Stephanie M. Neumann 00:00
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists, sponsored by a grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Stephanie M. Neumann, co-producer and audio engineer of For Good Measure, filling in as host for this episode. We continue today interviewing artistic executive director of Ensemble for These Times, and For Good Measure host and producer, Nanette McGuinness [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]. You're the cofounder and artistic executive director of the award winning contemporary chamber music group Ensemble for These Times. Can you talk about E4TT and how the group came to be?
Nanette McGuinness 00:50
Honestly, I have to say I backed into it. My then pianist Kristin Pankonin, who has since passed away of cancer, was also a pianist for David Garner, the composer who is my co-founder for the group. And she was recording some of his music at Skywalker and introduced us to each other. She thought he would like my singing, and that I would like his music. And she was right, you know. So she introduced us and he threw some scores at me. And the ones that really interested me the most were some settings of Holocaust poet, survivor, Mascha Kaléko. And so we talked about his writing some music for me, and, you know, he was like, well, we need to form a group, that's how we get funding. And I was like, oh gosh. I was busy singing opera, and I was like, oh, this is going to take a lot of work. And so I hesitated for a while, because I was, you know, enjoying singing and things were going nicely. But I got hooked by those Kaléko poems, because it's very powerful poetry and evocative and moving and direct. And so, you know, I guess, one day I said to him, Okay, fine. And we formed a group, which we called at that point, the Jewish Music & Poetry Project, because it was, it didn't make sense to call it the Kaléko Project, and we didn't want to call it, the Holocaust Project, because that's, it didn't feel right, that felt too hard, although that's what we ended up doing. And we got a grant. And then we got a fiscal sponsor. And we were off and running. So at that point, we had the Kaléko song cycle, and then there were more we wanted to add to it. And as I was researching that, I found more great poetry by women Holocaust survivors. And so after we did Chanson für Morgen, which is what that one was, what the Kaléko cycle was called, we decided to expand the project to a four-song cycle project of, of music, new music to poetry by women Holocaust survivors. And I'm not sure how we came up with four, it may have been just the those four poets spoke to David and me the most. And so that became our first recording, Surviving: Women's Words. So then we toured the Kaléko cycle and the Jueddische Gemeinde to Berlin, and then to Hungary. I can talk about that more in a, in a minute. And along the way, we were also doing music by women composers, and we realized we wanted to rebrand so that what we were called represented better what we were doing. So, and it took a year or two of soul searching and working with a fabulous arts consultant to figure out what we wanted to be called, but we rebranded as Ensemble for These Times, the title of which came from In Dieser Zeit, one of the Kaléko poems that David had set. And gradually E4TT took over my life and my singing, much as I'd suspected it might when I hesitated to form the group back in 2006 and seven, it finally did in 2007, so...
Stephanie M. Neumann 04:23
From there, there's been so many, so many things you've done and accomplished with E4TT.
Nanette McGuinness 04:28
Thank you.
Stephanie M. Neumann 04:30
Yeah, and still, still more exciting projects and -
Nanette McGuinness 04:33
Much to do, much to do.
Stephanie M. Neumann 04:34
Much to do, yeah. Do you have a backlog of things you'd like to do?
Nanette McGuinness 04:38
Yeah I do, I do.
Stephanie M. Neumann 04:41
E4TT's mission has been to give voice to unheard and underrepresented creators, such as exiled, oppressed, BIPOC, LGBTQI+, women creators... Will you talk about some of the projects that E4TT has curated that support this mission, such as some of your award winning albums, your Music by Women and Nonbinary Composers concerts, and the Call for Scores?
Nanette McGuinness 05:10
That is a huge question. So we've talked a bit about Surviving: Women's Words, the initial project, and that when, like all of them, meddled in the global music awards. When we were in Europe, we performed in Berlin, and I think I had met the cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, um, he wanted, he was interested in our doing performances of music of the Kaléko cycle because Kaléko was Austro-Hungarian, so she belonged to a larger area than just Berlin. And he suggested that I look into music by Hungarian composers of the Holocaust. And I thought that was a really great idea. The library there, with the introduction from the, from the embassy, opened up their archives to me, which was so generous, and also I did a lot of research. I had to learn, or at least study, Hungarian, because I ended up seeing some songs I wanted to do. But I'd always wanted to study it, partly for the challenge, because it's considered one of the harder languages around, Hungarian and Finnish are considered very hard because they're constructed differently. But also I have Hungarian ancestry, so it had always been kind of on my bucket list of languages I wanted to dive into. And that became the project and then the CD, The Hungarians. It was originally going to happen, I think, in 2013, but that was when there was the government shutdown. So it got postponed to 2014, which was great, it gave me more time to work on my Hungarian. And that CD had one Hungarian composer who had survived and come over to the US and was important in film music, Miklós Rózsa, and then three other composers who had perished. That was The Hungarians. And then the next CD, Once/Memory/Night: Paul Celan. Actually a composer had suggested Paul Celan, Jared Redmond, he was looking at Celan's poetry, and I had kept bumping into Celan's poetry when we were doing Surviving: Women's Words. He's a fabulous poet who made up words, basically, which you can kind of do in German anyway, but he did it kind of in spades. And, obviously it wasn't going to work to include him in Surviving: Women's Words, because those were women poets, so when Jared said, you know, I've been looking at Celan, I jumped at it. And then we built the project around that. So as we were developing the project, there was some amazing poems by his contemporaries, like Czesław Miłosz, and local composer, Stephen Eddins, was very interested in setting one of those. And we were honored to have his son come and read the poem at the premiere. That was really cool, and that became that recording, and then The Guernica Project. So this is another one where a composer suggested the topic of Guernica, that was interesting him. And I guess I like collaborating with composers, no surprise. And it had been coming up during the prior albums as an important World War II topic that wasn't as well discussed as the Holocaust aspects. And we'd had several Spanish composers in our Call for Scores, because we did a Call for Scores as part of the rebranding, and so we developed this project. There was Mercedes Zavala and Mario Carro. And one of the composers in the Call for Scores, Jeffrey Hoover, who has passed away, sadly before the CD came out, was also a painter, and was interested in writing for us, and we thought his kind of painter-and-composer sensibility matched this project really well, because The Guernica Project was both talking about the carpet bombing in Spain, but it was also talking about Picasso's response. So that's how that project came about, those are our existing CDs. When I was performing in Europe, I took a side trip to Spain, visited some museums, and I went to Basque country because we were planning to do The Guernica Project. So I visited the Museo de la Paz in Gernika-Lumo, and they were so nice they let us use a whole bunch of historical slides at the premiere of Hoover's piece for us. That was really great, and then I was able to coach the Basque pronunciation with someone from the local Basque group. And then for the premiere, she brought over the Zazpiak Bat Dancers to do a Basque honor dance to start the project. So it really developed into something beautiful.
Stephanie M. Neumann 10:35
Yeah, that's wonderful.
Nanette McGuinness 10:37
You asked also, I think about the Call for Scores. The Call for Scores was part of our rebranding, because we'd been doing things by living composers, especially David Garner, since he was the co-founder of the group, but we wanted to expand our network of composers that we knew, so that we weren't just asking the people we knew but looking at more. And, we drowned. It was enthusiastically responded to, we got 275+ scores by 200 composers, it was like, and there was some really good stuff in there. So we ended up building a three-year series of the works by those composers, and we got to know a number of very good composers, many of whom, over time, we've had write for us including Jeffrey Hoover. And as we were getting to the end, towards the end of that series, we'd already been doing music by women composers and focusing there, and we'd been focusing also on women poets, women artists, musicians. And we wanted to introduce more of women composers to our audiences, it became clear that those voices were not being heard as well, that it was a tougher hill to climb, if you will, to gain recognition. And so we developed this idea of an annual concert of music by living, mostly living, but modern women composers. And the first concert, it kind of was a segue, the first concert that was part, sort of, of that series, was also part of the Call for Score, so it was, it had both. And we wanted it, in part because of the way it grew out of the Call for Scores, but also in general, to be kind of a sampler concert, to introduce people to a lot of voices. So that has deliberately stayed something where the pieces, instead of one 20 minute piece, we'll have usually ten or twelve, 3-8 minute pieces, occasionally your 10 or 12 minute piece. And we'll go back to composers we like or will commission as part of that. But it's supposed to be a sampler to introduce the Bay Area, and our remote audiences, to those voices. Yeah, so that's, that's how that grew out, and then a few years ago, I started seeing more music by nonbinary composers being clearly labeled that way, because more recognition was coming. And it felt important to include that, so we did. And so now I think the series is up to five or six, I don't know something like that, and it's always really popular, people like it, they appreciate it. Our surveys tell us that, that that people are enjoying them as well as their response. So yes.
Stephanie M. Neumann 13:49
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Always a very exciting concert to, to watch from afar. For now, but when I was there, too, so..
Nanette McGuinness 13:50
Yeah.
Stephanie M. Neumann 13:55
To see all of the composers coming through, giving that, yeah, giving that voice is great.
Nanette McGuinness 14:08
Yeah, and we both developed an annual commissions concert, you know, because when we figured out what our mission was going to be beyond women Holocaust poets and beyond bringing light on exiled composers, we were interested and willing to go back to the start of the 20th century or the turn of the, you know, like 1899, around there, but because we were focusing on living composers and unheard voices, we really wanted to start from then forward. And so that's what we've done.
Stephanie M. Neumann 14:40
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Nanette McGuinness, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button, and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax deductible donation, please visit us at www.e4tt.org. This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times and designed by Brennan Stokes, with co-producer and audio engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts, and tune in next week "for good measure" [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS].