“My own queerness feels, in many ways, about the ways in which I am observed; the type of feedback I get and it is certainly an internal and personal thing, but it’s about how it comes into relation with others.” - Jodie Landau

On February 7th at 6pm, MOTIF hosted a virtual roundtable with the composers of A WORTHY MIRROR, a commissioning project from early music revivalists that puts 12th-century poet-composers in conversation with their modern counterparts. Moderated by poet and critic danilo machado, this roundtable explored how A WORTHY MIRROR translates lyric poetry into new compositions, forefronts female and anonymous femme voices in medieval canon, and reflects upon themes of gender, self, and relationships across time.

“There's something about this piece of paper, how it transforms and is trying to figure out what it is. For me, I feel like that is life—we're trying to figure out who we are the whole time.”

“Breathless validates the work of physical laborers, rather than dehumanizing them, and aims to counteract the common narrative of robot takeover in the workplace by teasing out the expressive, dance-like qualities of the robot arm…In viewing embodied labor as a kind of dance, Breathless: Catie and the Robot asks the audience to witness manual work as choreographed and performed.”

"JJJJJerome shares how instrumental music has always been a significant space for grieving and dwelling. He tells me about how he’s always been drawn to music that deploys certain organizational techniques (like loops, drones, vibrato) that facilitate—and teach—dwelling. This dwell, this slow, is in many ways a protest to capitalist, ableist urgency."

“After the protests in response to the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022, it was an extremely difficult and isolating time. And I had all these emotions that just came out of me, like anger, anxiety, and I just found out that it’s a bit liberating to just express an aspect of the emotions in the work…Even though the work is very heavy and dark, it became an outlet of expression for me.”

“McBane’s compositional practice lends itself to evocative imagery and sprawling atmospheres...Topography draws on this music, building sweeping atmospheres from intricate, repeating patterns that slightly change with each reiteration. When McBane started composing the work, he was interested in crafting music that stretched out, imagining dusty desert roads and crispy flora that sprawled for miles and family hikes up and down the rocky California terrain.”

“We are the current generation, we are those whose voices are yet to be heard. And, in composing, we're expressing thoughts and ideas that are entirely relevant to our time period now, and are creating a place for our voices to be heard in the future.”

“We're not telling a perfect story with a throughline in every kind of way. We're trying to be storytellers, but not in a traditional sense. I've been around for a while. The dancers that come [to work with me] want to be part of a process that's going to be chewy and full and complex. I want to keep working with artists in that vein.”

“In Kibbey’s latest work Crossing the Ocean, six composers who emigrated to the States bring their musical traditions to her and the harp…Kibbey asked each composer the same question: which is the rock from which you’re cut? And how do those memories (musical or otherwise) synthesize with your current circumstances?"

“Cabaret was the most welcoming setting to lean into my natural queerness and activism as a young songwriter, whilst constantly being surrounded by legends who can consistently challenge an audience with joy and chutzpah. I’m excited now that there’s a chance I can bring that level of dangerous honesty to the pop world.”

“I would take [Muhammad Ali’s] footage, cut the sound off, and I’d write down the rhythms, the way he would be moving. He was an innovator...Muhammad Ali created a whole ‘nother system of boxing. I was really impressed by his movement. The way he moved, I said, that’s the way I want to play the trombone.”

“The subject matter that attracts me the most is relations…identity, connections. Actually not feeling connected to anything, and being a stranger.”

“In order to understand luminosity, you need to go through darkness. In order to understand the joyful purpose of your life you have to go through grief. The easiest way for me to translate my inner experience is through music.”

“To really slow down and to actually be in that space of patience and listening is extremely hard for me. And it's also the best version of myself when I actually do that. So, I think to get to embody that musically is the best version of who I want to be as a person.”

“...Williams has tenderly cultivated his artistry. He reaps virtuosity from the fecund space between worlds. Between tradition and futurity. Standards and experimentalism. The acoustic and the electric. The human and the world.”

“When things are personal, they also wind up being universal. Because, as human beings, we have so much in common. And if you’re dealing with something in a very direct way, and present it as art, [your audience] may project their own experience onto it. I don’t call that narcissism, it’s generosity.”

“Freedom Doll is about being very honest and vulnerable about how I felt…It was more about translating my core psyche into a performance. I'm approaching performing in a different, much more violent, vulnerable way on Freedom Doll.”

“The earth and humanity are intricately linked—when we hurt the planet, we hurt ourselves. When we heal the planet, we heal our communities.”

“The urgency is letting go the same way the island and Cesária taught me to let go. It’s not holding on to the experience no matter how precious it is. Be vulnerable, share it, and move on.”

“How can these instruments exist in these different places, while the expression in how they are played is slightly different?...As you fill in those blanks, the world becomes smaller and smaller. And as we connect these answers, we see that our differences become smaller and smaller.”

“I was experiencing [the Nagorno-Karabakh war] at a distance, by myself, far from my family and my country, and all of this came out in the music. This was my way of trying to heal, hope and dream, but also to express real sorrow. I lost friends in that war, I have friends who lost their homes. Music was my outlet.”

“The oboe’s singularity comes from its inherent resistance. We blow air through a tiny opening, into a very narrow resonating body—that resistant energy is what makes its sound so potent and its aural effect so profound. I think you could argue the political resistance that plays a large role in this music is well-suited to the instrument.”

“In the way that Chen was able to connect with friends and collaborators around Ligeti, Chen believes that surviving the future, and unpredictability in general, is the mission of music. For classical music to help others do this, connections must be made and felt between those who make music, and those who engage with the music composed or performed.”

From childhood, Barwick was into music. She describes her mother as a “beautiful singer,” and as a kid growing up in Tulsa, she sang in a number of choirs around her city. “[Music is] my biggest joy in life,” Barwick says. She has now expanded far beyond Brooklyn’s DIY scene, touring the world and building up to a new path in composing film music.

“No matter where the music goes eventually, the writing always starts on acoustic guitar. The guitar centers everything—it has its own personality, has its own way of doing things. The guitar shows me who I am.” - Kaki King

“When I listen to music, I am often overwhelmed! I recognize influences from other works and contexts such as biographical information about the artist or the era in which they created the piece. I’m curious about what I don’t understand technically, about the production resources to facilitate great writing and recording.” - LeeAnn Rossi, Senior Curator and Creative Producer

“I looked through the window and saw a bunch of people just blowing their horns, and it was just so energetic and so enthusiastic and so lush…I think that was the moment when I [knew] large ensemble is for me.” - Jihye Lee

“THE RASA PROJECT isn't just about John Cage or climate change or existential uncertainty; it's about making space for our generation––the one responsible for solving this issue––to reflect and react to what's at hand.”

“Joined by pianist Santiago Leibson, bassist Marty Kenny and drummer Rodrigo Recabarren, Nilsson analyzes and transmutes On The Pulse of Morning into a melodic interplay of measure and verse that find the ensemble and Angelou herself—the chief soloist in each arrangement—mulling revolution across the time space continuum through the time-honored divining tools of diminished chords and rhythm.”

“I didn’t have the intention of a quiet album but it felt right in the moment.” - Eydís Evensen on The Light

“When we observe nature, we learn so many different things. TENGGER's music has a simple and minimal distinctiveness, but most of it is inspired by the natural world.”

“The urgency is letting go the same way the island and Cesária taught me to let go. It’s not holding on to the experience no matter how precious it is. Be vulnerable, share it, and move on.”

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.

The Sensorium Ex Opera will form the core of an integrated web of emergent artistic, scientific and community-driven collaborations which take the key ideas and themes of the Opera from stage to society.

“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?"