. So I really wanted to, I really want to be able to work with someone who was, you know, kind of like a peer for me, and also a really great friend. And she has a little poetry account on Instagram that I've been following for a few years, and I always like I have some of hers saved to my inspiration folder as well. So when, when this commission called for a poet, I knew I had to reach out to her, so this will, very largely, be inspired once she finishes this text draft. But this semester, for me, was also like a really big master class in working with electronics. I've done it a few times in the past, but this semester is when I really started to dive into it. I've never thought of myself as good with electronics, but I really, I was kind of forced to be when the pieces that I was writing sort of called for it like it felt like it, it just, it just had to be that way, like when I had, when the dance piece I was working for this semester was, it was, it was just really, really intense and had a lot of like dystopian themes for the for the piece that we were trying to go for. So I I knew I had to incorporate, you know, like sirens, like really heavy hitting beats, which was so different from what I had done, but I knew that anything else that I would come up with just wouldn't be the same. So I'm excited to see how, how that will incorporate for for this piece, because I think there's lots of different ways it can go, and a lot of it again, is going to depend on how this on how this poem turns out.

Nanette McGuinness  10:48
Yeah. And in fact, I should point out to those listening that we didn't insist on voice, we actually gave you the list of instruments and options and let you pick, and I believe you gravitated there pretty quickly.

Madeline Clara Cheng  10:59
Absolutely.

Nanette McGuinness  11:00
Yeah, not that I'm prejudiced, but there is something special about the human voice...

Madeline Clara Cheng  11:05
[laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  11:05
...and about singing. It's trickier to write for, but it incorporates some really important stuff. I'm curious, what's the poem about, or what's the piece about, or do you have a working title?

Madeline Clara Cheng  11:18
We don't yet have a working title. She's basically sent me over a few things she's written in the past, as well as something like a story she's working on right now. It's about, it's about vampires, I think it's really, it's really, we're still trying to, like, pick and choose and see what sticks. She's written some, like, lovely works in the past about, about all these different things. There's, there's a really beautiful one about, about, like a bookkeeper in a shop. Um, it's very quiet and intimate. And then there's like, a darker one about, like a raven, which I've, I've, again, I love birds, my sister loves birds.

Nanette McGuinness  11:51
Right, right.

Madeline Clara Cheng  11:53
Very cool. I think one of her more recent ones that she, that she was she showed to me, was, um, this lovely one about, like a boardwalk by the sea. So nothing like that's like we've, like, firmly decided on yet, but there's a lot of really cool concepts and ideas floating around. She says that she tends to write a lot more, I guess, like somber and sometimes darker pieces, which I think is usually very different from how I write. But I always love to be able to push myself creatively. I think especially with electronics, I've done that a lot this semester. So thematically, I'm also excited to dive into that world as well.

Nanette McGuinness  12:30
Yeah, E4TT has a very strong history of doing dark topics, so yeah, it's not a problem for us if you do go in that direction, that... that's fine. It's our own one way of advocacy that we do.

Nanette McGuinness  12:48
[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 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].