JAVS Spring 2020

If I wasn’t sure about something, I knew I was only a text message away from a colleague who could answer it. I also used the initial time with the group to workshop and get the sounds to exactly where I wanted them to be. I feel there are three stages of a piece: writing the piece, working with the group on the piece and tweaking the score, and then (if you are lucky) the musicians taking what you wrote and completely owning it. In the early days, I had lunch with Ralph Jackson who used to run the classical department at BMI. I felt like I needed “permission” of some kind to start writing. He told me to stick to my instincts and if I really needed to go see somebody for advice, go see them for a specific reason. That was one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten because it gave me permission and the confidence to just plow ahead, trust my instincts, and honor my sense of creativity that I had since I was a child. I moved Did you get advice from other composers?

forward feeling that not studying composition formally was a blessing, not an obstacle.

Have you encountered any resistance to the idea of you not being a formally trained composer, but rather a composer/performer? Only the resistance I got was what I gave to myself! I am lucky that I am doing this at exactly the right time because there are now many composer/performers around, and many different styles of writing are accepted. I am also very happy that this has happened later in my career, especially as a woman. I have a much clearer and confident sense of self that I did not have in my 20s. Even though there are grants that I will never get because of my age or because my aesthetic does not fit according to what they typically fund, when my music speaks to my fellow colleagues and they feel empowered performing it, it gets played and I get to write more. For every field, it is always about people believing in other people that makes everything happen. You say your music is emotionally based—joy, bliss, torment, anger, loneliness, and passion. How are emotions the basis for your work, and how do they inform your compositional process? I always want each piece to have a different and unique inspiration. When I was a teenager, I came up with pieces that expressed the different emotions I was grappling with at the time. Now it’s usually not just one emotion, it might be a narrative scene or a process. I feel pieces need contrast: they need to be going somewhere or coming back from something. Sometimes, my pieces are about an experience that has happened to me. It could be a really simple feeling as with my looping piece Hello , about when you first meet someone and you realize you need to know them. Then there’s my woodwind quintet, If Only I , which is about not being able to make it back to Long Island in time before my father died and of all the feelings I had to process after that. Even while considering all the different strategies used to develop the music compositionally, my choices always stem from what the inspiration is and how I want something to feel.

Jessica Meyer performing at the National Sawdust in New York. Photo by Andrew Fingland.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2020