JAVS Summer 2021

If someone were to hear the music stripped back to the melody, and then go to the chaos music, you would hear organization in the chaos. You’re not going to hear it in the video! In the video, there are more layers, and that’s Andy’s music in the chaos. In making the video relevant, I wanted it to start off with just the “We Shall Overcome” melody and have it evolve into chaos. The burning tree, this is the idea that something beautiful can be easily destroyed by one act of violence. This act touches all people. You cannot create an act of violence and not have it come back to everyone. Originally the whole video was to be 8 minutes 46 seconds, the time that the officer had his knee on Floyd’s throat. My thinking was that there has to be a layer of representation of current events. This was all inspired first by George Floyd, and then by Congressman John Lewis, who died right after the making of the film. I have always been primarily an ideas person, so I solicited the help of one of my former students Cynthia Lam. She is this person that is of pure heart, really organized, and her recital had a social justice theme, so I knew she would be interested. She helped me organize things. The first thing was to get my students involved. I figured I could start with a Facebook post. We organized a list of everyone I could think of and started with that, and then we created a group page, and I began to write the letters and began soliciting. Cynthia found the film editor, a friend of hers who did the final edits and found the tree graph. I set a timetable for everything, and had Cynthia take care of the daily manipulations of who sent in what, when it was sent, and whether we had enough people. Originally it was supposed to be all volunteer, and then I mentioned it to Eastman Dean Jamal Rossi in a meeting and said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to pay two people something.” So we wound up with a little bit of money to pay Ben and the videographer. I thought Ben did an incredibly large amount of work. Not only did he do the arrangement, he did all the editing to make sure that the music lined up with the video. The opening screenshot of me in my backyard with me playing in my dashiki was filmed by Annaliese Taylor. The video in the middle that has the Black Lives Matter What was the process of making the video?

Why did you choose a tree as the central image?

From the song to my concept of what creates relevance to my life, to my students, and to music, we are all connected to each other in a broader sense. From that thought came the idea of a tree. A tree starts from a seed, sprouts roots, and the first thing that grows is the trunk. The youngest branches are the ones that are the highest. The older branches are down below. It is in the tree, in the roots and the expanding of the roots, that the strength of the tree and the vitality of the tree is assured. That analogy for me was not born of the presumption that I alone am a “tree trunk” but more the representation of a life. This is my life! It could be your life! It is a seed, it has taken root. I have been privileged to live it thus far. It has roots that hopefully as I continue to live, continue to expand. I don’t want to stand in one place either. The idea was, “How can I be relevant? What can I do? How can I branch out more? Do I want to just stay there and die, and not grow?” I then thought my connections are my students; to a large degree, to all degrees, my students are my life. Not so much because they’re violists, and I teach them, but because they are people. This idea of universal connections, it goes on ad infinitum until we get to almost every sentient being on two legs in this world, and that is the connection. We don’t like to think so broadly, because we are not given the opportunity to, but it’s because we DON’T think this way that we lose our humanity. So it is a call to humanity! It is a call to this idea of growth. For this project I thought to myself, there’s the tree, there’s the song, what can we do? I had two students who were composers. Ben Magruder was the one that I contacted first. He was one of the first graduates of the Film Scoring Studies program at Eastman. Andy Maskiell is a classical composer. Both are violists and former students. The more I thought about it, the more that I realized it needed to be in a format all listeners could relate to. So I rolled the ball in Ben’s court, and I said “here’s the tune, write it for a viola ensemble for me.” And then I said to Andy, “OK, There is going to be chaos music, and what I want is supposed to be. . . .” What made you think of collaborating with Andy Maskiell and Ben Magruder?

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 37, 2021 Online Issue

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