Ep 152: Tina Davidson ~ Unveiling Secrets and Harmonising Identity ~ a Symphony of Life and Inclusion

Imagine discovering that your adopted mother, the woman who raised you, was actually your birth mother and your whole identity had been a carefully constructed secret. That’s exactly what classical composer and writer Tina Davidson experienced, and it's just one facet of her remarkable journey that she unveils in our latest episode. Her story is a symphony of truth, transcendence, and inclusion, resonating through the echoes of her music and the crescendos of her life challenges. From her struggles with depression to her triumphs as a single mother and her astonishing career, Tina’s life is a testament to the power of music and community in forging a sense of belonging.

As the notes of Tina’s compositions rise and fall, so do the narratives of inclusion and personal growth shared in our heartfelt conversation. Tina’s compositions, like "Dark Child Sings," serve as a universal language for the feelings of an outsider, while her innovative music education programs break down barriers, fostering creativity in children from diverse backgrounds. Her poignant reunion with her birth mother weaves a thread of acceptance through our discussion, illustrating how embracing every aspect of our humanity can catalyse profound connections and transformation.

The final chords of this episode explore the interconnectedness of music, identity, and the global community. Tina speaks to the universal resonance of creativity, urging us to trust the unique melody within each of us. Her insights into self-discovery, the courage to confront secrets, and the celebration of art’s unifying power compose a narrative that will inspire listeners to embrace their own stories with compassion and courage. Join us for a journey that harmonises the personal with the universal, underscoring the significance of every voice in the grand orchestra of life.

Where to find Tina and her astonishingly beautiful music:
https://open.spotify.com/artist/2y5Z17bEilAiViMp9FMuJh
https://soundcloud.com/tina-davidson-3

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Truth and Transcendence brought to you by being Space with Catherine Llewellyn. Truth and Transcendence, episode 152, with special guest Tina Davidson. Now, if you haven't come across Tina, she's a classical composer and writer for the last 45 years. In her memoir Let your Heart Be Broken, she shares about her unique life and the traumas she experienced as a child being adopted by her birth mother but not told about her true identity. It's a truly strange and moving story. In the book, after years of depression and dissociation, tina started working to reclaim herself through therapy and spiritual practice. Meanwhile, she was a single parent, composing and creating works with major ensembles and orchestras such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, american Composers Orchestra, st Paul Chamber Orchestra, kronos Quartet, cassatt Quartet, as well as recordings with Albany Music and on Deutsche Grammophon performed by Grammy winner violinist Hilary Hahn.

Speaker 1: 1:24

So wow, and I've listened to a bit of Tina's music. It's utterly beautiful. I know it's subjective, but it is utterly beautiful. Thank you, my pleasure. I thought it was so cool on your TED Talk where you talked about being a female composer and how unusual that was. And you know you've done this music. And then you go like, for example, and the camera pans to the other side of the stage and there's a string quartet.

Speaker 1: 1:50

I think it is it's actually a string trio, so violin, cello, piano, okay cool so you know, um, and they start playing this piece of music and I thought, god, that's so beautiful and also so much more powerful than just the story, the actual music. So I invited Tina to come because her journey of exploration in regard to inclusion, which is kind of run through as a thread, is both courageous and enlightening and, I think, highly relevant to many of us today. And enlightening, and I think, highly relevant to many of us today. Isolation and an absence of community is rife today. We all need a sense of belonging, and navigating a lack of this precious component of human life is a challenge many of us are not educated for and it's something we don't like to talk about. It's embarrassing, we feel shy, we feel whatever. So inclusion is such a powerful theme and I was delighted when Tina agreed to come on and talk about that. And, of course, many other things will be woven through our conversation, as usual. So, tina, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 2: 3:08

Oh, such a pleasure, I'm delighted, excellent, and I am talking to you from Lancaster, pennsylvania in the United States, which is a beautiful area of Pennsylvania that has been cultivated by Amish the Amish. So they have very small farms and I always feel that they've created a land trust for us, because they won't sell it, they just hand it down generational.

Speaker 1: 3:35

So it is a beautiful area here, right, but you're not living in an Amish house yourself.

Speaker 2: 3:42

No, not at all. No, but they're around you. They're around me. Yes, so give some context for where I am coming from.

Speaker 1: 3:50

Yeah, how lovely. Well, I think that I live in Wales and there's a lot of sheep and birds. You're never alone in the countryside, right, right, exactly, always something talking to you. Yes, um, so, um, would you like to just lead us straight away, tina, by uh telling us when you first kind of uh connected in with this thing about inclusion, when you, when you first realized how important it was for you.

Speaker 2: 4:22

You know I'm going to go back to my birth story, but it wasn't until I was later, as an adult, that I realized how important inclusion was. But, as you said, I was born in Sweden and I was placed in a foster home and lived with a Swedish family. So I lived there for three years and I was the youngest of three boys totally adored, and the brother that was closest to me in age was almost we were only six months apart. So we were really brought up as twins in a very close relationship. We basically did everything together and slept in the same room, et cetera. And when I was three and a half, a beautiful young American woman came. She was a young professor, she had gotten her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and within a month and a half she adopted me and brought me to America and I then grew up as the oldest. She married and I became the oldest of five and I always had a sense, even though adoption was never spoken about.

Speaker 2: 5:36

It was never. I was never treated any differently. I always felt separate. I always, you know, they would talk about oh, your grandfather did this and your grandmother did that, and I go oh, that's so cool. Oh, they're not my grandparents. There was always that sense of looking through a window at a family that I wanted to physically belong to, and it's interesting what an impact that word has. It's just a word, but I think children definitely make up their own context for things and they don't talk about it. They don't tell you what's going on. So it wasn't until I was 21 and I happened to be back in Sweden and I said, oh, I'm going to find out who my birth parents are. And when I contacted the adoption agency and came in, they asked me all these questions about my family and how it was and finally they said the woman who adopted you, your adopted mother, is your birth mother.

Speaker 1: 6:48

Oh, my God.

Speaker 2: 6:49

So there was this sense of like. My reality was the same, but it was totally changed and that sort of became the beginning. I did put it away. I was 21. I came back and I told my mother and she cried and she said oh, you know, it was so important at that time which is true in the 50s to protect yourself, since I was an illegitimate child and she was a professional Made total sense. And she was a professional made total sense. But as I processed this over the years, I began to wonder you know, why didn't she just tell me? Why had she not said I am your mother, we can't talk about this, and I love you and I want you to know that you belong.

Speaker 2: 7:43

So it really wasn't until I was in my early 30s and I had a newborn daughter that I realized how important it was to really start diving in and trying to understand this in a deeper context, and it began about a 10-year process of doing a lot of therapy and a lot of crying and a lot of expressing my anger. Particularly, I uncovered that not only had I lived sort of with this estrangement all my life which was, I have to say, was in words, not, you know, my family accepted me. Every once in a while my brother said well, I'm not going to obey you because you're adopted. But you know it wasn't in action. I was totally part of the family, although it was clear that my stepfather felt much closer to his biological children than he did to me.

Speaker 1: 8:54

Did he know no he didn't know either.

Speaker 2: 8:58

It turned out she really hadn't told anyone, hadn't told anyone, and as time passed she became more and more committed to this secret and more and more anxious and, I think, to some extent paranoid that her life would be taken away. But what I did uncover is that and it's not something I think we think of with adopted children is that my foster family, to my three-and-a-half-year-old mind, was my family.

Speaker 2: 9:35

And when I left, without explanation except go with this woman who I didn't even call mother, I called her Aunt Terry for quite a while. That whole unit, it was like there was a car accident and they all died.

Speaker 2: 9:57

Yeah, yeah yeah, but there was no discussion and no ability to grieve that. And so in my 30s I really did find that I had a lot of grief to express, I think professionally, as a composer. Where this started to leak out and I always compose about myself in my music, but, in terms of inclusion, where this started to really leak out and take a professional turn is that in the 80s and even 90s, being a classical composer was sort of considered an elevated art form. You know, oh, you're a composer where you must be not of this earth, or you must be so talented or, oh my gosh, how do you do it. And I really started to resent that because I really wanted everybody to compose.

Speaker 2: 10:54

But the music world had sort of fashioned this elitism to boost the art field, to make it seem, you know, everybody would want to come and be in the presence of Beethoven and you know, mozart and Bach, these geniuses rather than. Oh, you know, when you go to kindergarten, your first grade, you go in there's an easel over in the corner and the teacher puts a smock on you and then she gives you the best art lesson in the world and she says try not to get the paint on the floor and you just go off and you create and it's your personal experience with this art form. It's not narrated or you don't have to teach, learn brush strokes or go. You know you're not. You know, in the music world you have to listen to all the great masters before you're allowed to do anything. But you know, when you're in kindergarten they don't say oh, excuse me, you haven't gone to the museum yet. You cannot paint until you've gone to the museum.

Speaker 2: 12:14

So that idea of including everyone into the process of the artistic form has been very, very important to me as a composer and as a writer, and I think you know you talk about my book Let your Heart Be Broken and I write about my process. You know. I just want people to know this is, you know, it's not a big deal. It's always a big deal to be a professional in your field, whatever your field is banking, veterinarian, podcaster it's always a big deal. You always have to work hard at it.

Speaker 1: 12:54

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:55

But the arts aren't some bigger deal. That's the way I feel, that's the way I teach, that's the way I feel, that's the way I teach and that's the way I write. Music is that idea of inclusion. I was thinking how sometimes people will say is there a word that represents your life?

Speaker 1: 13:21

And some people would say love, or I would say inclusion, that is my word. Inclusion that is my word, yeah. So how it comes across is that you have a fundamental assumption of inclusion. That inclusion is where you're coming from in the way that you're approaching your life and what you're doing, which is a very interesting response to me, given the history that you've had, because some people might have responded to that history by being suspicious or exclusive or defensive or any of those things, might say that's a way somebody could have gone. But you haven't gone that way. But you did say you did a lot of personal work. You must have transformed a lot within you.

Speaker 2: 14:06

Yes, and I write about that journey of how I did that work and it was painful. I composed a lot about it. So I almost did two kinds of therapy at the same time talk therapy and then composing therapy. So I had pieces called Dark Child Sings. That's a cello octet and that was about that little lost child in me that I felt was kind of dark in the dark and kind of a dark, downcast face, that sort of sense of not being included, sort of sense of not being included. And so I wrote a lot of for about 10 years I wrote a lot about that.

Speaker 2: 14:50

I don't think I was saying, oh, now let me put my therapy into music. It was just sort of where I was guided. I've always felt that I am the petri dish, I am the fertile ground. I try to understand myself in not only relationship to myself but in relation to the world as I grow and change. Only relationship to myself, but in relation to the world as I grow and change, have children, you know, go into my 60s and 70s. So what's going on now is kind of where I'm always at. And for about 10 years in my 30s and into my 40s, that narrative was forefront.

Speaker 2: 15:49

Then I started to really think about how could I include others in music. So one of the things I developed was a school program where I went into schools and taught children who never had any musical background how to compose music. We did that through instrument building. So we built instruments out of cans and jars and shoe boxes and what I found is that when you allow kids to run around and make things like an instrument, basically you can ask them to do anything. They're yours, they'll do anything for you. So then we would write music using graphic notation. So how to simplify the notation system so that it's at their level. So firstly, graphic they would draw the sounds and they'd have wonderful titles. It would be some story, because that's what music is, it's a story, a beginning, middle and end. Then we'd reduce the paper and have invented notation. So they'd have to think of the sound and think how would they invent symbols, to think of different pitches or even rhythms. And within I would teach like once a week for 10 weeks and we would have created a whole half hour concert of music that they had to perform for the school. So it became, you know, and I always was how do I teach what I know at whoever's in front of me, whatever their level is. So I'm constantly modifying my teaching for you know and I actually excel at kids who have behavior problems I'm really good at them or who see the world differently, maybe are on the spectrum, because I'm always thinking this is what I know, how can I create something for that particular learning style? And that is also a way of inclusion. If you're always saying this is what I know and I'm just going to teach it to you the way I think it should be taught, you're not really including the person in that process.

Speaker 2: 18:00

Then I started to create a lot of music that included children performing with professionals. I thought, oh, you know, it's fun to listen to an orchestra, it's fun to listen to an ensemble, but can you imagine playing with an ensemble? That might really make you feel like you wanted to do that. So I created a lot of pieces where there were children.

Speaker 2: 18:26

I have one for what we call twinklers, our little kids who can just play Twinkle, twinkle Little Star, and they study with their teacher and they play. Maryary had a little lamb and twinkle, twinkle little star and um, kind of the suzuki method. So I created a melody for them that they learned and they play with their teachers and they just repeat it over and over again and then the orchestra comes in and kind of wraps them up and then they emerge again as solos and then they're wrapped up into this orchestra. So my idea was not only a wonderful experience for the orchestra you know how cool is that but for these kids to have the entitlement to play with the orchestra. You know that experience, you know like, oh, I was up on this stage. So I'm always looking for opportunities to share this field that I love, which is writing music.

Speaker 1: 19:28

And yeah, I love that, that just for some reason I feel very moved by that story about the children and the orchestra and I and to me, you, me that sense of I want to be able to play with the orchestra, whether it's actually an orchestra or whether it's actually the orchestra of life. I want to be able to play with it and play on my own and play with it and play on my own or with my group of peers or whatever that's right, beautiful, beautiful.

Speaker 2: 20:07

And when I teach composition, it's not that I want you to be a composer, but I want to show you your creativity. I'm going to put a stamp on your creativity and that stamp says this is yours, this belongs to you. Don't let anybody say you're not creative. You can use that creativity or that sort of sense of inquiry in everything you do. You know so. I'm always saying you know that's. My mission is to tell children they're creative and they're responsible for this wonderful gift that we all get.

Speaker 1: 20:42

Yeah, wow, and I don't know why, but my mind's suddenly gone back to that conversation you had with your mother after you'd gone and found out, because it struck me that, her not acknowledging that you were her birth daughter, she was excluding part of herself, wasn't she? I?

Speaker 2: 21:01

think so yes.

Speaker 1: 21:03

And then you came back to tell her what you'd found out, and that sounds to me like you invited her to include that part of herself again as well as including you. Do you feel it had that effect on her?

Speaker 2: 21:16

I love that interpretation of it. That's very loving. Yes, I think the tragedy for my mother is that she couldn't, that she didn't feel free, and that's partly a product of her time and being such a progressive. Having a PhD in the 50s, that was an enormous accomplishment. But I think she was born in the 20s and she was always quite the feminist. But she also didn't accept or feel safe enough in the world to really truly be herself and I think that is a wonderful way of expressing it. I think in my book I see it more as a cautionary tale of what happens when you have a secret in your life. I mean, you're always allowed privacy, everyone you know, you don't have to tell things about yourself, but a secret is different. It's usually about somebody else that might be. That's keeping them from something. That's keeping them from something and I think that willingness to sort of sell yourself for that secret or that safety is extremely damaging and I always felt that the secret sort of became a kind of in the book.

Speaker 2: 22:54

I call it a personal Frankenstein. It's very destructive and you are almost controlled by it. You're always having to consult the secret before you make some sort of move and I think in terms of personal freedom that's very limiting.

Speaker 1: 23:15

Yeah, I'm sure it must be, I'm sure it must be, I'm sure it must be. But very courageous for you to go and do that, find out that information, and then come back and talk to her about it Really courageous. And then, of course, she didn't have the burden anymore of not telling you, because you knew.

Speaker 2: 23:32

Right, right. But I think she was frightened that I wanted to tell my siblings. She didn't want me to tell my siblings and finally I said well, you have to tell my stepfather.

Speaker 2: 23:43

I mean you just have to. And she was reluctant but did, and it was very hard on her. When I got married, she did not want me to include my father's family, my biological father's family, in my marriage. She wanted me to have two weddings and I said no, it's enough, I'm not going to pretend. And she was actually not going to come to my wedding until a week before.

Speaker 1: 24:21

I think she was hoping I would fold and I just said I love you, Can't do this you know, I would have thought that by then she should have realized what kind of person she was dealing with in you.

Speaker 2: 24:33

Well, I think she was always hopeful.

Speaker 1: 24:37

So did you have three families at your wedding.

Speaker 2: 24:39

You know the foster family I wish I, you know, I didn't have the foster family at that point.

Speaker 2: 24:46

I didn't really connect with them until I was three, until my daughter was three and a half right and then I went and and spent time in Sweden and that was really wonderful because I could be with my foster family and see my daughter, who was the same age that when I left, and I could sort of get bearings of. You know, they're very talkative and I was a little Swedish girl. I was a mile-a-minute Swedish girl. Unfortunately my Swedish mother had died so I never got to see her again. And then when my daughter was 10, we spent about six weeks in Scandinavia, four weeks in Sweden and two weeks traveling, and there I lived very close to my foster brother, the one that was very close to me, and he told me a lot of stories that I didn't know.

Speaker 1: 25:41

Great, how great. And so you got to meet your actual bio dad.

Speaker 2: 25:50

I did and in this strange way that my mother operated, she said to me when I was in 10th grade so I had three years left of high school she said, oh, I think you should go away to school, I think you should go to boarding school. And I said, oh, I can go to this wonderful music boarding school. She said, no, no, no, no, you have to go to Philadelphia because I have friends there and this family will look in on you. So I went to the boarding school and then, from the next year, for 11th grade, she happened to have a job in Germany and I lived in Germany with the family. I went to a German school and learned German.

Speaker 2: 26:29

So I came back to this boarding school in 12th grade and she said actually, this family that I told you about would like you to live with them for a year and it will save lots of money, et cetera, et cetera. So I lived there a year, only to find out much later that it was my biological father's family that I had lived with for a year without knowing it, and I would call my mother up and I'd say you know, the parents seem to be fighting an awful lot. Well, of course the mother knew that I was his biological child and she had agreed to this, but after about six months it became very tense between them. Honestly, honestly, exactly, honestly. Are you kidding? You could not write this, could you Well?

Speaker 2: 27:25

I did write it.

Speaker 1: 27:26

Yeah, but you know what I mean. But you couldn't make it up. You couldn't make it up.

Speaker 2: 27:39

This was obviously some sort of inclusion training you were being put through that you didn't remember having ordered up. Well, you know, my birth was very difficult for that family because he did have a lot of children and the issues of how I was included has been very difficult for them. The older ones were sort of okay with it, the younger ones were fine, but in that family I always knew that I was the illegitimate child, which is a very strange thing to be, because there are all these sort of social. I mean, what does it mean to be an illegitimate child? It means nothing. It just means you had birth parents that weren't married. It's not, but to other people it may have a lot. Yeah, you know, and I think when you are I love the euphemisms for being illegitimate it's born on the other side of the blanket. Yes, yes, Okay, and I just you know, and the history of illegitimacy, particularly in England, with you know the usurpers and the, you know it just is, and I feel very close to my siblings that I grew up with.

Speaker 2: 29:00

I feel less close with the siblings that I'm biologically connected to but didn't grow up with. And that is also an interesting thing about how do you claim lineage and I think that being brought up in a family sort of synthesizes a lot of the thinking, maybe some of the values, and it doesn't mean that all the children are the same or would even have the same values, but there is a chance of it having. And certainly my father's family was a lot more wealthy than my mother's family. My mother's family was wealthy in intellectual endeavors. That was their wealth and their sort of snobbism. And my biological family, although he was a world-class scientist and worked all over, did a lot of research all over the world. They had a lot of money, so there was a lot more class stuff going on that I never understood. I was like going that's really weird, yeah, wow.

Speaker 1: 30:10

Well, I think it's great how you've actually navigated and integrated it all. Yes, there's a question I was really thinking about asking you and I was thinking about this this morning. You're creating this beautiful music and you've had this whole really interesting, very challenging life. How do you feel the nature of your music has been influenced by this path that you have traveled and are traveling?

Speaker 2: 30:41

Oh, 100% influenced. And again, I am a composer that really composes about my life, where I am now. After those 10 years of writing about the trauma, I felt a really interesting shift. Of writing about the trauma I felt a really interesting shift and I became interested in connecting to things that were outside of me, like the earth or spirituality or those bigger things, and I was challenged particularly by spirituality. I had been brought up in a Unitarian household, first as an Episcopalian and then as a Unitarian, and just to think of God, you know God felt like so patriarchal to me and this idea that somebody was out there sort of directing your life didn't make a lot of sense to me. So I really had to emotionally go back and redeem those words like spirituality or connection to God or connection. And I came to a place where God could be anything. It could be Allah, it could be God, it could be Jehovah, it could be the Great Mother, it could be the Earth, and I startedhovah. It could be the Great Mother, it could be the earth. And I started writing a lot of music about that connection. I really started to explore it and I think it was as I started to resolve trauma in my life, my heart was more open to things that were outside and I became really interested in connecting to them. So I started.

Speaker 2: 32:22

The piece that I wrote for the violinist, hilary Hahn, is the Blue Curve of the Earth, and it's about the earth seen from the moon and that beautiful blue curve and our love of the earth. I have a piece called Theight of Angels for String Quartet and it's about that. The angels, according to Jewish and Christian tradition, are so full of joy of being in the presence of God that they dance all the time. They just never stop dancing. And I, you know, that was you know what would it be like to allow yourself to have that kind of joy, particularly from some of the darkness? And when I compose, I'm writing a narrative, but I'm thinking about that joy and that movement as I compose the piece. I'm allowing myself to have that kind of experience of wondering and opening myself up to those ideas. So I would say, for the next 20 years, I have a piece for orchestra called Celestial Turnings. I mean, I just was constantly writing about that and now in this you know, fifth or sixth decade, I am finding that I'm writing about things that are a lot more personal. I have a CD recording coming out in July.

Speaker 2: 33:56

The pieces are called oh, one of them is called Barefoot and it's about, you know, it was winter and I just wanted to go out and be barefoot in the garden and feel the dirt, you know, that warm earth under my feet. And then I was thinking of Moses coming up to the burning bush and God says, take your shoes off to the burning bush. And God says take your shoes off, that idea of being in the divine present and having to bear, you know, really bear, the soles of your feet. So that's called barefoot. Another piece is called hush and it's about hushing your child, comforting your child. You know those, you know, hush, darling, oh, let me comfort you.

Speaker 2: 34:43

So they're much more personal. Yes, and quieter, quieter pieces. I think that are tender. I just finished a piece for piano called Bending Light. I was just thinking about it what, what if you could actually put your hand on light and you could bend it? And then I think of bending music, or you know bending the sound, or you know bending your life, or maybe flexibility, I don't know things like that well, that sounds to me like a synthesis of the personal and the spiritual, actually, I think so.

Speaker 1: 35:19

That's how it really sounds and I love how, in that whole cycle that you've described in your life, how each thing, when fully embraced, then gave rise to the next thing.

Speaker 2: 35:33

Yes, because it's about curiosity.

Speaker 1: 35:36

Yeah, yes, because it's about curiosity?

Speaker 2: 35:39

Yeah, it's sort of. I remember years and years ago I went to a personal growth workshop and I had just divorced from my daughter's father and I was just a mess and I remember standing up and talking about all this anger and frustration and now I've done it, I've moved on, and he said to me, he said great.

Speaker 1: 36:07

Now what yeah?

Speaker 2: 36:08

And part of me said I wanted you to sympathize with my victimhood. And you're asking me now what? But I think that's you know when I got over myself. It took me a while to get over myself. In that situation, I think we've all been in exactly that situation?

Speaker 1: 36:27

Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2: 36:28

I mean like, what about me? Why?

Speaker 1: 36:31

aren't you validating me.

Speaker 2: 36:33

Yes, what about my pain? You didn't hear me, but that is the mature question Now what? And it's not that we're going to deny what has happened, but we know that as we greet that pain and that difficulty, we're also moving forward through it to the next thing, which is the now what? Yeah, and that is the title of my book Let your Heart Be Broken, that idea that we all have our heart broken, but that accepting that brokenheartedness, that loving it, being compassionate with it, allows us to find that, for me, in my imagination, that wonderful, rich, fertile earth that is in that brokenheartedness At the bottom of your heart that is shattered, there is this beautiful earth for a new life to begin. And that is not about going out and looking for it, because it's going to happen anyway, yes, but it is about valuing the experience, allowing yourself to grieve the experience, move through the experience and not bury it in your backyard.

Speaker 1: 37:59

Lovely. I love it, and also the openness, the curiosity and the openness and the adventurousness. I do think you're adventurous in your story as well. You're not sort of sitting there going, oh, I don't know. You're like ah, I know, I'll just cross the ocean to find out who my real parents are.

Speaker 2: 38:23

Now I do want to have a caveat. I do the victimhood very well, but I limit it. It's always like, okay, you really want five minutes of this, go to town and then it's enough. So I do think there is a lot of discipline in joy and in finding a new direction, and there's also, you know, doing the work to heal yourself, and it comes in many forms. It's not only the talk therapy Doing the work to heal yourself and it comes in many forms. It's not only the talk therapy.

Speaker 2: 39:00

I found journal writing extremely important and one of my stepdaughters recently wrote to me and she's been reading my memoir and she said I just got a journal and I thought, oh, she said I want to know about myself and I thought I couldn't be happier with that response. It wasn't about me, as she's reading the book, it's about her, and I think that's also part of the artistic inclusion no-transcript I give myself out there, but I don't really want you to know me. I want you to know you, I want it to resonate in you so that you know or you're curious about you more. That would be the ultimate feedback for me, that would be the best scenario.

Speaker 1: 40:05

Yeah, wonderful yes. So you're giving out something with the intention that it's going to serve the listener's potential, that they're going to know.

Speaker 2: 40:15

Whatever it is, it's not them trying to figure out what me. It's just about them receiving and hearing themselves.

Speaker 1: 40:26

Yeah, beautiful. Well, what's more inclusive than that? Yeah, yes, very inclusive, it is.

Speaker 2: 40:37

But it is I think it really is to the heart of the artistic endeavor. I think sometimes fame and fortune covers that up and sort of covers it up. But I do think when Bach was writing music he wrote in the bottom to the greater glory of God. That's who we wanted to talk to. He wasn't thinking about an audience. I don't think Mozart had this sense. Oh, I'm becoming a great composer, I have to write great music. He was thinking of the people he was relating to and that is really always about inclusion.

Speaker 1: 41:19

Yeah, I love it. Very inspiring and very different, very, very different story. And I think, with this whole thing of music, I think we've all had that experience where the music holds us or moves us or enters us or inspires us or nourishes us or challenges us. We've all had experiences of being profoundly affected by music and it's so easy now to get hold of music and just play it wherever you want and we don't necessarily know anything about what's behind the curtain. You know the person who created the music, what's their process, what's their life.

Speaker 1: 42:05

What's their intention? We have no idea. So it's lovely hearing all of this and it all makes perfect sense to me in the way you describe it. I love how you kind of mentioned earlier on this thing about music being a higher art form, that a different kind of creature, not a normal human being, can create this music, and it strikes me that the way you've engaged with it and the way you engage with it is much more of a contribution in many ways, because it is including all of being human rather than making it about being some sort of perfect offering which is not personal Right.

Speaker 2: 42:48

And to me. You know it's so interesting and we were talking about words and how words define. You know that I was adopted and that word defined me when in reality it didn't really have much to do with me, but it was the word that either I labeled myself with or others labeled me with, and I think in music, or let's see if I can think I was thinking of this. Now I've forgotten it. I'll have to get back to it.

Speaker 1: 43:32

Words like adopted, which is supposed to mean something, but it's not really a notion.

Speaker 2: 43:38

Right. And I think when you look at the word art form, we associate that art form with something that is quite different than folk music or rock and roll or popular music, and I think the arts, and they call it the high arts, which always makes me laugh. But when you look, oh, I remember what I was going to talk. So when you look at Beethoven, I'll take Beethoven, and I wrote about this for Ms Magazine years ago. When you look at Beethoven and I love Beethoven when you look at him and use the words universal music he is writing a universal, it appeals to everyone. And you look at the way he ends pieces, for instance. It's usually with a lot of fanfare, it's usually very loud and there are these chords and it's the repeated chord dum, dum, da-da-dum.

Speaker 2: 44:41

Now change the words and look at him as a man who is living at that time white, christian, upper class, not a worker and you might then see the ending of his pieces as more like an orgasm. Perhaps you don't have to believe that that, but let's say hypothetically that's bum, bum, bum, bum. It is talking about his physical energy, yeah, and? But that totally opens the question then, since we're not talking about universal music and I don't have to write that way to be universal, but it is personal. Then how is my energy? What does my energy speak to? And that, for me, years ago, was so defining because it became like, oh, what's me Rather than what's that? And how do I fit into that? And I love Beethoven I think he was an irritable, grumpy guy a lot of the time who wrote exquisitely beautiful music. But now I can just be me and look at my energy, look at myself as a woman, as a mother, as a person who's living right now, yes, and writing about my time. So those words completely changed the context.

Speaker 1: 46:19

Yes, yeah, yeah. That reframing which allowed me to then come through as you rather than you coming through as someone who's trying to be like Beethoven.

Speaker 2: 46:29

Right, exactly, I would be a very poor second Beethoven really poor.

Speaker 1: 46:34

We don't need another Beethoven, we've already got one.

Speaker 2: 46:37

Yes, yes, and he's lovely.

Speaker 1: 46:39

Yeah, exactly, yeah, brilliant. I mean honestly, I could talk to you for ages.

Speaker 1: 46:45

It's just so lovely, thank you, I'm going to kind of switch the direction slightly now and go a little bit more global sort of level. There are a lot of challenges in the world at the moment I think we can all agree and everyone's got their own ideas about what is happening, what isn't happening, what should happen, what has happened, what's going to happen. Everyone's got their own ideas and against that backdrop, there are a lot of people in leadership positions of all kinds community leaders, business leaders, spiritual leaders and people who just want to be great leaders in their own lives and I like to think most of those people are trying to be helpful. They want to be part of the solution. I like to think and some of those people are listening to us right now and listening to this whole conversation we've been having about inclusion and all these amazing ways of thinking about inclusion and expressing inclusion that you've been talking about Is there something you'd like to say to those leaders in relation to some of what we've been talking about today?

Speaker 2: 48:01

Well, it is quite the time we're living in, isn't it? You know, sometimes I feel that artists and thinkers and writers and teachers feel that what they're doing is so small compared to the needs that are being presented now People dying, people starving, people being bombed, and I think it's hard to maintain the faith of your work and that small gestures over time have big consequences. I am thinking of Middlemarch, and at the end of it she talks about how the faith of the small parents and the small people are really what holds up society, society. And I think, you know, there is always the urge for artists to write big pieces for peace and for stability, and they and we do. But I also think that any time you act out your beliefs for inclusion or peace or love, that it does have a ripple effect.

Speaker 2: 49:37

Now, of course, I think there is a sense like, oh, I should stop being a composer and be an activist, and that is a really hard thing to negotiate because the needs of the people are so great. But I also do think that when you are standing in your field with love and with inclusion and with that, you are also supporting young people, because they need to be indoctrinated in these. You know that creativity is your gift, that it is I'm teaching you in a loving way, in a respectful way, and you integrate that into your life and live that as well. So it is a very hard path. I think you have to kind of stick to your guns and stake out what you can speak about.

Speaker 2: 50:42

I speak about not only the love of my field but the support of women and how they have also suffered through the millennia and are continuing to speak out and be actualized and how to support them. So I'm always looking to see what part of my garden can I till for the benefit of others. And it's sometimes very hard to stick to your gifts and to believe that, as I do, that I was given gifts, I was given experiences. This is how I am expressing them and that is enough. It's a hard thing to say that you're enough because it's so painful.

Speaker 1: 51:41

I think that's very well said, beautifully said, and I've been thinking a lot along those lines, you know, particularly during the COVID years, particularly because there were a lot of people kind of suffering in all sorts of ways during that time and I often thought, surely I'm not doing enough, surely I'm not doing enough, and kept coming back to who do I think I am, that I'm supposed to be doing something different from what I'm doing from what I can do, you know Well, and the advocacy of podcasts.

Speaker 2: 52:17

I have to say I am just so grateful to all of you out there who have taken it on their own initiative to create contact about something that they love, and I think that is just wonderful and you do what I do to your constituents and you try to get the word out there.

Speaker 1: 52:40

Absolutely right, and I'm quite lucky because on my hosting service I can look and see which countries people are listening to the podcast, and there are people listening to this podcast in all of the countries that are talked about on the news and not necessarily very many of them, but some of them are listening to these conversations and I'm thinking how amazing is that? But when you start doing something, you don't necessarily know it can have any effect on anybody in any way exactly. You just start and then you hope so. I'm not going to keep talking because I don't want to dilute what you said, which I thought was so beautifully said. Thank you very, very much. So, tina. Um, if people want to you, where would you like them to go?

Speaker 2: 53:28

Well, first of all, hold on. I'm just going to put my Do Not Disturb on again. I'm Tina Davidson, so it's tinadavidsoncom. You can always write me, just get on the internet. There are ways of getting to me on the website. I'm on Facebook, instagram and you can buy my book on Amazon, and then you have some links. You can go on your favorite streaming service, whatever that is Apple Music, amazon or Spotify or I don't know all the ones. Soundcloud, I think, was another one. Yes, but your streaming services have my music. Just search under Tina Davidson, composer, and then SoundCloud is a special. You just go soundcloudcom and then look for my music and then those are free. I don't think you download them, but you can listen to that site as well.

Speaker 1: 54:35

Fantastic, so plenty of places where people can go. Yes, so we're going to wind up soon. Is there anything about inclusion which, if you don't say it in a couple of days, you're going to kick yourself because you'll?

Speaker 2: 54:53

think, oh, that one. Well, I'll tell you I can. Um, I was asked by a podcaster actually I think he was in new zealand or australia to come up for 10 things that I learned as a composer and artist. And it's funny because for composers, I rewrote the list and I have like 20 things that I learned. But my first one is trust and value your own creativity. You know just, this takes time to be patient, but trust and value that Feed your mind, body and soul. You are what you eat, so read, travel, have experience that will be channeled into your work. Eat, pray, love. Life is the resource. That was another one. Oh, I like this one.

Speaker 2: 55:44

When blocked, take a nap, so that trusting of your brain to help you figure out your brain is working. So a lot of times, when you stop thinking about it, your brain is like trying to put information together. Uh, share your joy, and music is my joy. Uh, share your joy. Communicate your love of work to others. Share rather than teach, and I think that's so important. I think we a lot of times have hierarchies that we don't even realize we're involved in. Of course, I know more about music than perhaps somebody else does. Uh, who's never music, but I want to share it rather than I want to infect you. You know I want to spread, you know, my virus, which is love of music. So teaching implies hierarchy. Sharing is between equals.

Speaker 1: 56:45

I love it. Thank you so much. Well, another episode where people could very usefully listen to it more than once, because there are so many beautiful nuggets and we've talked about a lot today. Actually, has there been a favorite part of this conversation for you today, tina?

Speaker 2: 57:05

I think talking to someone in Wales is just so cool. I'm just so happy. It just feels so connected across countries and that means so much to me.

Speaker 1: 57:21

Yeah, me too, actually. That's one of the beautiful things, and just being able to resonate with somebody. Yes, we have completely different paths to where we are in this particular moment, and yet there are so many things that we can both resonate on. Yes, I think that is a great thing for humanity. At the moment, we can always find really important vital aspects of being human that we can resonate on together.

Speaker 2: 57:48

Right and you know, america doesn't have the best reputation, particularly with our upcoming elections and to know that there's some of us who don't feel that, we would feel great relief in the person the president who is continuing, who is elected now and are fighting our own battle every day against misinformation. So we're fighting the good fight there's. There are quite a lot of us who are um, so to know that.

Speaker 1: 58:34

Strange, strange, strange times.

Speaker 2: 58:37

Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1: 58:38

Yes, In 50 years time we'll laugh about it.

Speaker 2: 58:43

I am hopeful, but we have to get through this first.

Speaker 1: 58:47

We have to get through this. We will see Well, tina. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. I look forward to airing this episode and I'm sure it will be a great nourishment to people the world over. So thank you so much and have a beautiful day.

Speaker 2: 59:01

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1: 59:11

Thank you for listening to Truth and Transcendenceence and thank you for supporting the show by rating, reviewing, subscribing, buying me a coffee and telling a friend. If you'd like to know more about my work, you can find out about mentoring, workshops and energy treatments on beingspaceworld. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time.