ArtStorming: The Art of Remembrance: Concetta Abbate

What if a violin could steady a room full of grief and turn it into a space for deep remembering? We sit down with Concetta Abbate—violinist, composer, and death doula—to explore how music moves beyond entertainment to become ritual, care, and legacy. From the first notes she learned as a child with a visual impairment to the ceremonies she now shapes for families, Concetta shows how sound can hold stories when words fall short.

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Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

Transcript

Season Theme: Art As Legacy

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Have you ever wondered what makes creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, Lily Pierpont, and this is Artstorming, a podcast about how ideas become paintings or poems, performances, or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and we'll explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. In our inaugural season, Artstorming the City Different, we dipped our toes into the vast ocean of creativity with a focus on some of our favorite creators of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That conversation was enjoyed by artists and non-artists alike because it showed us how we can all benefit from learning how to generate something from nothing, dream bigger, charter new territories, and solve problems in new ways. In season two, we're gonna take that concept of generating our lives with intention to the next level. This season, we're talking about legacy, art as legacy, and how the most creative among us tackle this rich and deeply personal subject. Welcome to Artstorming, The Art of Remembrance. We've all had those moments where a song hits us so hard it feels like it's actually holding us together, right? Well, today's guest takes that connection to a whole different level. Imagine picking up a violin at age four and essentially learning to see the world through sound due to a visual impairment. That unique perspective led our next guest to a truly sacred calling, serving as a death doula and crafting musical eulogies. Today we're moving past the idea of music as just entertainment. Instead, we're diving into how a melody can become a vessel for end-of-life care and a way to build a lasting spiritual legacy. It's a deeply personal, slightly philosophical, and incredibly moving look at how the arts connect us to the full cycle of life and death. You're gonna want to lean in for this one. Meet Conchetta Abate.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Hello. Hi, good morning. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. Um I was checking out some of your other guests. They like know some of them.

SPEAKER_00 2:25

You know Katherine and Eric, I presume.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Catherine and Eric.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Catherine Secora and Eric Mingus.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Oh, I know Eric, I know, yeah. I know Katherine for years. I'm I must know Eric Mingus, but I'm not sure how.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Well, because he's married to Catherine.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Oh, right. Yeah, I've known, but I've known Katherine like like from like before she was married. So and I hadn't been in touch with her for a while. So that's why I was surprised that she mentioned my name, but that's what I think you know it was a no-brainer.

From Violin To Death Doula

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Your name came up before the interview. I was just getting to know her. In fact, she had applied for a position as an executive assistant for me. And when she told me her story, I was so blown away. I was telling her about season two and season three, and your name came up. And last night, right as I was preparing for this, I went to your Conchetta website and I was reading about you. And I was like, oh my God, was I supposed to talk to her in season three? Because it talked about neurodiversity and synesthesia, which is my whole content for season three. And then I remembered, I was like, no, she writes eulogies and music, and you know, and then I saw the sound and uh memory portion of the site. Okay, now I'm I'm back on track. But you just fit into every category of every artist that I want to talk to. So it just perfect. So I'm approaching this as if we're just meeting for the first time, and I don't know anything about you, although I've peeked at your website to know enough that you are multi-talented and a musician in various forms. But I was surprised when I went deeper into sound and memory that in addition to writing musical eulogies for people, you're also a death doula. And so that fits into our theme of the art of remembrance and death as muse and mortality-inspiring art. So tell me how you got into all of this.

Music Beyond Entertainment

Training, Advance Directives, And Listening

SPEAKER_01 4:18

I have been playing the violin my whole life. You know, I started when I was four, and I think also the fact that I was born with a congenital birth defect that gave me a pretty significant visual impairment. So I don't see out of my left eye, I don't have peripheral vision or depth perception. And the fact that I started violin when I was four, it just kind of transferred a lot of my sense perception into my sense of hearing over my sense of sight. And I think that sound is very much how I relate to the world. And I have always felt like music has a much bigger purpose than entertainment. Like our society genuinely sees music as entertainment, and uh, but in my own personal experience, it's been a personal type of therapy in various ways. It's also been a way of communication and accessing an experience to the world. It's been a way to build community. And in the context of loss, death, dying, grief, it's an incredible tool in many various ways, bringing community together and also providing some of those therapeutic benefits at someone's bedside or when they're sick. I had always found myself in a position of, you know, being the designated violinist at funerals or singer in my own family. And I was always really comfortable with that. And I'm a very kind of emotional thinker, and I love slow music, I love narrative music, I like music that tells a story, the kind of music that you would hear at a funeral. And then I really was challenged to step into that role during COVID because more often I get asked to play violin at weddings, which is a different kind of role. And then during COVID, of course, no one was getting married, but I was getting asked to do a lot of funerals. And even for years after that, still doing posthumous remembrances because people were not able to meet in person during that time. And um, I became a death doula in 2022. I decided to take a really like a more formal training course because I wanted to, I felt like a lot of what I was doing was intuitive, but I wanted to be more informed specifically how to respond to death to grief, but also like some of the logistical things that happen around death, because there has been a lot of death in my own life, and I've seen people sort of be very unprepared time and time again. And I wanted to fill in some of the gaps of my own knowledge, and I took it out of curiosity, and I never expected that I would do it professionally, but it was one of those things where it's kind of organic because once people saw that I was doing it, then people started asking me for it more, and you know, I started getting more involved in my community in that role. I formally started Sound and Memory in 2024, so it's pretty recent that I established it as a business. But, you know, I've been doing that, the this type of work for a long time. And uh I specifically did training to do advanced directives because I I've had some personal experiences where it was unclear what people wanted. And I also saw the impact on the other people that I was working with. So this was a skill that felt really important to me. And I also feel that as an artist, I'm very I feel that I'm very good at listening and and hearing people out and guiding people towards whatever it is that they want or getting to their more philosophical or spiritual values rather than purely viewing this as a medical document. I think that sometimes people don't feel fully heard if they're filling this out at a lawyer's office or maybe at the hospital. And the way that I was trained, I did a training through respecting choices, which was facilitated by the dying year. And the way I was trained was to ask a series of questions and to listen and they're guiding questions. And so we learned this method that really reflected you know how I might speak to someone if I were doing some kind of inquiry to learn something deeper about that person on an artistic level. And so a lot of that work is very word of mouth, and I do a lot of public education programs, and all of my programs involve live music, not just recorded music, but music performance. And the last presentation I did was at Maplegrove Cemetery in Kew Gardens, and I did a workshop about green burial practices and encouraging people to begin planning and hear some different options, and it was really well received. And even from that workshop, you know, individual people reach out to me for further guidance or advice. Um but yeah, I mean, that's there's a lot in my story of you know how I ended up here. I was also deeply interested in medical anthropology when I was in college and um almost wanted to go into public health. I worked for a year for the American Red Cross after college. And so this is kind of a way for me to bring together my interest in music and serving the community in a way that I saw that there was a need just organically through my interests and through the work I was doing.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

It's so beautiful, and it's such a perfect complement to what we're discovering in this podcast series, which is the way that the arts and ecology and mortality kind of all work together as this sort of perfect union and people's awareness and consciousness and how the arts support that process so much. We're in the process of creating something called the legacy toolkit, which is helping people develop their soft legacy plan, which is exactly what you're talking about. And the soft legacy plan would dig into the values aspect instead of just the dry legalese or the medical power of attorney. It's what do I really care about and what do I want to linger after I leave, or what do I want to leave my family with, my children with, as an emotional legacy, more of an that kind of an imprint. I call it the echo. And having the arts there to support this process is to me a no-brainer. And music has always been a ritual that accompanies death. It's part of our DNA, right? So it's only natural that it would come back into the world. And so thank you so much for this work that you're doing.

Public Programs And Green Burial

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Thank you. Yeah, I think that um it's interesting because there's so much need in end-of-life space that it's hard to talk about the arts when there aren't enough hospice nurses, there aren't enough people to just sit vigil or to take care of people's medical needs. We're we're really understaffed as a society in terms of taking care of really essential things for the for people who are terminal. But I think that people think of music as something much more inaccessible, like, oh, it's something that's really a specialty thing, and it's like the icing on the cake, and we have to pay a bunch of extra money to have this happen. And I think that has to do with our society commodifying music as an entertainment object rather than perceiving it as something that we are born with and that we live with every day, like our heart has a heartbeat and we are surrounded by sounds every day. And when we organize sounds, they become music. And then you really think of it in its most basic and essential ways. Everyone has access to music, and there's really simple ways to tap into it that don't have to involve spending a lot of money to hire experts and specialists. If you have the funds and the resources, live musicians are absolutely incredible. And there's also ways to engage community in community music making to amplify what a live or a professional musician is doing. But I was surprised, you know, for example, I was presenting at the National End of Life Doula conference in Louisiana this past October, and I was telling people about something so simple as getting an affordable Bluetooth speaker,$50 or$60 speaker, rather than using your iPhone. And somebody in the audience said to me, Well, you hear the difference. It matters to you because you're a trained musician. And then I explained a little bit about bass frequencies and how we feel them differently, not just hear them differently, but we feel them differently. And then I did an example where I played on the phone versus even just an affordable, not an expensive speaker, and everyone could immediately hear the difference. So I don't think it's that people don't care. It doesn't matter to them. It's that they don't know. They haven't been exposed to different types of sound qualities. It's really just it's a deeper issue of the fact that our society has sort of devalued refining the innate use of music that we're born with.

Access, Sound Quality, And Live Music

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Well, we tend to perceive the world as materialistic when in fact we're sort of vibratory creatures and the vibration of music is part of our, like I said, it's part of our DNA. And it's it's been sort of educated out of us in a weird way. But I think anybody who is exposed to it, in the example you just gave, where they have the option of hearing a piece of music through an iPhone or through a even a halfway decent speaker, it's a visceral difference of experience.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Yeah. And like my point was that it's not it's not like that much more expensive or out of your way. And even hiring a live musician, it might seem expensive. Maybe you spend$200 or something like that. But you know, people spend a lot of money on other things like flowers and other things that are very important, but you would be surprised like the quality of what you get. And I think that people aren't exposed to live music, so they don't know the difference. Um but yeah, my background is also as a music educator and an arts educator, and I've seen access to education in the arts kind of change over time. And I think, yeah, you know, it's very cultural. Like if you're not getting it home, if you're not getting it at school, we we do lose it, and we've especially lost it in the funeral space. I know a lot of really active wedding bands, there's hundreds of them. They're constantly working. Why? Because it's music is entertainment. But there have been times where I've told people that I play violin and sing at funerals, and they say, Are you allowed to do that? Is that appropriate? Because they think that music is entertainment.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

And it's supposed to be a morose and sombre occasion.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

So this or or reflective, contemplative, peaceful, loving. And I I um I was shocked by that. So these are things that I'm learning, you know, as I'm doing the work. Is I always knew that we've lost ritual around death, but now that I've I'm really actively speaking about it in public, and the I get these kinds of comments and responses, I'm like, wow, like this is really a different concept for a lot of people. That music could be something other than entertainment. Wow. Or that it could be accessible to us.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Well, I'm so glad you're people are getting educated. And I think COVID did a lot to help us confront mortality in general. And I think that there have been a lot of positive things with regard to maybe taking more initiative. I mean, certainly that's what we're up to in this podcast is to get people to realize that they have choice in how they curate their life and how they curate their exit. And so presenting people with various different options that are available now, that um some of traditions are as old as time itself, and some of them are kind of being reinvented, such as yours. But when did you first start getting into a musical eulogy by commission?

Ritual, Funerals, And Cultural Shifts

SPEAKER_01 18:38

Well, I've written music for people in my own circle who have died. I, as an artist, it's a way for me to process loss. And so I wrote a few pieces, and then one of them got featured on an album about women composers and women artists. And um what I did for that piece was I I took a poem that my aunt had written, and then I set the poem to a melody and then composed something. Uh, it was for acoustic guitar and flute. I think it's on the Sound and Memory website as one of my work samples. But I think that people, there are people that really value the arts and supporting living artists, and they want to have their legacy be that be supporting living artists and to have something really unique and special to play at the memorial. And it's a really interesting experience, you know, working with someone to create this kind of music. Like, what was their favorite instrument? Did they love the trumpet? Did they love the piano? Who were some of their other favorite artists to listen to? And like, what do you want the lyrics of this song to tell? Or maybe you don't want to have lyrics. So there's different options that we discuss, and then the products that they get is the sheet music, like a PDF score and the recording of the piece. And this music could also be something that could go into the repertoire of things that are played by young musicians, you know, on various concerts. There are lots of universities that are promoting students playing music by living composers. So I have had some of my pieces played by other musicians that are not me. And in that way, like this music as written sheet music, it becomes a living legacy. And it's it's very special. And, you know, people have commissioned portrait artists and textile artists. And I it's not something new, but it is something that is, I would say, very niche at this point in time. I get hired much more frequently to just play music for funerals than to commission an original piece. That is more rare, but it's really special when I get to do that.

Commissioning Musical Eulogies

SPEAKER_00 21:09

Yeah. Well, we're going to be having an exhibition that accompanies this podcast called Remains to Be Seen. And it's going to be a virtual exhibition space that you can walk into and walk around various different memorial arts objects. And it's my hope that we will be able to also have a component of that that is pieces of your music that people can play. And um, I the idea here is that people, again, start thinking more in advance, not that it's a morbid thing, but just so that we know we make so many decisions in our life based on who we think we are. We we dress in a certain way, we go to choose certain schools. But then when it comes to choosing our, you know, our final exit, we are skittish about it. We we think I haven't lived long enough to know what my wishes will be or whatever that is. But as so many of us know, you can go at any time. So to even have this be part of our, I'm trying to start a trend where this is something that we initiate earlier in life and we do it as an evolving thing. You don't have to have just one song, like what's my song? What's the song that's that's inside of me? And to have a conversation with you in your 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s or whatever it is, and maybe there are four or five songs. And wouldn't it be cool at the end of one's life, um, at that celebration, that you heard the piece of music that represented that person when they were in their 30s? And in the 40s and 50s and so on, because they had the wherewithal to think about that. And they've thought about the beautiful piece of artwork, the urn that they that their cremains or the coffin or whatever it is, and then the musical component of that. So I just hope that it's a trend that really catches on.

Planning Legacy Through Art

SPEAKER_01 22:47

Yeah. And I think that what you're talking about is actually just getting people to live like a more artistic and full life, you know, in general, because when we realize our mortality, we realize we don't have a lot of time. What becomes more valuable? And how do we get to that value sooner before it's too late to do those things? In terms of so you asked me about commissions, but actually another thing that I've done over the years is actively co-write music with people who are not necessarily musicians. I did two workshops at senior centers in Brooklyn. I was an artist in residence through Brooklyn Arts Council's Tsukasa program. I wrote two complete albums with senior citizens. How cool! We basically I interviewed them. Like we taught we wrote lyrics together, we came up with topics and themes. We kind of group wrote them. Some of them were individual songs. One of the seniors, her name was Sylvia. She was 94, and she had all this sheet music of songs she had written when she was like a teenager. She studied with Errol Garner, who was her next door neighbor, this famous jazz composer. I don't know if you know like the song Misty. Yeah. Yeah. And he was her neighbor, and she had all these songs. And so we actually arranged them and recorded them. And I have the lead sheets for them. And, you know, we also had another, I had another student who was also in her 90s, and she actually died before the concert happened. Um, but I had the recording of the song that she said came to her in a dream. So I worked with seniors for two years doing that project, and then I got hired by the Adirondack Writing and Poetry Center to do a pop-up course last summer that was called Music That Tells the Story of Our Lives. And again, it was an interdisciplinary course where some people coming into the class were more writers and poets, and some of them were more traditional musicians who were struggling more with the lyric writing aspect. So I lead people through these workshops, and like it's less that I'm just composing the music, which is a commission, is when you tell me what you want and I give you a product, and that that's great because I like doing that too. But these are more like educational long form work workshops where maybe the product isn't so polished, but it's like something that's yours and that you made, and it's a little edgy, and like the recording quality is a little bit, but it's like something so special. Like one thing I had my students do is go around and with a field recorder or just like a voice memo app on their phone and collect different sounds that are meaningful to them and then tell the story of that sound. And this one woman told a story about a loon call and how the call of the bird was connected through her childhood through old age. And I think that again, I was talking about this at the beginning. Music is essential, it's a it's a part of us. We're born with it. We recognize it if we're listening every day, if we're thinking about listening. And if we're given the language to just think about it and talk about it. So my role isn't just to come in and be like, I'm the expert and I'm providing all the music. My role is also kind of an educator where or you know, a lead, uh, a guide, like you can also be the musician, even if no one's in the room. And so I'm trying to give people those tools as well. And even better if you can have a professional musician there with you all the time. But it's not always the luxury.

SPEAKER_00 26:43

So what I love, I love this because it's it to your point that if we're all sort of inherently musical, this distinction between a professional musician and the music that's inside of us, that you're a facilitator that's just coaxing out of each of us. It's like we all have a song inside of us, and you're just kind of helping to cultivate that. I think that is incredibly beautiful.

Co‑Writing Songs With Seniors

SPEAKER_01 27:07

In the years that I've been doing workshops and teaching, people all absolutely have a song inside of them. But I I'm I think that I have a few thoughts because I I've spent a lot of time researching kind of the historical role of music and the cross-cultural role of music. And one reason to have a professional musician is to have them externalize your pain and have them play it out for you. There are reasons to have a hired musician there. Like when musicians are timekeepers, we're highly trained in keeping track of time. We can make a second feel like an hour or an hour feel like a minute. We're really good at that. And when you're in a funeral and everyone's falling apart, you want to have somebody who's kind of able to hold it together. And I know not all musicians are comfortable working in funeral spaces, but through this work, I have cultivated a community of people who've done these funerals with me. And we did a funeral for there were 300 people there. It was a young woman that died of COVID suddenly, a blood clot. And there were 300 people there. And we did an arrangement of Philip Glass's evening song, and it's just this like really repetitive, simple melody that goes over and over again, and it just you commit to it as a musician. It's very simple, but you're committing to the repetition. And there's just like a silence in the room afterwards. It wasn't an applause, it was just a feeling of being lifted up. That's the beauty of hiring someone who's who like knows who can who can do it in a a way that they've been trained for decades to do. But I also think of it as the difference between like uh hiring like a priest or a spiritual leader versus also having that internally inside of you when you need it. Yeah. Because it has that like, yes, like refined like aspect of training that we do. And it is also an essential part of all people, you know.

SPEAKER_00 29:31

Well, I also love what you're saying here because some people have lost their tradition of going to an institution, a church or a synagogue or whatever that spiritual container is. And those spiritual containers have rituals, but a lot of people are having their end-of-life ceremonies outside of that context. And so the music provides that container that you're talking about to give people a way to process and metabolize those emotions in a group context. And, you know, a musician that's trained to do it in a music hall with a very specific type of, you know, music given to them, that's what they're doing. They're sort of ushering you through an emotional journey. And so I I see the absolute value of having um musicians to hold space for that kind of community emotional experience.

Why Hire Musicians For Grief

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Yeah, we did I did a funeral that was for a this woman must have been. I mean, I never met her, but she must have been a character. They had all of her fancy hats out on the table, like 50 of them. And they were like, everybody take a hat. I don't know what to do with them, like take it home with you. She had all these like designer fancy hats, and she was an animal lover and rescued animals. This woman sounded amazing. And her husband um said she loves Michael Jackson, and I don't know if Michael Jackson will work on the violin. I'm like, I'm gonna make this work. So I did the song Human Nature. Oh, yeah, I can hear it. Yeah, and I played it on the violin, and everyone was just like, that's the song, you know. Like, that's I can do that. I can take that memory and like bring it in the room. And it's a human connection, you know, it's a little different than playing a recording of something. Like I took the time, I think there's a human connection there, you know. I took the time to translate something. And I make such deep connections with the people that I work with, like I stay in touch with them, you know, because it's it's such a meaningful experience for people. And I have to say, musicians are really good at this. I have a Substack where I interview musicians about their grief experiences, and a lot of musicians become musicians because they've had a major life-changing loss or experience. Like, sometimes I think you have to be really kind of out of your mind to like want to do practice music for six hours a day. Like, there's something that's like drawing you to do that, you know? And so I think musicians themselves, as people, are just really interesting. Like, what is their story? Why are they why are they devoting their life to something that's not tangibly rewarding or materially rewarding?

SPEAKER_00 32:56

Well, a practicing studio artist is sort of the same, but I think that there's something about preparing your instrument, your body instrument, to let that muse come through you that and the practice of of surrendering to that whatever that is, that quality that comes through you is it's a kind of devotional practice.

SPEAKER_01 33:20

Yeah, and that's why I was sort of comparing it to like the priest role or something. It's we're not priests, but we're we're trained to anticipate time and how time shifts and to be emotionally in tune. And I think those are just really excellent skills to have in a room. Yeah. One thing I was thinking about earlier in the conversation was this idea of commissioning artists or like spending a lot of time during your life preparing for your legacy. And I was reading a musicology book about how some of the greatest works in classical music were commissioned by wealthy people as their requiemes. Right. And, you know, we still play that music today. And there was an era in European history when people were more religious, everything was about preparing for the afterlife. So you were you were seen as more noble, like the bigger the mausoleum you built, the more money you spent during your life. Like that was like the goal. And then I think something obviously has shifted, like where the goal is the is life now. And so it's almost like there was too much in this direction, there's too much in this direction. Where's the like meeting point? But it's really interesting, like so much of the great art of the world was from you know, legacy commissions.

Music As Emotional Container

SPEAKER_00 34:47

Exactly. And I think that the with I love that idea of the pendulum kind of swinging one way or the other. And now with the emphasis so much on the now, people don't even want to think about a lot of people. Have given up this idea of the afterlife per se. Some people have. And um, you know, but this idea that really it's it's what do we want our life to have meant is kind of more where I think we are living right now. And a lot of people think of legacy as a name on a building, but really we're trying to put the emphasis on what have you cared about? What have you given yourself to? And the arts have a really important role to play in how we describe that. And it doesn't have to be fancy. I was thinking earlier, as you were saying, hiring musicians, but even coming together in song and including song. I mean, that's why hymns were sung. A song has been a part of ritual. And even when you think of singing, the vibration that comes through you as you hold a note or as you hum along or whatever, these are all an important part of the of a physiological manifestation of grief and grieving, as well as celebration. So it goes both ways.

SPEAKER_01 36:02

It's also something really accessible. Like if you're really stressed out, or the person is having terminal agitation, and you've got people in the room, you know, humming a melody, introducing some vibration into the room that is warm in tone, it can totally shift. Or even just like opening up a window, allowing in some bird song or playing a recording, even of nature sounds. There's really these really elemental ways that sound is accessible to us in a ref our own way of refining it. But singing, I mean, the the benefits of singing are like are well documented. And especially singing in groups, it's a really essential way that we co-regulate with each other. I've been working on a singing project for two years now, and it's sadly coming to an end. I mean, I'm excited for the shows, but it'll be over. It's the first weekend of February, and then after that, we're done with this production.

SPEAKER_00 37:06

But I've just been really benefiting off of it so much, and I'm like, I'm hoping to join a choir or something after this is done because well will it be recorded, or is it doesn't matter that the recording because it's your experience of singing with other people that has been so transformative.

Personalization: Michael Jackson On Violin

SPEAKER_01 37:23

I am releasing an album. I have the the CDs printed, but the it will be available streaming on April 3rd through my record label. And uh, you know, I I personally think the recording is absolutely beautiful. Um, the live show is February 5th, 6th, and 7th at St. Mark's in the Bowery in Manhattan. And it's so it's in this big cavernous church space, and it's gorgeous. Like the sound is unreal. And it's one of those things that's like you have to be there, you know. Yeah. The recordings are really beautiful too. But this piece is uh I I initially told you about being born with a visual impairment, and this piece is a bit about that little senses of loss that we get when our when our body doesn't work the way it does for other people, you know, we have these disabilities or impairments, but then from that we find renewal, we we find adaptability. And you know, that's a little bit of what this piece is about. But I think that like, you know, in terms of the the spiritual aspects, a lot of what I do through art is, you know, I try to observe patterns in nature and my own life experience and and how does death play a role? How has it already played a role in my existence? Because people say to me, like, well, how is it like not be able to see with your left eye? You don't see three-dimensionally, I see two-dimensionally. I'm like, I don't know because I never had it in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Yeah. Well, you know what I was thinking is you just brought something up that so I developed a hearing impairment in my teens when I was listening, went to concerts that were too loud. And I didn't really realize the degree to which it was impacting my life until COVID. I learned how to read lips really, really well. And so when the masks went on, I lost my capacity to understand what was happening in the world. And luckily, most of us were sequestered, and the people who I was living with were often within close enough range that I could move around them, see their lips, or I could get them to repeat. But during COVID, at some point I got hearing aids and I realized how much of the world I had been missing over the last 30, 40 years from bird song specifically, because when I got the hearing aids, the first thing I noticed was bird song. And I thought I was hearing birds, but it was just the crickets and birds that were, you know, in my in my ears. It wasn't actual bird song. And the other thing was zippers, you know. So the first day I got that zipper and it was like, so if you were to be writing a song for me, I was imagining that it would be, you know, all of this bird song at the beginning, and then the bird song sort of dissipates and goes away, and then the hearing aids come, and then the bird song comes back again, and it would be this arc of my hearing loss and hearing regain, which would be I I'd never thought about composing the song of my life from that perspective, but it's certainly one of the threads.

Musicians, Loss, And Devotion

SPEAKER_01 40:32

Well, it's interesting that you mentioned birds because we've experienced a mass extinction of birds on our planet, and I've done a lot of art and related to that. I wrote one piece called Invisible Light that is about how birds navigate through electromagnetic frequencies. And that piece is very much like that, where all the instruments are this coffee bird calls and they start like kind of dying away. And I'm doing a new piece with an architecture professor at Pratt, where I'm gonna be composing music based on the bird call of extinct birds, and there's gonna be life-size bird nests on this roof that the audience will be able to kind of like sit in. So that's happening this summer. I'm gonna be working on that project in the spring. But your personal story of loss, everyone's personal story of loss, is related to the collective story of loss, which is climate change and the loss of species, and the that we've lost the value of preciousness and interdependence. You know, the birds can't exist without all the other species in the environment, and neither can we. And um, and it's really beautiful what you were saying about the hearing loss, because like it made you value the preciousness of those sounds, like that's what loss does for us. You know, I'm not I don't I'm not a particularly like religious person or anything like that. I just wonder, like, what does that tell us about the role of death as an organic part of life? And also finding a balance, right? Because we don't want to be all death and we don't want to be all life. Not everyone agrees with that.

SPEAKER_00 42:20

I don't know, but well, I mean, it's I agree with you 100% because it's like the inhale and exhale. We can't always exhale, we can't always inhale. It's that yin-yang balance of uh light and dark and polarities and all of that. That is what the that's the fabric of of life.

Legacy, Requiems, And The Pendulum

SPEAKER_01 42:37

So, like when when somebody asks me, why do you miss like not having sight? Sometimes I miss like I am what I imagine to be that experience. And I also feel that same way about the loss of climate. When I walk around my neighborhood, I imagine what this neighborhood would have looked like when it was lush and full of trees, and one of the most naturally beautiful places in the world, and that the next generation isn't even gonna know what we knew growing up. I know that you know that nature was very different when you were growing up versus what I, you know, what I grew up with, and then the younger generation. So I do have a feeling of like grief and loss and nostalgia in that sense. And so through my performances, I'm also trying to get people to reflect on those feelings or even maybe acknowledge it if they can, because there is a continuity. It's not like just the time we're alive right now is important and nothing else is important. We're gonna die, but that doesn't mean that like we just trash the planet and then leave, like, you know. But I think it relates to the like what you were saying about legacy planning and and thinking ahead. And it I maybe I'm speaking of really broad, abstract themes, but it I think it's related to the health of the planet, like taking care of our legacy. I have a friend who came over to my apartment yesterday morning because his friend is terminally ill. And he said, Will you talk to him? And I'm like, Yeah, of course, give him my number. And he said, But I don't know, maybe it's too early. I don't know if it's emergency level yet. And I was like, Who cares? It's great if it's too early. Like, let's talk. Like, now's the time, not when you're sick and you want to just focus, you need to be focused on being sick, you need to be focused on the physical aspects of exiting, which are trying enough, like dealing with all this other stuff, like paperwork and documenting your artwork, and do all that now. So I was surprised that he said that to me. He's like, I don't know, maybe it's too soon.

SPEAKER_00 44:53

Well, that's I had that same conversation with. The gal I spoke to a couple of days ago, uh, Mallory McDuff, who um who lost her parents at a young age. And she, we had a whole conversation about green burial and a lot of really exciting things that she's up to in her world. But she said her father, for some reason, and he was a very conservative Southern guy, he talked about his death and how he wanted to be processed at death their entire lives. It was part of part of that regular conversation. And so by the time it did happen, they were also clear. They didn't have to read a directive. They knew exactly what he wanted because he'd been talking about it forever. And even though it was a catastrophic and sudden loss, they were much more prepared to handle all the logistics than they would have. Yeah. We started having the question of when is the right time to have these conversations? How soon should we start talking about them? And she said, you know, it's it's a pity that we don't talk to our children about it and that we haven't normalized it in everyday life, which would give us so much more opportunity to be very deliberate about our life.

Singing, Co‑Regulation, And Community

SPEAKER_01 45:57

Yeah, I actually had a young woman who was in her, she must have been 22 or 23 in college. She wanted to do her advanced directive with me because she was trying to encourage her dad to do it. So we did a whole advanced directive session. Um there's a podcast interview that she did with me about it. It's on my Substack. But I think the younger Gen like Gen Z are much more in tune with death because they were really young when COVID happened and they are witnessing so much on the internet through videos and and so I thought that was interesting. This generational difference where this young woman was like, I'm gonna do my advanced directive because if I do it, my parents will be encouraged to do it. Yep. Um, I also did I play violin for green burials. There's a cemetery on Long Island called Oakland Cemetery that I've done a funeral for, and it was for a family friend who also they planned this like two years or more. And his wife was at the funeral too, and and she was she's 93 or something now, and she thought the ceremony was so beautiful. And afterwards she said, Is that where I'm going? Like in a happy way. Like she was like, That's where I'm going.

SPEAKER_00 47:37

So I mean, I think that's that's the whole opportunity here, is in the same way that by introducing the idea of having a memorial arts object that's commissioned by an artist, and I've talked to some incredible artists who are doing beautiful things that if you can get people enthusiastic and excited about it, like, oh, I get to choose this instead of, you know, if it's not a gray headstone with, you know, numbers on it, and it's not just a will of legal ease and a medical directive, if the arts can be woven into this so that it becomes deeply personal. I mean, like, what is my song? And imagine being able to hear your song played throughout your life and then know that that will be shared with your friends at death, just like you did with that Michael Jackson song on the violin. I mean, I think if we can get people enthusiastic and excited so that it's not this morose thing, it's kind of like, who am I? And again, I keep saying, what's my song?

SPEAKER_01 48:28

It's empowering. It's empowering. It helps you to live your life fully. It doesn't, it's not this thing that's lingering that you worry about subconsciously. It relieves the people around you of the grief of not knowing what you wanted or the arguing over that, if you're very clear. And I'm even taking it a further stretch. Like, if our modern day version of spirituality is interconnectedness with nature, like it is also good for humanity and the planet to be aware of your death, aware of the preciousness of your time and the preciousness of resources that are all around us, that hopefully there's a consciousness shift as people are thinking more about death and also the fact that there's no such thing as absolutely perfect health. Like we we get sick, we live totally completely satiated. You know, we can live very full lives even with a disability, even with a loss. Like we shouldn't strive for perfection, it's not human. These are some of the bigger, like philosophical ideas that have come to me through doing this work and just reflecting on my own life experience of loss, personal loss.

SPEAKER_00 49:54

But even it even I'm gonna interject here because our next season, which is called Mind at Large, and we'll be exploring neurospiciness, and but mostly I want to address the myth of normal. We think of it like loss or gain, but it's really this continuum of opening and closing, and or however whatever language you want to give to it, but we need to be more fluid with it.

New Works, Disability, And Renewal

SPEAKER_01 50:17

We also think about intelligence or perception in hierarchy, whereas it's really just divergence. Yeah, like this piece that we're doing in a week, this is the poster art for it. And it's kind of like a human becoming a rabbit, becoming a squid. It's becoming like all these different animals because different beings in nature have extremely different ways of perception in the same way that humans are neurodivergent, and so valuing that it's not like we're more intelligent than a fly. A fly can have a map of a 10-mile radius in its head, it's a completely different type of intelligence and perception. So to compare one to the other is comparing apples and oranges. And my dog is also a trained service dog, so I think a lot about like where my perception leaves off, like hers picks up. And so we need each other, we need divergence, we need biodiversity and people that think differently. So I'm totally on the same page with you on this. I'm thinking about that, and I'm thinking about death and that when we die, we make space for something new. And everyone, every living thing has a time for that. After our conversation, I'll send you some links to things that I think you might find interesting. I have a video of the funeral that I played at Oakland, the Green Burial, where you can hear the bird song reacting to the violin. I'll send you some things to check out and like whatever you think your audience might be interested in, like, feel free to include. Do you have any other questions for me?

SPEAKER_00 52:07

Well, I guess just to wrap it up, say a little bit more about how you use music in the doula phase of your practice.

SPEAKER_01 52:19

I don't really specialize in bedside music. I mostly do music in funeral spaces, but I have encountered a lot of threshold choir singers in my work, and I sang with them when we were at the end of life doula conference. It was a really beautiful experience. And I'm also working on putting together recordings that people can use at bedside for terminal agitation because, like I said, it's not always possible for a musician to be there, but I know that there are some things that people might respond to if you're really looking for something in a moment.

SPEAKER_00 52:55

Do you incorporate certain frequencies in that, or is that just inherent in the in the music?

SPEAKER_01 53:02

I think like there are certain frequencies that can be more relaxing for people. And there's also healing that people do with tuning forks and bells and things like that. But that's not really my specialty. I also know that there's bedside harp. Like some people are trained to do the harp at bedside. I'm very adjacent to those kinds of spaces, but my work is much more in the legacy space and funeral music and music around Greece. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

Yeah. So people can contact you through your website. And I'm sure some people will contact you because I just I want to contact you. I think that this it would be so much fun to work together. And the other thought I had is that I'd love to arrange for you to come out to Santa Fe and do one of your workshops, not necessarily senior seniors, but anybody who would be interested in your facilitating us to just connect with that inner song that we all have within us.

Hearing Loss, Birdsong, And Memory

SPEAKER_01 53:59

I would love to do that. And um, I can also show you some of the work samples of the work that I did with the seniors in the past. We wrote some really we've written some really fun songs over the years, including breakup songs about how you hate being on a diet, songs about how getting old kind of sucks, like stuff, songs about how much you love black coffee, like all these like kind of details about life that this is a space to talk about it and laugh about it and make a joke and share with other people who are having the same struggles. You know, I just hope that we can make death a more integral part of life. And culturally, I hope that's what you and I and those of us in this space can contribute to. And uh I think that it will lead to a better future and a healthier society and a healthier relationship to other mortal creatures and beings in our environment because they're all terminal too.

SPEAKER_00 55:11

That's the perfect place to leave it. That it's just been so delightful. I knew it would be, but it was even more wonderful than I expected. So um, I will be in touch and we'll exchange more information and I'll be back in touch with you, especially about the Remains to be seen exhibition and also another project that we're creating where we're going to be rewilding golf courses.

SPEAKER_01 55:33

Okay, cool.

SPEAKER_00 55:35

Turning them into memorial arts parks where they love that. Yeah. So that stay tuned for more information about that. And I definitely want you involved in that project.

SPEAKER_01 55:44

Okay, great. Yeah, keep me posted, and I'm curious about your neurodivergent series. It's been really great chatting with you. Really good to meet you.

SPEAKER_00 55:54

Yeah, likewise. Well, I will talk, we'll talk again soon.

SPEAKER_01 55:58

Talk soon. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 56:00

Bye. So thanks for joining us today. Artstorming is brought to you and supported by Artbridge NM and listeners like you. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms or wherever you listen. Your subscriptions, likes, comments, and shares help us to reach more listeners and attract the support we need to thrive in these challenging times. If you love what you hear, please consider making a contribution. We rely on your help to keep these conversations going. Every dollar you contribute goes directly into programs that support our mission. And we've been offered a matching grant that will match every dollar that you contribute. That means more compelling stories, more in depth articles, and an even greater impact on our community. Please visit our website at www.artbridgenm.org and thank you so much for being an essential part of our work.