Announcing my July Residency

My new direction, and my move to Substack.

There is a line in a song by Haitian-Guyanese music artist Michaël Brun that goes: 

“In Silence, it’s Violent.” 

We need each other to live and to thrive, to find true love, to fill up our hearts, and to sustain ourselves and others. When we are silent and force ourselves to bear it all alone, we sever our connection to life-giving communities. 

I know what it’s like to hide almost everything from my loved ones. Not only my music, but almost every aspect of my lived experience. I kept my musical creativity and ideas under wraps for years. 

But that’s about to change. 

I’m pleased to announce I accepted an artist residency in Italy during the month of July.

Photo by Jordan Chin

I was on the couch at Jor and Nico’s apartment when early in the morning on Memorial Day I woke from anticipation. Aided by the sunlight streaming in through the glass, I reached over to grab my phone and check my inbox. 

In the quiet stillness, my heart thumped with excitement and joy as I read I was being offered a spot in a month-long artist residency created by My Queer Blackness, My Black Queerness and the Villa Lena Foundation. It takes place in the heart of Tuscany, and is sponsored by the Italian designer brand, Loro Piana. 

It’s a time and space residency fostering the creation of new and original works. In my case, I’ll be focusing on new music composition and a body of essays while collaborating with other artists of a similar background and lived experience as me on interdisciplinary projects that explore and celebrate black queer identity. 

I want to share a bit about my journey to inspire other readers and creatives to excavate and heal in ways their art perhaps requires them to at this moment, and also encourage them to launch their stuff out there in a way that lands them similar opportunities such as this. 

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My application grew from the content on my website and sharing my ideas with all of you. It was the result of my efforts in thinking about and sharing my knowledge about music in a way that inspires freedom of thought and expression by reinterpreting the dogmatic tradition of classical music and making it our own through embodiment and mindfulness. 

My writing was a way to support other creatives, and dig as deeply as I possibly could into the philosophy behind music, which I understand as a dharma, a way of life.

I insisted again and again that my students and readers pay attention to their lived experiences. But as I did so, I became disturbed and bothered by how far away my own lived experience was from me. What did I know about the nuances of being, not only as a musical being, but as a human being with lovers and aspirations?

There was so much of myself that had been shut down from the wounds of my past that my only response to the pain from interacting with others was with numbness. I wasn’t fully practicing what I knew to be true and taught my students because to do so for me only signaled how much I wanted to grow, change, heal, and release. 

In concert halls around New York City, I wanted the fresh, the new, I wanted the vulnerable, I wanted to be moved at my core. The vast majority of what I got, vexingly, was a sterile, dry, disengaged kind of music-making by professionally funded orchestras. Was I being too idealistic or naive, clinging on too much to what I had experienced during my training, or was I speaking to something a majority of us felt but didn’t want to articulate because the solution of opening our hearts is too foreign in our culture?

Loneliness of the intellectual or artistic kind tends to compound. In the recent past, to see my likeness as a Black American of Haitian and Guyanese descent on stage or in the audience, listening to or working on this music, was an absolute rarity, and drove me for a while into isolation. Feeling different became overwhelming, but I ignored these feelings so I could live. I hadn’t learned yet that it’s far easier to live surrounded by truth and love than any other way. It took recognizing what was going on, identifying it, and then releasing it by speaking about it before my reality started to look and feel different, the way I wanted it to.

In a very real sense, my healing took an upward turn by publishing my writing. My musical focus shifted from “conduct this random Beethoven symphony,” or “compose this album,” to more concrete goals, such as “grow a readership one article at a time that teaches some aspect of the most meaningful thing you know about.” The connections I’ve made while making progress on this last goal were absolutely amazing. But the unseen growth came from the conversations my written work produced in real life. Writing helped me gain an understanding of what it is about music that bothered me to my core, as well as what created the moments of transcendence. It was through conversations with others that I was able to find myself again. 

But I always knew this phase was just a start. Writing about the particulars of harmony didn’t fully help me integrate the hidden, silent aspects of my being into my music. I was uncomfortable with the fact that I was a sexual, gendered, racial being because I couldn’t articulate those aspects of my existence in the same way that I could articulate the musical and spiritual realities that lived among the relationships between the notes and chords of my music. 

But as you know by now, music is not about the notes. 

The emptiness I had felt, the lack of musical depth for me, was also rooted in the ignorance of the other felt realities of my being. Realities that exist in the hearts as much as they exist in the minds. In the musical experience, these realities are just as present as the physical notes. I’m reminded of what Nadia Boulanger told Quincy Jones in her Paris teaching apartment in the 1950s.

"Your music can never be more or less than you are as a human being." 

Reflections of You

Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Met Orchestra and Chorus

I listened to A German Requiem by Johannes Brahms for the first time at Carnegie Hall two nights ago. Musically speaking, it was perfection. One of those rare moments where we—the audience together with the musicians on stage—achieved unity. 

The rising and falling melodies in the soprano and the power of the bass reached down in me and unearthed deep emotions. Alongside the splendid cascades of beauty during this humanistic requiem were for me these feelings of mourning associated with the senseless murders of black and brown individuals in America who look and feel just as I do, who are still murdered and incapacitated in disproportionate numbers as a consequence of our being perceived as a subordinate race, in acts that wreak havoc on our families and spread fear and pain across our extended communities.

And right next to me was Dominic, an internationally acclaimed fellow queer black musical artist, who felt a similar, yet different, pain rise in him. It was a pain that I can empathize with, and truthfully, simultaneously, I felt so grateful and lucky to have him next to me, to breathe and to heal with each other through the experience of this immaculately conceived live music. It felt as if the strength from our like-heartedness was stronger than the pain we released.

This reality of mine, of ours, is too important to deny and leave to the silent abyss. To deny this part of my reality in my written work about music is to deny a possible connection and awakening in my reader, and to lose an opportunity to connect and transmute the pain from the illusion of our separation from one another. In a way, the silence enables and allows this ignorance to continue. I have committed to no longer let these realities stay silent in me.

My takeaway for you is simple. If you wish to understand your music as deeply as possible, you have to be willing to let your mind, heart, and limbs be moved by the experience itself, and accept with a full heart that which comes up for you as a whole being. This is simply how music works, what it requires of us. Its movement stirs our emotions and memories and associations and brings them to consciousness in ways they wouldn’t otherwise. It engages the deepest and most interconnected parts of our neural architecture, allowing all parts of ourselves, present and past, to integrate together, and this experience can feel like a revelation, and can move one to tears.

It is never the surface-level beauty of the sound that moves me, what moves me is the awakening and realization of wholeness through musical sound on some previously unarticulated aspect of my being finally lit by the light of truth. 

How My New Site Works

Here on this new Substack, you’ll find my essays, compositions and sketches, and score studies. All of the new pieces on this site are sent directly to your inbox when you’re a subscriber.

Substack is a more social writing space that attracts great writing from authors around the world, and encourages multidisciplinary conversation in the comments beneath each post—something I look forward to the most.

You’ll find me writing a lot more personal essays about my experiences as both a musician and as a human being.

I have working articles coming not only on musical performance, the philosophy of harmony and musical wholeness, and the experience of orchestral conducting, but also insights and stories about masculinity and queerness and blackness, and other aspects of experience that feed into my understanding. I want all of these facets to exist harmoniously in me so that each is strengthened and enriched, and this page is a representation of this harmonic goal.

I’ll be sharing the products of my artist residency here as time goes on, so you’ll have close access to my new music, ideas, theories, learnings, and experiences.

You can see all of my posts on the Archive page.

The Harmony tab is where you'll find the 14 Days of Harmony course, as well as other writings about the subject. You can also access that content under the Learn Music tab, or by going to this link where the full course is now on one page. It was important that the experience of this course material remained the same as I moved to this platform. 

Scores is where I'll keep all of the score analysis for composers and producers, such as the in-depth analysis of Bruckner that’s coming up this Fall.

Finally, the Podcast tab is where I’ll distribute new music releases together in one place. 

As always, let me know what resonates with you the most, and I’m excited to build for you here digitally and in Italy in real life this July.