International Musician Interview (DHC Interviewed by John Otis)

MUSIC HERITAGE:
Music was an essential part of life for both my parents and grandparents. On my mother’s side – Russian Jewish immigrants – being a professional musician was the highest possible profession: it mixed music, performance, money and success. What else existed? That side of my family congregated around the piano the way some families congregate around food.

On my father’s side — Swedish farmers already several generations in the US – music was also fundamental, but not as art; rather in a kind of citizenship. Someone who plays an instrument is useful as a member of society, providing an essential aspect of community-building. And what’s more important than being useful? My Grandmother played the piano in exactly the same spirit as she took part in community events. “Folks gotta sing,” she said, “and someone’s gotta keep ‘em together. That’s why I play the piano.”

My parents courted by singing together – and, as it turned out, singing was their single point of connection. They divorced when I was still a baby, but music remained my basic connection with both of them. The only time I ever saw my parents together was at my first harp concert.

The upshot of all this was that, for me, music was my first language — a form of communication, a strictly live phenomenon (I rarely listened to recordings or radio) and just a way to be in the world.

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS:
I started the ukulele when I was 7. I still remember the first moment I held the instrument in my hands and fingered my first chord (G). It was the same year I learned to ride a bike – and the two, bike riding and playing an instrument are fixed in my mind as the beginning of independence, freedom and power. To be able to accompany myself was a kind of liberation and to be able to accompany other folks made me feel useful and important.

I had a few lessons on many instruments as a child during the period when my mother and stepfather tried to understand how to focus my interest in music. It was clearly my first language, my first interest and my preferred method of entertainment. My parents tried many instruments, trying to get one to “stick,” before they realized that I wasn’t interested in PLAYING an INSTRUMENT – I was interested in MUSIC. I wasn’t interested in becoming a “player,” but rather in how music worked harmonically, structurally, emotionally, and how to build music-story inventions. So they gave up on lessons, my mother taught me the rudiments of reading chord charts, they rented a piano, put it in my room, just left me alone, and I kept on writing.

THE HARP:
When I got to college, my school needed a harpist in the band. I knew how to tune the instrument, so I became the harpist. And this time it “stuck” - not because I loved the harp, but because of the teacher. My teacher, Linda Wood, psyched me out immediately. She knew how to challenge me and set out a series of challenges that kept me playing and practicing. Within 6 months, she was recommending me for background music gigs. Soon she started recommending me for orchestral gigs, too – not because I was such a great player, but because I could count – and whether or not I played every note right, I came in at the right place. Timing is everything.

When I finally took the plunge and bought a used harp, it took every cent I had. To get the harp to gigs, I’d rent a trailer, hook it up to my VW bug and pray for no rain. After a few months this got old, so I pulled all the seats but the driver’s seat out and experimented with shoving the harp in. With some shifting and angling it fit. (In fact, I discovered a year later, I could get the harp, my best friend and her cello in the car – and still drive it.)

The car was a remarkable-looking vehicle, even without the harp. It was my Dad’s old Beetle and I’d totaled it the week after I got it. It ran fine, but the front end was decimated, so I had my mechanic bolt Dune-buggy headlamps to the front hubs and replace the front bumper with a wooden four-by-four. Then I took a paintbrush and a can of deep green Rustoleum and painted the whole car. I appreciated the paradox of a gilded harp traveling in such a funky-looking vehicle.

I found the whole harp “gestalt” very off-putting. Its delicacy seemed to hide both the instrument’s abilities and its shortcomings. I found it disturbing that people seemed as impressed with it as a piece of furniture as they did with it as an instrument, and I resented that it seemed built to be coddled and protected rather than to get out there and make a voice for itself.

On the other hand, I had a sense at the beginning that being a harpist might have a palliative affect on my “oversized” personality — help settle me down. I remember walking to my first orchestral gig, dressed in black, carrying a huge electronic tuner (they were as big as a small suitcase in those days and cost about $200). I was so impressed with myself at being able to "pass" as a real musician, which I thought meant fitting a kind of mold. When I finally got over myself, I found that that mold chaffed, and in the end it was the harp that had to fit me.

So basically, I think the harp initially represented an aspect of womanhood that I both longed to embody and needed to challenge. If you can imagine that the harp, as a stereotype, represented one destiny for me as a woman, you can see why I considered the instrument as both a powerful nemesis and a damsel in distress — I had to fight it as an enemy, ally with it as a partner and liberate it as a feminine image, all at once.

(As an aside: I went through a similar evolution with body image. When I first signed with a label (GRP in the 90’s), I was hungry to have a cover shot where I looked like some kind of pin-up girl. I really wanted to “fit in” as a female media image. Once I finally got that, I realized what a trap it was for me and how little it expressed both myself and my music and that’s when I started really trying to explore exactly how I needed to express myself physically with the instrument.)

My personal relationship to the instrument only developed once I struggled through the stereotype and my appreciation for the harp as an instrument has developed over time. At first, what most interested me was the physical challenge, in particular the high level of coordination I needed to deal with both the strings and the pedals. I was fascinated with the mechanics of the instrument, the thousands of working parts, and the coordination of feet and hands.

It was once I started doing solo shows that I really began understanding the huge musical vocabulary this instrument has, the range of emotion and color, and its ability to mimic other members of the pitched percussion family -- like guitar and steel drums.

I hope two things:

ONE: that they’ll be amazed at how limited their own preconceptions of the instrument previously were.

TWO: I hope that at some point they’ll become oblivious to the fact that I’m playing a harp and will simply experience the performance – and simply experience the instrument as an extension of my voice.

If they’re seeing me for the first time, I hope they’ll come away with an awareness (conscious or unconscious) that they came into the theater with some kind of prejudice about what they were going to hear, and that by exploding that preconceived notion, they’ll be more open-minded to other things in their lives, and more conscious of their prejudices.

If they’ve seen me before, I hope they’ll come away with an affirmation of my own belief that it’s not the instrument you play that’s important, but how you play it — and by extension, it’s not what you get or even what you choose in life that’s so important, but rather what you do with it. What you choose to do with what you get is what, in many ways, defines your life.

I don’t really think about how I want my music to affect my audience. I think more about how to bring a certain idea or experience to life via the music, and my biggest struggle is the balance between preparation (“knowing” what I want to do) and responsiveness to the moment.

Often my greatest regret after a performance is if I didn’t follow the audience or the circumstances. For example: I recently played in a huge stadium in Paris. I had my program planned in advance, but at the last minute, after looking at the physical environment, I realized I could bridge my performance with the previous performance by walking to the stage in spotlight and playing as I walked (one advantage of having a wireless, electric harness-harp). That was a great idea. It connected me with the previous performers, cut out the “down-time” of getting me onstage, and was in keeping with the conceptual bridge I was hoping to make between my performance and the ancient troubadours who wandered the Celtic Isles.
As I walked to the stage, I played a kind of Celtic marching music — and the audience started clapping in rhythm. It was thrilling — but instead of following that train of musical thought to conclusion once I got to the stage, I reverted to my original performance plan. That plan was fine, and the audience response was great — but after the show, I regretted that I hadn’t had the guts to follow where THEY were going for longer. I didn’t have the courage to let them affect ME enough.

I still regret a performance in North Carolina where the rain was beating down on a huge outdoor shed. I ALMOST changed my plan at the last minute and played a tune called “Rain King” -- and to this day I regret that I didn’t, because of what the audience and I might have experienced together if I had.

Music can bridge us to an experience, or to an audience. I am always looking for that bridge. For me, each performance is an opportunity to reach for a kind of truth that seems to exist only within the realm of performance. And this is where the “Alchemy” comes in — the alchemy of performance and collaboration is the part where the “Invention” comes to life.

Most of my pieces are musical stories, and every time I tell that story I am working to bring it to life — for both the audience and myself. So I’m really using the music to affect myself, and the audience is, in a sense, along for the ride.

DREAM OF A SYMPHONY:
About a dozen years ago I sat on my porch one New Year’s Eve, with a glass of champagne a little before midnight, closed my eyes and said, “I see myself playing with an orchestra – not in the back, but as a soloist, playing my own music.” At that time I didn’t know how to write for orchestra, and the harp I envisioned (a small electric harp I could strap on) didn’t exist. All I had was this vision.

The building of that vision into a reality included a lot of false starts, a lot of support from other musicians, instrument builders and folks who believed in what I was struggling to do. Little by little I built a body of work and started playing it with symphonies in the U.S.

Making the change from writing in a jazz style (lead sheets) to writing for orchestra was painful — not just for me, but for the musicians who worked with me! My first orchestral scores had all the right notes but absolutely no dynamics, articulations, phrasing, slurs — nothing! I’d simply never had to express any of that in writing, so I had no idea it was needed and no idea how to write it. I found all this out a week before my debut with the Boston Pops; a week during which I think I nearly caused the conductor a massive coronary when he first saw my "scores." They were absolutely unreadable, and I credit him with remaining calm and instead of insisting we go to our backup plan (I'd just play standards from charts the Pops had in their library), he basically said, "Look, this needs a music doctor."

During that last week, we brought in an arranger and copyist who literally set up camp in my apartment, where we worked around the clock, taking shifts sleeping, turning the raw notes and ideas into readable scores and parts.

I’ve learned so much about the importance of presentation – not just on stage – but to anyone I need to communicate with along the way: the music needs to be on the page, but it also has to look “familiar” to the players. Jazz players need to see it written in a way they’re familiar with and classical players need to see it in their own language.

The other thing that really tripped me up in bringing my music into a classical environment was an understanding of percussion and rhythm. In a jazz ensemble, you find the beat with your ears — from the rhythm section, or from the drummer in a trio. In an orchestra, players find the beat with their eyes – by watching the conductor – and the use of percussion in an orchestra is generally much more for color than to keep or set a rhythm.

I learned this the hard way, by thinking I could simply put jazz players and classical players together on stage and listening in horror as they fought over the beat.

During the last ten years I’ve learned a lot about writing scores, a lot about the importance of simple practical issues like the preparation of parts, the importance of getting parts and scores to music librarians with plenty of lead time before rehearsals, how to minimize rehearsal time by providing audio for the players and by identifying tricky and exposed parts for certain instruments, and how to hire players to come in and help me learn about the instruments I'm least familiar with.

I went from playing three or four pieces in a program, to writing the entire program, and eventually, to filming my orchestra program for DVD and Public Television broadcast. In retrospect, it seems like a logical progression. At the time it seemed interminable and often hopeless. For me, a sense of being lost seems to simply come with the territory of learning, and as I see it in writing, it makes perfect sense. A tolerance for being lost is probably a necessary character trait for heading into new territory.

The one place I always feel safe and at home is on the stage during performance. There, I feel like an ambassador. I love being able to take the audience on a journey and when I'm playing with an orchestra I love that I'm able to to introduce the audience to their own orchestra in a new way. I love being able to feature instruments, pull them out of the fabric of the ensemble and present them soloistically.

The interrelationship of the ensemble with the individual players is so stunning to me. I love the fact that this powerful “whole,” the orchestra, is made up of equally powerful individuals. I love playing with that idea musically: that the individual player, simply by being highlighted or given a unique role, can be as powerful a voice as an orchestra playing tutti. I’m also fascinated — and this is a holdover from jazz — by the ability of musicians to alternate seamlessly between playing a support role (accompaniment) and playing a leadership role (soloist). This interplay is beautiful to me and such a profound metaphor for the individual and society, that I never get tired of playing with it.

But I digress...

GRAND RAPIDS / PETER WEGE / INVITATION TO PROPOSE A PROJECT:
One of the orchestras that hired me about ten years into my orchestra soloist career was the Grand Rapids Symphony. From the minute I stepped off the plane, I had a special feeling about the community and the ensemble — and the show was one of those magical experiences we’ve all had: where circumstances outside our control seem to conspire with the performance to make it almost otherworldly. You know, the kind of thing where you play “Over the Rainbow” and suddenly the sky rumbles with thunder — that kind of thing.

It was a great show, and afterwards a man walked up to me, took my hand and said, “What I saw out there, I want the whole world to see.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but this man was Peter Wege, a philanthropist, environmentalist and fervent supporter of the arts. We remained in contact and a year or so later he invited me to submit a proposal for a collaborative project with the Grand Rapids Symphony.

I had many ideas for projects, but in the end my partner, Jonathan Wyner, said, “Your work needs to be seen, not just heard. You need to make a DVD.”

That, in a nutshell, is how “Invention & Alchemy” came to be.

The process was a combination of creative development and logistical scrambling. While I was writing and editing the music, Jonathan, who became the project producer, was interviewing directors, video editors, lawyers, production companies and lighting designers, coordinating with the orchestra and learning about makeup, costuming, video facilities, Union negotiations and the like. We were both working so hard we could barely find time to talk.

During that last hot summer before filming, we'd have meetings in the pond near our house – take our flippers and inner tubes and flap out to the middle of the pond, the only place we could get away from cell phones and email and just try to think straight.

THE MAQUETTES:
About 6 months before the filming date, we began to understand just how huge the project was, and how much we’d be dealing with during the filming. We realized the three days of filming didn’t leave us any time to experiment with the program and the staging. That’s when Jonathan came up with the idea of the “Maquettes.” A “Maquette” is a scale model of a huge project, a word I learned from an architect-friend.

We created two Maquettes: full-length versions of the orchestral program, but written for nine-piece ensemble. We presented them in concert, filmed them and edited them, just exactly the way we would with the final orchestral versions using smaller halls, smaller audiences and smaller production crews. Once we saw what the project looked like on film, we revised, rewrote and regrouped -- then we did it all over again.

Because these Maquettes were real performances with real audiences, lighting and cameras — not just rehearsals — they allowed us to work through many of the logistical and program-related issues in advance of the orchestral filming. They also created an unexpected advantage: they allowed the director and the entire video crew to actually see what was going to happen on stage.

A PIECE TO PLAY TOGETHER:
When the project was in the early planning stages, I asked conductor David Lockington what he wanted from the project. “All I want, Deborah,” he said, “is for you to write a piece that we can perform together.” These are the opportunities I live for.

Lockington is a world-class conductor, but also a cellist, and he has a beautiful singing voice. He’s also a damn good actor. So I adapted a piece I’d originally written for solo harp — a retelling of Sheherezade and the resulting piece, 996 (which refers to the 996th night of the 1001 Arabian Nights), is one of my favorites on the DVD. Lockington sweeps off the podium and comes back with a sultan’s sash, a gold earring, and his cello. Then we tell, musically, the story of the 996th Arabian Night — the night the Sultan learns to tell stories to Sheherezade – and in the middle of this passionate cello-harp duet, the orchestra comes back in thanks to the Grand Rapids Symphony's great Associate Conductor, John Varineau, who somehow (I never did figure out how) appeared on the podium to conduct the orchestra while Lockington played cello.

Having a story and a kind of mandate (“write a piece we can play together”) was exactly the kind of thing that brings my imagination alive. I got even more excited during the first rehearsal with David, when I saw how willing he was to invest in it theatrically as well as musically. That's when it stopped being just an idea and came to life. This idea of bringing a story to life on stage is so compelling to me and it's that kind of alchemy, which I experienced over and over again during this project, that made us call the DVD "Invention & Alchemy."

WHITE RABBITS:
Jonathan had an idea, early on, about interactive portions of the video: “White Rabbits” that would allow viewers to literally drop behind-the-scenes at certain points of the program as if through a rabbit hole. He wanted to film one White Rabbit segment for each piece, so that viewers could get insight into the pieces, the stories behind them, specific techniques I used in playing them or writing them. So we got together with filmmaker Ian Brownell and filmed twelve more segments at an old Vaudeville theatre in our neighborhood.

At first I didn't really understand how these would work, but once the DVD was out, watching my 11-year-old niece playing the DVD and chanting, “Where’s the White Rabbit, where’s the White Rabbit,” was such a thrill — I realized that this aspect of the project not only gave it a whole added dimension, but made the whole DVD more accessible to kids.

TECH:
The tech aspects of this project were extensive and the interface between artistic production and tech production was very involved. On a simple, practical level, it was a multicamera production, shot in hi-definition with full symphony orchestra. Apple.com actually published an article about the tech aspects of the project (you can access it from HipHarp.com), which is a good thing because I don't personally speak that language, so I can only describe what I experienced as the write/composer/performer ... and as the partner of the producer who dealt with all the tech aspects.

Choosing the production crew was a huge task that fell on Jonathan's shoulders, as both Executive- and Creative-Producer. We watched video after video, searching for directors and trying to educate ourselves about editing, lighting and other production values.

We ended up working with director Bob Comiskey, who was a great combination of someone with an aesthetic we appreciated, a very strong technical ability (we knew he'd be able to create a good rough edit "on the spot" from his years of work in television and with the Boston Pops), a music background (he's a drummer) – and I personally appreciated working with him because, while he's directed a lot of music, he's also directed Emmy-Award-winning children's television.

Bob created a kind of choreography from the scores. Often I wrote in the score which players I wanted the cameras focused on so that the video edits would directly reflect the audio – I wanted the audience to be able to see what they were hearing – and I wanted them to have the experience of being closer than the front row. Bob worked with a score reader, Justin Locke. Justin sat by Bob's shoulder in the video truck following the score while Bob literally called the shots (you can actually see some footage of him doing this on the “Special Features” on the DVD. Bob's directing is a performance in-and-of itself).

One of the great things about working with Bob was that he's so used to directing LIVE TV that by the end of each night we had a cut of the show that could have, theoretically, gone direct to disc.

One of the most brilliant choices was the lighting designer. Until I saw the work of Bob Peterson in action, I really had no idea how powerful great lighting can be in bringing a performance to life. All of us musicians were actually cranky about the lighting, since he was doing all his experimenting while we were in rehearsal. Honestly, we had a pretty bad attitude about it. Then we saw the video monitors — and each time it was the same reaction. The person would stop and look, get very quiet and say, “Ohhhh, THAT’S what it’s going to look like,” and the grumbling stopped immediately.

LOGGING & EDITING:
After Bob Comiskey did his final edit, Jonathan and I spent another month RE-editing the program. Bob’s edit was great for television, but both Jonathan and I wanted the final edit to reflect not just the performance, but the music itself. That meant a lot of tweaking, and apparently using some techniques that were a little unorthodox, but seemed obvious to me (like overlaying the horns and the harp on the screen when that's what I heard in the music). Jonathan and I also wanted to edit with a somewhat more cinematic aesthetic (longer cuts) than what’s standard today in television (no more than 7 seconds between cuts).

Oh ... and the logging! Jonathan and I split up the tapes and logged hours and hours of video. In many cases that meant transcribing every word that was spoken and describing the action in the scenes. Doing that allowed us to make choices between the three nights of performance and also allowed the director of the “Behind the Scenes Movie” to put that part of the project together without having to spend hours logging it himself.

GRAMMY NOMINATION & PBS:
So, the DVD and CD were released, we went on a release tour and then heaved a sigh of relief – for about two seconds.

In our initial proposal for the project, we'd stated our primary objectives were to bring my work to life on disc, to highlight the musical collaboration between me and the symphony, and to provide a “way in” to symphonic performance for a very broad-based audience. By the time the disc was out, we were more than satisfied we’d achieved the artistic objective. To hold the product in my hands – and even more importantly, to be able to hand it to someone else, to know my work could finally travel on its own – this was transcendent.

But ... the proposal also had two elements I’d call “Icing on the Cake” goals: we wanted a Grammy Nomination and we wanted to see it broadcast on television. Producer Jonathan Wyner had submitted the CD version of the DVD in several Grammy categories, but this was a completely new type of recording for me and it was an unusual combination of music and spoken word — almost like a cross between a soundtrack and a radio play, so we had no idea where the album might fit Grammy-wise. So when we got a nomination in “Classical Crossover” we were thrilled, because — well, it was a Grammy Nomination, so that’s thrilling — but this particular category was one of the few that nominates the album as a whole, and was particularly meaningful because it nominated the collaboration, and not just one aspect or song.

OK, so long story short, we didn’t win the Grammy (it went to a famous Welsh classical singer for a classic crossover-type recording), but it was truly wonderful to be at the Grammys as a Nominee and we DID get a very cool medal.

Getting the program onto PBS was a whole project in and of itself — more like a spin-off than an extension of the original DVD project. After several false starts, we ended up taking an independent route, working with an independent Public Television distributor rather than directly with PBS.

On a technical level, we needed to transform the work from a 145-minute interactive DVD into a 60-minute, 3-act television program. That meant re-editing the video, transcribing all the text for close-captioning and recreating the credits and [creating some kind of master from all this that would be uploaded to the stations via satellite (I'm a little hazy on the details here, since Jonathan, as producer, oversaw all of that)]

On a logistical level, we learned a lot about how the Public Television system works. We all think of PBS as a single entity, but in fact, there are more than 200 PBS Affiliates around the U.S. Our distributor actually lobbied each of them separately (that meant creating promo versions of the new program for each of them).

The long and short of it is that in March 2007, stations across the US started airing the broadcast version of “Invention & Alchemy.” Bizarrely enough, because of the way Public Television works, we’re often the last to know that there’s been an airing!

I'll just be in an airport somewhere and someone will run up to me and say, "Hey, I saw you last night!" or, "Wait! Aren't you the harpist?"

What's amazing to realize is that, although I've been recording for more than 20 years, this is the first time my work as a stage performer – both the visual and the musical aspects – has been publicly available on disc. My work is a kind of musical theater, so until people actually experience me physically in performance they don't experience the music in context – and the music is only half the story. So the release and the National broadcast of "Invention & Alchemy" is a very important debut for me — and the first time many people, even many long-time fans of my music, are actually seeing who I am as a performer.

I also want to point out the incredible role Public Television plays here. On Public Television, unlike commercial television, it IS possible for an artist to create an independent work and bring it directly to the public. It's not like I took my idea to a producer, she took it to her team of writers, they rewrote it, hired a designer, a coach, rewrote it to please the sponsor and then used me as "onscreen talent," (if they even let me be on screen!).

After more than 20 years in the music business, I feel like this project is my national public debut as a performer! What excites me conceptually about this show being on public television is that this show really is "me" – not a homogenized, commercialized me, but really me. So its broadcast on Public TV is not just a chance to get my face on television stations all over the country, but to reach individual people in a huge national audience, the same way I reach individuals in a huge concert hall or stadium. So it's in keeping with the ethic we've held throughout the project, the ethic of bringing the work to life, capturing the chemistry between me and this ensemble and bringing the audience right inside the work. It's deeply satisfying to spend years on a project and, at the end, be able to see the initial spirit and inspiration shining just as bright as when the idea first sparked.

And remember – this all happened because one man walked backstage and said, “What I saw out there, I want the whole world to see.” So a career is really a collaboration -- between an artist, her supporters and her audience.

There are two basic challenges for me: the challenge of creation or invention, and the challenge of performance, the transformation of idea into physical experience.

1. INVENTION: Creating the work – stories and music – creative challenges:
I am constantly searching for stories or idea-sparks that will inspire invention for me. If I can catch myself on fire with a story then I'm home free – there's still a huge amount of work to do to bring it to life, but once I feel the story I can simply follow it and test the music I write emotionally against the emotion of the story.

I also like to put myself in situations where I have to grasp for a creative solution in order to simply survive. The truth is that I'm more likely to gain musical inspiration from non-musical sources than musical sources. So, recently my partner/producer, Jonathan Wyner, and I produced a series of events called "Inviting Invention," which combined performance, interview and onstage improvisation –not with other musicians, but rather with scientists, journalists, dancers, a theater group. This series asks the question: "How is being a scientist or a philosopher or a dancer like being a musician, and how can the two possibly create something together – right now - in front of an audience?"

The MIT Museum heard about the series and booked us to present it at the 2007 Cambridge Science Festival, working entirely with inventors and scientists as guests. The point of the series is to explore where the points of invention intersect between diverse fields – and then to explore what we can learn about invention in our own fields from that intersection.

Originally we created these events as a challenge and inspiration for me personally. Then we discovered that the experiment was meaningful for everyone involved, from the participants to the audience.

2. ALCHEMY: The challenge of bringing the work alive in performance:
Bringing music and story alive, whether the story is sung or spoken, narrative or theatrical – this is always a challenge for me, and it's what I love to do. Every time I walk on stage, I'm hoping to play so authentically that every nuance of the music/story comes alive for the audience – and thus for me as well.

I’m very interested in collaboration and in what happens when ideas or performers work together — or, I should say: how people, ideas or performers work ON each other. By that I mean, what happens to a story when it’s expressed musically; how performers enhance each others’ performances; how one kind of idea can affect another kind of idea. For example: how can a scientific idea affect a musical idea – how can a musician and a scientist collaborate and enhance each others’ work. This goes back to the concept of "Invention and Alchemy" that underlay the DVD project. In a sense, for me, invention is "idea" and alchemy is the performance of that idea – bringing it to life physically.

I remember reading in music school that Schoenberg had said that, in a way, it was a pity to hear his own music performed because, on the page, it was perfect, but never so in performance. I’ve discovered that for me, sometimes it is exactly the opposite. I can write a line, but never understand the full emotional impact of the line until I hear it played by someone who cares about bringing it alive.

This is especially obvious when I write a new piece. Since I compose using Finale software and midi instruments, I'm listening to a synthetic version of the piece for weeks or months until the first performance. The experience of hearing the music played live for the first time is always very profound. Suddenly, it loses it's metronomic "perfection" and at the same moment comes truly alive. The humanity in a single held note played by a great musician is so immense that I often find it overpowering.

I think this is the great art and creative genius of the "re-creators" of a composer's work, by which I mean the performers. This is their "alchemy" – the part they play in generating the life of live music.

So my challenge as a composer is to create it and write it in such a way that the players can bring it fully to life. In a sense, I build half the bridge and they the other half. When those two halves connect, we bring the idea alive for each other and for the audience.

Challenging myself as a performer is different from the challenges as a writer/composer. Working on performance is, I think for every one of us, a life-long work. There’s the physical aspect: keeping our bodies in shape, developing an ever stronger, deeper and more fluid connection with our instruments physically. Then there’s the paradox between familiarity and creation. Like in any marriage, part of the beauty and richness of a long intimate physical relationship is the development of physical familiarity.

A lot of that seems to happen naturally just by playing. The conscious challenge is to find ways to reinvent and refresh our relationships with our instruments so we can continue to deepen our connection with them through our whole lives.

I’m lucky that my instrument is still very much in development, so I’ve been working for years with harp builders to build instruments that let me play the way I want to play.

About 8 years ago, when the CAMAC company built me a portable, electric harp, I had to start over from the beginning. I had to build a harness so I could strap it on, I had to learn a completely new playing technique. The strings are lighter gauge, and the chromatic mechanism is completely different. On the pedal harp chromatics are achieved with a foot pedal; on the harnessable harp they’re achieved with hand levers.

Harmony was suddenly completely different as well. On the pedal harp, when you change key, the entire harp is changed, whereas on a lever harp, you can have each octave of the harp in a completely different key.

I went away on a retreat for a week when I first got the instrument and practiced over and over the simple act of harnessing the instrument on, walking across the room while playing, then taking it off. Over and over and over.

I added the harp little-by-little to my shows, but I was so comfortable with the pedal harp that I simply relied on it. I finally had to make a conscious decision to do a month-long show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with only the harness-harp. It was like throwing myself in the water so I’d learn to swim. Only when I’d played 26 shows in the same number of days, did I finally feel comfortable with the instrument.

Once I could actually play it, then came the challenge of creating orchestral pieces to feature that harp. I often feel like the harp is a gem and when I write orchestral pieces for it, it is as though I’m creating various settings for that gem.

Boy, I could write so much about this. I would give the same advice for all musicians – myself, other professionals, young folks — and that is to find your own voice.

ARTISTIC SUCCESS:
Music is part of my language, but music isn't what I'm saying. It's what I'm USING to tell my own truth. My mother sang constantly and she sang all songs with equal conviction, from Nursery Rhymes to Operatic Arias.

My experience of music was that it told a story and that the different styles were simply different moods or scenes in the story. So my work incorporates many styles and genres of music – whatever I need to tell my story is what I'll use.

That’s MY voice. And everyone has a story like that: the story of what makes THEIR voice, what makes them who THEY are. It’s most important as a musician, an artist – just as a human being – to listen to that voice, to embrace it, to strengthen it, and to learn to speak with it. Without our own voice, we’re only echoes. And the more we find of our own voice, the richer we are as artists and as human beings – and the richer we make the world we touch.

So regardless of how financially successful you are, if you're speaking in your own voice, you own yourself and in my mind you are a successful artist.
As for financial and career success, I'll tell you what Livingston Taylor once told me: "Success as a musician means living to play another day."

On a practical level, I'd like to say: be willing to count on your fingers. What I mean by this is do whatever you have to do get your own handle on the music. Focus on where you want to go and what you want to do, not on how good or bad you look getting there.

When I first started playing with orchestras I thought I "should" be able to count 453 measures of rest effortlessly. Finally, a seasoned professional said, "Hey! Just count on your fingers!" It's about doing whatever you need to do to connect with the music, not about showing how easy it is for you.

On a musical level, I love what I learned from bass player Rufus Reid once, when we were doing a TV show together. He was telling young kids about becoming a bass player, and he said something like: "Look, when you start playing don't worry about filling in all the notes. Just play the big letter – the C, the F, whatever is before all the minor-major-7th-9th-altered part – and play that note in the right place. Later on, when you have that down, you can start filling in the rest."

You have the rest of your life to fill in all the blanks. So go with the big notes. Find a way to stay in time with the music until you're comfortable enough to start filling in the rest.

REVIEWS:
I know some folks just don't read reviews, but I do. I admire great reviewers. I love great, juicy quotes, and I’ve learned a lot from both good and bad reviews written by great writers. Sometimes a reviewer is the only person who has the guts and the language to pinpoint a problem with the work that I can sense but not put my finger on. And when a reviewer is a good writer, their review is an important part of my performance. Like a great sound system, reviewers and writers help my work to reach the ears of a greater public.

I've had a lot of great reviews and lots of quotes I love, but I’d like to talk about my worst experience with reviews...

The first time I wrote for a classical ensemble I made a huge tactical error: I thought I could rehearse with the classical players and the jazz players separately, then put them together for a single rehearsal and perform the piece. Each group alone sounded great, but the combined effect was of two different groups with two completely different sensibilities, playing the same piece at once. All the music was there — in two different ways at the same time. I’m not talking about an edgy Charles Ives effect — I'm talking about a muddy and confusing Battle of the Bands.

The reviews came in one by one, each more brutal than the last. And this was in Scotland where reviewers consider bashing performers as a mixture of art and sport. I was at a festival where some folks already resented me trying such an ambitious project, so as the reviews came in, someone kindly cut them out, highlighted the particularly vicious lines and posted them on the door to the lunchroom.

That experience, right at the start of a new phase of my career, was devastating. I completely shut down and boxed up that dream of writing for orchestra in a dark cabinet in my soul. I didn’t try to fix the work, and I didn’t really understand what the problem was. I had no idea that the soul of the work was fine and that I’d simply made a tactical error in performing it that way. I thought I was simply a failure at doing that kind of work.

What’s the moral of the story? You WILL make tactical errors. You WILL fall on your face if you have ambitious creative dreams. It comes with the territory. And no matter how many times or how many people tell you that, it’s still completely devastating when it happens.

The postscript to the story is that a year later the Boston Pops offered me a chance to solo. I had no time to write completely new pieces, so I expanded the arrangement of the “failure” piece, somehow rekindling my belief in the music. But it was terrifying to get back on that horse. I just held my breath, expecting a reprise of the bad review scenario.

I remember opening the paper to read the review. My hands were shaking and when I read it I burst into tears. The review was beautiful, called the piece "stunning," and vindicated everything I'd believed about the power and beauty of the piece – but this time I'd gotten that power across to the audience. Sometimes you just have to do it again and again and again until you get it to really work.

CAREER LOGISTICS:
Everyone can’t see us and hear us perform, so we need to create reflections in various forms: websites that let people get an idea of what we do and who we are; press kits that let folks learn more about us; press releases that tell the press who we are and what we’re doing; demos so that people can hear or see “at a glance” who we are musically. I’ve personally chosen to go an independent route. I don’t have an outside manager, booking agent or press agent, but I have a staff that helps me manage incoming booking requests, press, product sales, etc. We often work with outside publicists or agents — and I’m not averse to eventually affiliating with a manager or agent, but up to this point it’s made more sense to maintain my independence while I build a body of work and while I develop the kind of performance I most believe in giving.

MUSIC AS A FIRST LANGUAGE:
Music was my first language. My mother played ukulele, my father the banjo and they knew hundreds of songs, from Burl Ives folk songs to Musical Theatre to Operatic Arias. My parents divorced when I was about one, so music became the one connection between my family.

INSTRUMENTAL OPEN-MINDEDNESS:
I saw the guitar played as a classical instrument, as a rhythm/dance instrument with flamenco and as a folk instrument, so I got the idea that the same instrument could play many different roles. I also heard stories about a jazz cellist my mother used to go see, Fred Katz. She’d describe the scene: the smoky jazz club, this cellist lit by a single tiny spot, the crowd so hushed you could hear a napkin crumpled in someone’s hand — and then she’d describe the music and the effect it had on the crowd. The story mesmerized me and from then on I had a sense that instruments had a special power when played outside of their most stereotypical roles.

NO SPECTATOR SPORT:
Music simply wasn’t a spectator sport in my mind. It was something you did WITH people, or you danced TO, or that set you dreaming. The few times I was taken to concerts, I was extremely uncomfortable. I think in some ways I’ve become an ambassador for all the other folks like me out there, the ones who feel out of place in a concert hall, who need to find a way in to the music, who need to be welcomed.