Issue #7
Nashville to Nepal, Music to Architecture
A small disclaimer: this story will eventually be relevant to Building Songs it just takes a while to tell. Please bear with me.
I have been a musician longer than I have been an architect. There is a pretty low barrier to entry in music. Just about anyone can become a musician if they have the drive. Growing up in Nashville, I knew many professional musicians, yet I didn’t know a single architect until I was in my 20s.
I became a musician in my teens, and I worked professionally starting at the age of 17 (albeit off-and-on) until the present moment. I had a recording contract at the age of 19, I worked as a Nashville session vocalist, and I had a music residency in Kathmandu, Nepal—all before I turned 21 years old. Shortly after I turned 21, my music career suddenly halted. My manager started working against me—calling me ‘crazy’—and conspired to tarnish my career. I am grateful now I walked away from that so called “opportunity”, even if it halted my music career until my contract expired in 2020.
This is not a sad story. I just felt you needed some context to understand where I am coming from. I want to return to my residency experience, since it shaped much of my artistic practice.
In September of 2015, I was in college scrolling on Twitter when I stumbled across a tweet requesting applications for a music and photography artist residency in Kathmandu, Nepal. The residency was to coincide with Photo Kathmandu’s inaugural photography festival in November 2015.
I applied (half jokingly) and was selected to join a cohort of six international artists. My expenses in Nepal would be covered, but I had to figure out how to get there. As a poor college student, this meant buying the cheapest plane ticket to Kathmandu with a high-interest payday loan. It was totally worth it.
It’s been nine years, so I can’t exactly remember every detail. I remember my flights looking something like this: Boston—New York (12 hr layover)—Doha (18 hr layover)—Kathmandu. It took two days to get from Boston to Kathmandu with the cheapest flights possible. By the time I arrived in Kathmandu, it was late at night, and I was running on little to no sleep. I remember being so disoriented by the newness of traveling alone internationally.
I was invited as a jazz singer and collaborated with other musicians and photographers on several projects and performances throughout my two-week residency. The 2015 residency theme was Improvisation within Time. Kathmandu is kind of famous for their jazz music scene, and time is crucial to both photography and music. We were Photo Kathmandu’s first ever cohort, and they hired Philippe Van Cauteren, artistic director of S.M.A.K. Museum for Contemporary Art in Ghent, to direct our projects. There were two local Nepalese artists, and the others traveled from Mozambique, India, and Bangladesh.
I was the last to arrive, and the next morning we got to work. We had to figure out how three photographers could collaborate with a singer, a trumpet player, and a guitar player. We agreed to keep things unconventional—no filming musicians or writing music to images. In what other ways could a visual medium meet a sonic medium?
We wanted the two mediums to be in constant dialogue. Using the language of one to converse with the other. One project we worked on involved a role reversal. Instead of the musicians writing and performing the music—what if the photographers wrote sheet music with an arrangement of images—replacing your typical music notation. It was a strange idea, but we went with it.
The photographers went out into the city separately—photographing the urban environment as they desired. After a couple of days, they came back as a group and selected photographs to print. All photos were printed in black and white (I believe there was a budget constraint), but also it worked because sheet music is black and white. The music itself adds color and texture.
After selecting and printing, the photographers began cutting the images and arranging them on a long scroll, fashioned from large sheets of paper. The photographers wrote three parts: a vocal melody, a trumpet part, and a guitar part. After the sheet music was finalized, the musicians were invited into a room to begin filming.
Our task as musicians was to “sight read” this new composition. We had one attempt to interpret the music and perform it to camera. Each musician did the exercise separately, and I went second. We had not seen the images let alone the sheet music, and we couldn’t depend on our knowledge of music theory. We were in unknown territory.
We filmed it, so I have video evidence! This really happened. Take a look:
The images featured architecture, people, and urbanism. Those images fashioned into sheet music? It doesn’t get more Building Songs than that! The experiment didn’t produce any revolutionary new music, but the methodology we implemented is something I still try to emulate in my artistic practice today. Before sharing this story with a friend several years ago I just saw myself as a singer. After watching this video and hearing my story, she said “you’re an artist!” I believed her. I am an artist.
This residency came to me at a strange time. I had recently transferred to Boston University, and I was working and living as an au pair in a Boston suburb while going to school full time (a story for another time). I was literally playing hookie for two weeks to go do this residency. But miraculously, everything went well, and to this day it is one of the best decisions I have ever made.
The experience gave me a new perspective I will graciously carry with me for the rest of my life. If I have any advice, I say go with your gut. As weird as the whole scenario was, I had a gut feeling I needed to do this residency. I didn’t know anyone in Nepal, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t know the language, and I had to travel alone to the other side of the globe. I am so glad I had the naïve bravery to follow this through.
This newsletter is partly, autobiographical. Even the newsletters about album artwork have a tinge of myself in them. My songwriting is partly autobiographical. Sure I can write about experiences I’ve never had, but every song has my perspective at its core. My perspective today is shaped by my life experiences and my education. I see songs as my teachers, and I am their humble student.
Shortly after returning to Boston, I made a vlog documenting every day of my trip. It is a little cringey watching it back nine years later, but it represented me at the time (a naïve twenty year-old). All of the music in the video was either created by the cohort or recorded by myself. I made all of the music downloadable below if you want to hear them separately.
MUSIC FROM THIS VIDEO (free mp3s):
What a great adventure you had and a unique musical experience. I believe in going with your gut too, have found it often to be life-changing when I've done it.
Looking forward to more in this story.