Recently, since doing some of these songs live a few times, I have noticed happy memories peeking through. That realisation turned into a song on the album. Eventually, other feelings started to replace those - while my mom was sick I never felt pity for her, I saw her as the strongest human being on the planet because of her tenacity and humour - but when she passed, I started reflecting on her situation and wasn’t strong enough to avoid feelings of pity creeping in (which I know she would have been super annoyed about). The first six months of grieving were mostly a crippling sense of guilt - I should have shown up more, I should have gotten her a pet, we never went to Greece after she got sick. How do you hope that of Love. can help others grappling with grief?Īs a caretaker, I always look back at what I could have done more. Grief is often a difficult topic to discuss, but something that basically everyone has to deal with at some point in their lives. Music was the place I could put those complex feelings of sadness, worry, hope and fury - each song captures a moment of that process. She exclaimed about what a beautiful day it was and we listened to a jazz band play on 97th and Central Park West - I just held her hand. There are moments I could never share with her, like when the doctor said she was too far gone and we had to stop chemo, she didn’t really understand that interaction because of the brain cancers effect on her cognition - so I walked her across Central Park from the hospital back home, with her wheelchair, crying, but when she turned around I gave her a big smile. When I couldn’t sleep at night because I was on caretaker duty, or was just too stressed, I would write lyrics to capture those feelings, to put the anxiety of dealing with so much unknown into words, to get the unbearable tension of responsibility out of my head. I would learn how to chop up beats on my laptop and the digital audio workstation while she was getting her MRIs - I would fine-tune orchestrations and balance layered recording mixes while she was sleeping in the chemotherapy chair. How did you turn to music after your mother was diagnosed with brain cancer, and during the caretaking process?Ĭomposition and writing verse became my primary way of healthily coping with the stress of being a caretaker. Read: Violinist and composer Elektra Kurtis has died Listen: The Strad Podcast #67: Curtis Stewart on Julia Perry’s Violin Concerto Her ingenuity, courage and groundbreaking way of looking at music gave me my compositional ’mother-tongue’ and framed what I thought was ‘normal’ as an American composer. She came from an opera-singing mother in Poland, played with the Roma people outside Warsaw, and had a bassoonist/world music percussionist brother. She was a classical violinst, a Greek violinist, a jazz violinist, an educator, a killer Gumbo chef, among many other things. She hung out with rappers to figure out how to get their verses about Aphrodite to fit into Greek patterned 7/8 grooves.Īll this showed me what an earnestly curious and open-minded music creator looks like. I would play in her band ‘Ensemble Elektra’ which combined Greek, contemporary classical, Middle Eastern, reggae, jazz and a touch of hip-hop music. My mom and I ended up going to a lot of classes together in addition to my twice-weekly violin lessons and music theory classes - we would check out Simon Shaheen, Henry Threadgill, Steve Coleman - we would play around with ii - V chords together, she would compose and speed up her compositions in Finale and I would dance to them as a kid - she would speed them up way beyond anything playable and as they got faster and faster I would fall out laughing on the living room floor. I hope that trait has been passed down to me. I had no clue my mom was a cross-genre musician until after college - I thought that what she did was just what being an artist was, that musicians led multiple lives playing multiple styles of music and insatiably learnt about as much music as they could. How did your mother’s abilities as a cross-genre violinist and composer influence your formative years as a musician? Discover more Featured Stories like this in The Strad Playing Hub
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |