To [Emile], it was important to stray away from an ambiance or etherealness film scores usually have, and this was particularly so when it came to voice. “I wanted you to feel it in your ear,” he said.

“I feel like I'm in a boat in the middle of the ocean. And then to my right, there's a storm, but then to the left, there's a sunset and so it's like beauty and chaos all at the same time.”

"John is the ultimate inventor, and he does so with pure love. That purity makes everything he does brim with honesty and often radicalism in its most exciting form."

“When I came to [the Manhattan School of Music] for college, and I was 20, I went to a club downtown and I heard this [artist] called Imani [Uzuri]. Opening for her was Santigold. I was studying classical music, but culturally looking for something that felt more like what I saw when I would go out at night."

It felt like organized chaos, reminiscent of the mosh pits I'm so used to being in.

In Paraíso, much hinges on these choices, and on the idea of choice itself. How does one choose to migrate—choose to leave paradise? Is any choice even yours considering all of the structures creating pressured conditions for living and leaving?

“I was inspired by the contrasts. You can still be in love and still have that type of suffering and be courageous enough to open your heart. It’s about deconfining yourself and keeping your heart open.”

A collaborative class reflection on claire rousay and Fuji|||||||||||ta’s National Sawdust performance.

“Home is Home” left me wanting to travel to all the places Salles has been blessed to associate with home, as each selection transported me to a new safe place where I was greeted with the hospitality of jazz culture and experimentation.

"Before pivoting to music, Dalt was a geotechnical engineer...her compositions, heavy with reverb, feel like expeditions into the deepest of caves, places where the world becomes a distant memory, where the wrong shadow in the right place can trigger fantastical hallucinations."

"They complemented each other perfectly, with Guidry giving audience members a musical interpretation of what it feels like to overcome racial oppression and self-doubt followed by Kalia’s ethereal trombone improvisations that carefully articulated fragments of her past."

your pen did not shy away from queering the brush; stroke of wild, puissant potential in pulsing young bodies

“In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm just at the beginning of a spiritual journey and this first dragonchild record is really a way of honoring that spiritual practice. The music has always been spiritual, but this is the first time that spirit is coming front and center.”

New voices. New history-making…45 years later, under Mekala’s leadership, the Ark is still flying.

“I naturally build instruments in the process of searching for unknown sounds.”

“Rosebud Ben-Oni, claire rousay, and FUJI|||||||||||TA all quilted distinct performances rooted in being attuned to the audience’s reactions.”

“As they sing, they’re completely in sync: Throughout the music’s crisp open intervals, they look into each other’s eyes and gesture towards one another as if they’re reading each other’s minds.”

“Music has been a gateway for me to span time and space connecting more intentionally with my culture, and the sounds of Berklee Indian Ensemble…were no exception”

“The music of J.G. Thirlwell is, in part, about letting go of preconceptions.”

“There’s a lot of soul in all of it, not in any kind of perfunctory way—a lot of heart and emotion.”

“Classical music was most popular when it was being used for dance,” they assert. Is popular dance culture ready for classical dance music? “Do whatever you want to the music,” Keb says.

Diving into her music is like swimming through an unscathed secret.

“I feel like I can fill all of myself up inside this instrument. It sings so well. I can express myself with this instrument in many different genres”

Love the lovely / kissing that is / treeing treeing treeing / needing the beauty

Imminent rise / of the phoenix / trusting hushed / choruses trapped / calling - trespassing

Fast-motion capture / of a flower’s petals / unfolding. 

Lightly stack the smoothest stones / and clear away the brush. Coax / the canopy to admit sunbeams.

Colors collide without clashing. / Chords can’t constrain / the controlled chaos

The final installment in our digital tribute poetry series unHIDDEN: After C.P. Cavafy. Read all installments now on Motif.

The fourth installment in our unHIDDEN: After C.P. Cavafy poetry series, a digital tribute centered on modern queer desire and visibility.

The next in our digital tribute poetry series unHIDDEN: After C.P. Cavafy.

The latest addition in our poetry series unHIDDEN: After C.P. Cavafy.

The first installment of our new poetry series, unHIDDEN: After C.P. Cavafy.

“I hope my story will shed the light of truth on the devastating consequences of war. I hope that it will encourage veterans to open up to those close to them about their experiences. I hope it stops someone from joining the military. I hope it makes people think twice before resorting to violence.”

“This sculptor and their process of dealing with [their] relationship with the audience (the public self v. the private self) really spoke to me. How the sculptor views their works in progress. It was satirical and also a little funny.”

A maker of DIY electronics and instruments, composer, and computer musician, Sheehan turns speaker instruments into microphones by reversing the clarity of the speaker.

Using the texts, Pierrot-plus instrumentation, and National Sawdust’s Meyer Sound spatialized sound system, Guterres sought to make music that dealt with fate and hope.

Walking around the same parts of their neighborhood with their dog and finding the familiar made anew on these walks resonated in the words of Cavafy’s poetry.

A cultural theorist as much as a composer, their deep appreciation for the two comes with a profound understanding, which they have translated into their compositions.

What's musically inspiring me at the moment is the ability to be teleported. What I mean is to be moved to another moment in time, to be pleasantly disrupted and altered.

Wikinson ducks the arduous work of engaging anti-Blackness. As a result, American Tap fails to breach the banal.

Playing techno track after techno track, Fola improvised on various instruments with the groove in the background, fusing his love for modern electronic music with his Nigerian roots.

“It will be a collective shining, a collective uplifting.”

With two distinct sensibilities, the duo invented a musical language. Two violins floated in perfect tandem, diligently capturing a massive net of sound and pause.

Ahead of his April 1st edition of ‘Hour of Charm’ at National Sawdust, former artist-curator and former artist-in-residence Sxip Shirey created a playlist featuring artists he’s previously curated.

A dappled white light sparkles through a hazy blue-green glow as they play subtle scratches over a blaring bass beat, conjuring the roughness of the sandy ocean floor and the sense of mystery that lives at the bottom of the ocean.

Like moving fast in a car but a moon follows slowly, he was able to suspend time, acknowledging beginnings, ends, and conversations between notes that resolve and ones that don’t.

Her piano was responsive, dynamic, and nearly sentient. Through a dialogue between herself and her piano, Tan watered and fed her pieces to life. 

Pianist Alex Peh explores parallel piano worlds that unsettle boundaries of genre, tradition, and style.

In those moments of stillness, we were in meditation, together—and that feeling held within it all that an answer could provide.

...I’m left with is a feeling of generational knowledge, cosmic connectivity, and the futuristic vibrations of the tabla and sitar still in me.

As soft blue and purple lights swept across the stage, the crowd appeared as if they were sitting on the seafloor, where sunlight streams through the rolling waves above.

American Tap traces the cultural roots of this uniquely American musical and dance form, revealing how the evolution of tap acts as a microcosm of America's shifting identity, anxieties, and demographics.

“This work engages critical values from disability culture in an interdisciplinary artistic project that fosters access as aesthetic and is grounded in the disabled experience.” Joyce is a 2021 Toulmin Fellow with National Sawdust and Center for Ballet and the Arts.

Tiffany Rea-Fisher is a National Dance Project Award winner, 2021 Toulmin Creator, 2022 Toulmin Fellow, a John Brown Spirit award recipient and was awarded a citation from the City of New York for her cultural contributions.

“A model and practice for connecting body to body, body to spirit, and bringing our Wholeness into group vocal improvisation“ Michelson is a 2021 Toulmin Fellow with National Sawdust and Center for Ballet and the Arts.

I am creating from the space of exploring the unknown, starting from a blank page and improvising from there.

After six years of living in the most diverse city, New York, I started asking a question—who really am I?

It’s important to me to create something meaningful, truthful, and inspiring. In the process, I hope to grow as a human being!

“It’s shocking. This is something you cannot just watch on YouTube or put on headphones and expect to have the same experience. It will change what you expect, what you hear, and how you feel about sound.”

“It was definitely really gratifying [to] prioritize [accessibility] from the start, to really integrate it as an essential artistic element. I feel like we’re often so conditioned to view accessibility as not aurally pleasing or visually pleasing, like this tack-on, and I loved trying to push against that."

“As the days and hours accumulate I’m reminded of the ways in which practice, steadfast repetition, is a reliable force for both growth and creation. The Raja Routine is akin to the singing or playing of scales, which become arpeggios, which become an extended range, which becomes technique and can translate into a grasp on rudiments and self-possession with which most new things are made.”

“I am interested in creating what I’m calling holograms of the individual characters. Sometimes, a live dancer might interact with a life-sized, projected dancer. I am trying to create four separate worlds that bleed together through the layering of digital media and choreography—I am working to distinguish a strong thread between all the characters.”

“From the beginning, we didn’t want ChamberQUEER to just be what these four people think the future of classical music will be. That’s not interesting! The four of us are such a small part of what it means to be a queer musician. You get stuff that’s way more surprising and exciting when you let others take the reins.”

i am thinking about the necessity of Black joy & laughter. & Baldwin’s smile. his large teeth, some gapped & browning, anchoring a smile that feels oddly effortless considering all the shit he had to be mad about. depending the circumstance, like debating some entitled whiteboy with an ivy league pedigree, Baldwin could flick his smile switchblade quick as if to say: don’t fuck with me.

"So many times, your default position has been to defend your institution’s choices instead of showing care to me. Sure, my 1099 makes up such a small percentage of your 990, but the bottom line is more than fiduciary. The bottom line also implies your core values. Beyond your institution’s feckless mission statement, what’s your bottom line as a person?"

All told, Baldwin was a witness of his time for all time. He was never afraid to go it alone––temporal popularity be damned, long-term, sustained justice be sacred. The questions remain the same from his time. It is up to all of us to make sure these questions are answered very differently. We are all witnesses. We all have voices.

Molly Joyce: “There is always something more to learn, experiment with, and improve upon.”

“Just as there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, there’s no ethical labor relation under capitalism. Every labor relation I’ve participated in has been exploitative in some way.”

My friends and their parents didn’t go to hear the orchestra and even at that early age it didn’t feel like a place where I would be welcomed because of how I looked. No matter how much I practiced, my skin never magically turned white.

A letter to James Baldwin, from an artist and organizer reflecting on today’s social justice movement.

Considering the lineage and foundations of the current ecomusicology movement, from Native American traditions to Free Jazz and Zen Buddhism.

Musician and activist Martha Redbone reminisces on the American Indian and African American sounds of her childhood, and celebrates the legends of Indigenous composition.

Reframing classic music in a global perspective ranging from Ragas to Dvořák, Nina Simone and Beyonce.

“This work engages critical values from disability culture in an interdisciplinary artistic project that fosters access as aesthetic and is grounded in the disabled experience.” Joyce is a 2021 Toulmin Fellow with National Sawdust and Center for Ballet and the Arts.

“A model and practice for connecting body to body, body to spirit, and bringing our Wholeness into group vocal improvisation“ Michelson is a 2021 Toulmin Fellow with National Sawdust and Center for Ballet and the Arts.

Join us for our third episode which features guest Jad Abumrad. In this episode, our hosts unearth the practice of active listening and the nuances that come with listening and communicating.

Join us for the second episode of our second season featuring guests Lori Pourier and Natalie Hopkinson. Kamilah Forbes, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Paola Prestini engage in conversation surrounding sovereignty, indigenous peoples, and gentrification through a macro and micro lens.

Paola Prestini, Kamilah Forbes, and Marc Bamuthi Joseph's podcast Active Hope returns for its second season with a focus on belonging with New York City Ballet company member Georgina Pazcoguin and dancer and author Phil Chan.

What is the connection between the individual and larger systemic change? How can we construct systems and modalities that take into consideration that the world is constantly changing? And how can we do all of that while being present with our bodies and finding personal fulfillment?

Join us for Episode 4 of the Active Hope Podcast, featuring Marina Gorbis, the Executive Director of the Institute for the Future, poet Brenda Shaughnessy, and illustrator and animator Tim Fielder.

A critically acclaimed theater director. A poet and TED Global Fellow. An award-winning composer. How can artists and arts workers shape the transformational and polarizing moments of today? Join the artistic leadership trio of Kamilah Forbes, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Paola Prestini—from the Apollo Theater, the Kennedy Center, and National Sawdust—on the #ActiveHopePodcast, an engaging public conversation in the pursuit of inspiration for all. Join us for Episode 3 featuring Regina Romero, Mayor of Tucson, Arizona.

Join Kamilah Forbes, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Paola Prestini for an engaging public conversation exploring artistic intellect and national strategic leadership in the pursuit of inspiration for all.

Join us for Episode 2 of the Active Hope Podcast, featuring CNN commentator and New York Times best-selling author Van Jones.

Playlist (Rainbow spirals round and round).

Playlist (Blinking at a star).

Playlist (Something like a bird).

Playlist (Twisting all the knobs).

Playlist (Reading and remembering Andrew).

Playlist (Waves of light).

Playlist (Deeper than light can go).

Playlist (Tones of Deep Solemnity).

Playlist (Become Spirit and Light).

Playlist (A century lost to memories).

Playlist (Moths Swirl and Clouds Call).

Playlist (Who’d have thought that snow falls).

Playlist (earthbound, starblind).

Playlist (Forgot About the Time).

Playlist (Veo a través del tiempo).

Playlist (Mysteries Dark and Vast).

Playlist (lose verbunden).

Playlist (Perchance to Dream).

Playlist (Preaching on the Burning Shore).

Playlist (Tremors of Bliss).

Playlist (quite simply melting).

Playlist (Yankin’ at the Chain).

Playlist (I Am a City of Habits).

Playlist (Succumb Now to the Spirit).

Playlist (The Nature of All Things).

Playlist (If Only I Could Remember Your Name).

Playlist (Don’t Call It a Comeback).

Playlist (A Cassette of Fresh Screams).

Playlist (Everything Well in Tune).

Playlist (Done with the Chart).

Playlist (Go Quiet the Tumblers).

Playlist (Und Ein Engel Ging Vorbei).

Playlist (so süß die Sinne mir zwingt).

Playlist (Standing in the Swing).

Playlist (Churning My Direction).

Playlist (Songs to Fill the Air).

Playlist (The Sweep of Centuries).

Playlist (The Simple Things).

Playlist (A Broader Sympathy).

Playlist (The Impression You Made).

Playlist (The Edge of the Envelope).

Playlist (Lost in My Circle).

Playlist (I Am Sitting in a Room).

Playlist (Debris of Consequence).

Playlist (Two Weeks).

Playlist (overbooked in Ojai).

Playlist (Crickets and Cicadas Sing).

Playlist (D’un soir triste).

Playlist (Melting in Solid Blue Tune).

Playlist (so that I can be free).

Playlist (shock value of my success).

Playlist (Find Your Way Back Home).

Playlist (get up and fly away).

Playlist (Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket).

Playlist.

Playlist.

Playlist.

Playlist (Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!).

Playlist.

Playlist.

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Further reading

Playlist (Engineered to Suit You).

Playlist (Abschied).

Playlist (Out Beyond Earshot).

Playlist (Ich habe genug).

Playlist (Stand in Defiance).

Playlist (All in Due Time).

Playlist (The Clamorous Choir of Birds).

Playlist (Songs to Be Sung).

Playlist (I Found That Essence Rare).

Playlist (Um, Listen).

Playlist (Interstellar Our Escape).

Playlist (A Flourish of Ritual Activity).

Playlist (The Shuddering Breath of Yesterday).

Playlist (A Bone to Pick with Time).

Playlist (Peals of fragile thunder).

Playlist (The shadows lengthen).

Playlist (May as well fly away).

Playlist (Moment of awakening).

Playlist (Lost in musing circumstances).

Playlist (Visualize your world ahead).

Playlist (A Gradual Thickening of the Air).