Mirror Ritual

Program Notes

What do we take with us from the places we’re from? Are we defined by where we’re from or where we are—or something in-between?

Mirror Ritual takes on the idea of place and our relationship to it.

While in my doctorate at Michigan, I spent a lot of time, both in classes and with friends, with the idea of composers identifying themselves in their music—how our places and lives and experiences inform the way we write, purposefully or unconsciously. A running thread through these conversations was the fact that American composers are rarely asked to approach “place” in their music in the way that composers from outside the U.S. are, often in overly-essentializing ways.

This made me more thoroughly confront the question: am I an American composer? My gut reaction was “no,” but that sprung from my many criticisms of this country and not on the reality of the thing. The question is not a patriotic litmus test: I am American—I was born here, raised here—and America, conceptually and literally, the many privileges and challenges of this place and of its history, shape what I do and how I do it. Having opened that door, the question became: what does that mean? How does that feel? How does that sound?

This became Mirror Ritual, my dissertation, created in collaboration with the University of Michigan Department of Dance and choreographer Jillian Hopper. In approaching these questions, I wanted to dissect the archetypical “American” sound—a sound that came to define American classical music not because it somehow encapsulates the American experience (it doesn’t—no music really can, nor should it,) but because establishment voices actively chose it as the bellwether of “American-ness” during a hypernationalistic period of the 20th century when many countries sought this kind of neatly-delineated cultural outline. This, to me, was Copland: specifically, Copland’s landmark 1944 ballet, Appalachian Spring, written for the choreographer Martha Graham.

In reflecting on Appalachian Spring and how we might respond to it, Jillian and I brought the idea of place to our incredible cast of dancers, using our workshop process to ask them about their relationship to place and how they felt it shaped them. Their answers helped us locate our core tenets for the piece: what do we take with us from the places we’re from? Are we defined by where we’re from or where we are—or something in-between? How much of a place is defined by the people we meet there? Using these questions, we found the arc of a story: a story about slowly growing apart from the place you’re from, about that first home rejecting you, about finding a new home—and the long, nonlinear process of locating yourself between the many places you’ve called home, however briefly.

This piece would not have happened without the love and support it received from those around it: my fabulous collaborator, Jillian, and the University of Michigan’s world-class Department of Dance—my incredibly thoughtful teachers at Michigan, Kristy and Evan and Roshanne—my amazing dissertation committee—my friends and co-consipirators at Michigan, all of whom mean the world to me. I’m very thankful to have spent my doctoral years in a place that allowed me to dream big, around people who cared for and celebrated one another in every way they could.