Da Capo Conversations 2.0 with Ursula Kwong-Brown and Carla Lucero

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 178: Da Capo Conversations 2.0 with Ursula Kwong-Brown and Carla Lucero

Looking for a way to listen to diverse creators and to support equity in the arts? Tune in weekly to For Good Measure!

Today we revisit Ursula Kwong Brown’s and Carla Lucero’s perspectives on their artistic process. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Ursula Kwong-Brown and Carla Lucero, check them out here and here. Parts of this episode originally premiered in October 2024, click here, and in August 2024, click here.

This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/episodes/18079862

Co-Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-Producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Christy Xu

Chapters

• 0:31 Today we revisit Ursula Kwong-Brown's and Carla Lucero's perspectives on their artistic process. Here's what Ursula Kwong Brown had to say.
• 11:07 Here's what Carla Lucero had to say.

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00

[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists sponsored by a grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's episode, we continue our Da Capo Conversations, a mini series where we'll be giving familiar segments a topical twist [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]. Today we revisit Ursula Kwong-Brown's and Carla Lucero's perspectives on their artistic process. Here's what Ursula Kwong Brown had to say.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  00:40

You know, this is something I've been struggling to deal with ever since I started working with electronics in college. I was at Columbia University, where I studied with Tristan Murail, who was one of the founders of the spectralist movement. And so I was sort of lucky, I got to spend a lot of time at the Columbia computer music center, working with a lot of people doing sort of cutting edge stuff with electronics. And I had composed, like I'd said on paper, since I was about six years old, so I'm like, you know, at this point, I'm like, whatever 20 years old, I've spent, I'd spent, like, more than half my life writing music for instruments, and incorporating electronics, just like hurt my brain for the longest time. I could not figure out how to conceptualize it, how to write it down, how to notate it. And it's been an ongoing process, like, these days I would say I compose sometimes out of order, like I'll play things into Logic, like a digital audio workstation, and then I'll take it back into Sibelius, and I'll do that, and then sometimes I'll take it back into Logic and play again. And it's, it's all sort of a mishmash of however I, however each project wants to go. One thing that's great working with my husband is that he's, like, very good with electronics, and so he's always encouraging me to, like, start with what you want to hear and figure out how you want to do it later. Because often there are many ways to do something, and so to not worry about that in the beginning is very liberating to start with, like, okay, I want this viola to have this, like amazing decay and like, this reverb, and like this, you know, and there's different ways to do it, like this piece, "Reflections on Rothko" for viola and electronics, that's been done a lot using something called MainStage and Logic, like last week, we just built a patch to do it in Ableton for a violinist in Chicago who performs with that, and I never even occurred to me you could do it that way. But, you know, people come asking for things, and you realize that, yeah, it's perfectly possible to do it that way. And someone else actually did it with hardware, like on a mixer, like no software at all. And that was something that was totally new to me, is is doing it all on hardware. So I guess with each project, it's different, you know, you just sort of try to think of the sound world that you're going for, and then notate it as clearly as you can. And one thing about electronics is that as the programs develop, there's always going to be new solutions to how to do things, right, and so you basically just have to be clear as you can with the intentions, and then be open to different ways for people to to problem solve that, you know.

Nanette McGuinness  03:33

Sure, yeah, it sounds like your compositional process, if I understood correctly, that it's mostly you working with electroacoustic at this point, and that you're imagining the sound world you want, that you're not doing a lot of straight acoustic stuff.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  03:50

I am doing a lot of straight acoustic stuff too. So I just wrote this, like, 25 minute Requiem, that's for, you know, choir and piano. And it's, I wrote actually a version, it started out as a version for, like, synth and solo voice, with me, like, just recording myself, like 10 times over in layers. And as I did this, I was like, this is actually a choral piece. You know, having sung in choirs, like my whole life, I guess I have an affinity for choir music. But no, I guess so that, so that, so that, I mean, there are some things that you can do on like a synth, the great, grand synth sound that you can't do on a piano, right? Like it doesn't sustain forever, for instance, right, right? But, but, but I mean, I also love things that are purely acoustic, because as a, you know, I grew up playing chamber music, going to chamber music camp, going to Interlochen, and I love being able to, just like, sit down with some musicians and make music, and not have to worry about, like, whether the, you know, the speakers are going to work, or whether, you know, or starting and stopping the iPhone with the measure number, you know, like, it's such a headache, like, there are times when having things purely acoustic is just the best, and I, as a musician, definitely appreciate that.

Nanette McGuinness  05:20

So when you're looking at the blank page of paper, and you're writing either for your own desire, or a commissioner has said, do what you prefer, do you just start imagining the sound you want, and then the sound comes to you, and then you realize, oh, this is going to be an acoustic piece, or, oh, I want electronics, or does it just evolve as the sound world evolves?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  05:44

I would say that I have different sources of inspiration, and some of them just call to me, oh, that's electronic, and some of them don't. Like yesterday, I was on a plane coming back from Portland, Oregon, and I saw Mount Shasta coming through the clouds, it was beautiful. And I was like, oh my God, I have this idea, and so I started, pulled out my iPad. I did, I took a picture through the window, I pulled out my iPad, I was like, writing these, like descending lines, and I totally thought it had to be electronic, like there was something about, like the light and the shadow and the alternating and I just heard it as, like electronic, sort of descending clouds of sound. But, for instance, I was working on an idea for for this upcoming commission for you guys, and it was a piano idea that was sort of echoing itself. And it sort of was inspired by by, sort of like a delay line in electronics, but it was acoustic, and I was just really hearing it as like an actual pianist echoing and sort of imitating, sort of the sound of electronics, sort of like Steve Reich does, you know, with his, some of his piano music that sort of plays on the ideas of electronics, but are totally acoustic. I don't know, I guess it just depends fully on, each piece is different, you know.

Nanette McGuinness  07:00

Actually, that clarified it for me a lot. Something gives you an idea, and you hear it, and what you're hearing tells you where you want to go.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  07:08

Yeah, definitely.

Nanette McGuinness  07:09

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense.

Ursula Kwong Brown  07:11

It's just sort of like, some colors might feel like they have, like, sparkly silver in them, and some colors, I guess, I think a lot with color when I compose, and some of them don't, right? Some of them don't have any sparkle. And you're like, Okay, that's not, you know, this is just like a burnt, like orange color that there's no silver in that one, okay? Like, it's just a different color.

Nanette McGuinness  07:31

That makes sense. Do you have synesthesia?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  07:34

I suppose I do. I mean, if you look at my folders, like, it's funny, I because I have so many ideas that come to you, and you know how to organize them, right? And so I I have them by color, often, like, like red and blue and yellow. And so I'll have like, blue 11 or something, but I'll know at least what the sound world is from the color.

Nanette McGuinness  07:58

That's fascinating. Thank you for going into it in more depth on that. For our listeners who might not know some of the terms you used, could you tell people what the spectralist movement is? 

Ursula Kwong-Brown  08:09

Oh yeah. So Tristan Murail and Gérard Grisey were these French composers who made sort of spectrograms, like they took recordings, audio recordings and they looked at them with like frequency and the sort of the y axis and like time, the x axis. And you could see, if you analyze, like, say, a bell, the the overtones that it made. And you could compose something based on those complex overtones, um, and you could it would be different for like a piano, which has a very flattened spectrum, versus, like a clarinet, which has, like, a lot of even partials, versus adobo, which is like or human voice, which has a very strong form and in a certain range. And so they compose music sort of like loosely inspired by this stuff. And for me, it was especially useful because I was analyzing these frog songs, and I was able to pull them in and be like, hey, Tristan, like, can you look at my frog song and be like, this is weird, right? Like, they're singing these perfect fourths, like, have you ever seen this? And he's like, no, it's pretty strange for an animal to sing a harmonic interval, like two simultaneous pitches, not, not melodic, right, right? Which is more normal. So that's, that's spectralism. You know, they would do things like, he had a little keyboard that he would detune to quarter tones and place little rocks on it, so that he could have these very, you know, precise chords with these very precise harmonics that were flat or sharp. That was the world that he came from, yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  09:51

For those who aren't as electronically trained, you want to just briefly, Logic and Ableton?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  09:58

Right, so Logic is a digital audio workstation, and it's, you know, the traditional like, time runs on the x axis, and, you know, you have a bunch of different tracks, and you can record, like vocals or drums or whatever you want, right, in layers. Ableton is sort of a mind warp, if you're used to thinking that way, because it runs in loops. So you'll have like a column, and each each column will be like a different instrument, different voice, and within it is a loop. And you can, you can, like, run a show that way. So like, each scene or part of a song will be like a row of loops. Or in the case of my viola piece, it'll be like a set of processing, so like, in this row you'll have a ton of reverb, and in the next row, like, no reverb, but, like, three kinds of delays, because I have a pizzicato section, and I want there to be, like, lots and lots of echoes, but not so much reverb. And then in the next scene it all cut out and it's back to reverb again, you know? So it's a way of organizing time and processing.

Nanette McGuinness  11:07

Here's what Carla Lucero had to say.

Carla Lucero  11:10

My process is, it's, it depends on what, what I'm doing. If I'm creating, uh, cocreating the libretto, it's, a completely different process of writing the libretto myself. Initially it is. So I'm just going to talk about after the libretto is written, no matter if I've done it or somebody else. So what I do is, I usually have a big picture of what I want. I already kind of know what the direction I'm going to go in with the music, kind of know exactly how it's going to start and how it's going to end. It's it's kind of, it's like a photograph, in a way. And right as I'm picturing this, I'm also jotting down musical information, whether it be, you know, melodies, or maybe harmonic progression or a lot of times a rhythm, you know, just these ideas of what I'm going to do. And then I create a graph. I have one here.

Nanette McGuinness  12:18

And we can describe it for the people listening.

Carla Lucero  12:21

Okay, so depending on the piece that I'm commissioned to write or that I'm I'm embarking on myself, or a later commission, the graph starts out, um, I'll show you. This is the one for "Tres Mujeres de Jerusalén." So what this is, is I first start off with what you see in pencil, right? So, so these ideas of, of what the flow is, right, the scenes, what I what I'm envisioning, you know, that's happening with the scenes. Then after that, the information is about the orchestration. And then up here, it's about density. And and, you know, how, orchestral dense density.

Nanette McGuinness  13:13

I can describe to people who aren't going to be able to see this. It is a big piece of score paper on its side, and at the bottom are notes, and then there's a line above it, and then there's more notes, and this is all in pencil. And then there are increasing wave-like, not quite a sine wave, because it's growing more like a mountain above it, and there are three and then there's a big cliff rising to the climax at the top, and where Carla was talking about density, there's red hatching, and then there's some crescendos and a few other descriptions.

Carla Lucero  13:50

So that's that was for "Tres Mujeres." This one is for "touch." So you can see this one I did differently. And you could go ahead and describe it, and then I'll explain.

Nanette McGuinness  14:08

Okay, so instead of score paper, this is now, looks like poster board, and there are three chunks, one marked exposition, one marked development, and one marked recap. And I can't read the rest, oh, of somebody's love theme. And in, and the exposition, is the biggest chunk, and then development, and then the last part. And each one of those has in, it looks like colored pencil, different colors and vertical blocks of different colors. This is fascinating too, that particular one has scenes written above each color and pattern. It's very pretty.

Carla Lucero  14:49

Thank you. So you know, depending on the piece, because these are so different, the the last one that I showed you with all the color was for "touch" and, and I felt that, it sounds almost counterintuitive, but understanding this on a different level, "touch" is about Helen Keller, right? And so there, there were, there were ideas, orchestration ideas that I had toyed with, that that feel like shapes, that feel like colors, you know, trying to really express what's happening in her mind in in a very abstract way, but so that there is some consistency with that, how she's interpreting information and how she's relating to others, in terms of, you know, the world around her. They were more, it was more the music is more familiar. So really kind of to be able to juxtapose these two ideas, these two worlds, musical worlds, I had to be really precise, you know, how how it was going to move, how it was going to flow, whether or not I don't be, maybe I don't want it to flow, you know, in some parts of it. So it really helps me with my process, compositionally and orchestrally, you know, to try to realize these ideas. I did this even with my first opera on actual graph paper. You know, I've, this has always been my process. So after I do this, then I told you I had already, like, jotted down some ideas, right, on actual manuscript paper. Real deal, right side up, yeah. And after that, after the graph, I go back to those notes, and I start to flesh out at the piano, flesh out some of these ideas. Because actually, the first thing I need to do with with opera is create a piano vocal score. So it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes I'm already orchestrating in my head, right? It's like, oh, this scene, I already knew what I was going to do orchestrally so I have to make, create a reduction, you know, for this particular scene. But usually it's, it's, it's, we'll just say mostly it's the other way around, where I'm creating the piano vocal score. So a lot of that work's at the piano, and then I do what I call my refinement process, and I input some of that information into Sibelius and and make notes on my regular score. And I have an assistant, a dear assistant, Spencer Keene. And he is, he is copyist, engraver, videographer, editor, you know, and he's a composer himself. We've been working together long enough so that he understands, okay, I'm going to take this information on Sibelius and Carla's notes and and like, say there's some kind of pattern that's, you know, continue this pattern and keep these dynamics consistent here, you know, so that I am not bogged down time wise. So I can just keep keep going.

Nanette McGuinness  18:26

Could you repeat his name for a second?

Carla Lucero  18:28

Spencer Keene, he's wonderful. So, yeah. So so that happens, and then I'm able to to have something that I can deliver. It's formatted and everything, but there's a lot of back and forth that goes, you know, on. A lot of times I will, I will, you know, have this raw, not, not really that raw, but, you know, he puts in some of the dynamics and everything, and I have it listed out, and then I get it back and then, of course, I change things and develop things more, and that's usually, then I'm ready for him to format and and create a first draft, right, of the piano vocal score. After that, then, then I go into, after a workshop, I go into orchestration. The commissioner is always, the companies commissioning me always think like, oh, she's going to start orchestrating now, it's like, you know, I started before I even, you know, started the piano vocal score. So it's just kind of a continuation of of developing the project, but orchestrally.

Nanette McGuinness  19:40

Right, because you're hearing the timbres as you're composing, and so you already know how you want it to sound. The orchestration is part of the inspiration for the sound in the first place.

Carla Lucero  19:50

Exactly, more and more so with with each project, it seems like that's kind of happening very early on for me.

Nanette McGuinness  20:00

The way you were describing color and senses, are you synesthetic?

Carla Lucero  20:06

I, yes, I am and and I noticed, it was very interesting way that I perceived this before knowing what it what it meant. When I was young, I realized that certain colors and and frequent, well, I don't know how to explain this, like, you know, like when you're watching those old, the old TVs, and then you start to get that horizontal roll, you know the like the old...

Nanette McGuinness  20:42

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. You mean when it's not really working quite right, and it starts to flip.

Carla Lucero  20:46

Yeah, I started to hear, and there was no sound.

Nanette McGuinness  20:53

Interesting. You heard frequencies and sounds.

Carla Lucero  20:57

Oh yeah, it was wild, and and I remember I was pretty young, I remember asking my parents, what's going on, yeah, what are those sounds? What's happening? And and they're like, looking at me. Oh, and on top of this, I was dyslexic, so my parents are like, Okay, we want to rebate. Uh, was, yes, it was, it was crazy, so I knew that was happening and, and then same thing with colors, and, you know, and I just thought it was like normal that everybody, you know, processed visual information.

Nanette McGuinness  21:39

I do not, I don't see colors with music, but I've worked with a number of composers who do. I think it must make their compositions and process greatly enriched as a result.

Carla Lucero  21:55

I, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's hard, you know, because that's the way I am, but it explains the graphs too.

Nanette McGuinness  22:04

Yes, that's what made me think of it, when you showed me your graphs with the color blocks, I was like, I got a hunch here.

Carla Lucero  22:10

Uh huh, and I and I feel it. I can feel it, taste it, hear it, you know, everything. It's very it's kind of, it evokes, it evokes something in me where I'm you know.

Nanette McGuinness  22:25

That's intensely cool.

Carla Lucero  22:27

Thank you.

Nanette McGuinness  22:27

[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure's Da Capo Conversations, and a special thank you to our guests for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media, and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit us at www.E4TT.org. This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to Co-producer and Audio Engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure" [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS].