Ursula Kwong-Brown - Part 5

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 126: Ursula Kwong-Brown - Part 5

Looking for a way to listen to diverse creators and to support equity in the arts? Tune in weekly to For Good Measure!

In this week’s episode, we talk to Ursula Kwong-Brown about playing chamber music, her influences and mentors, and the importance of female role models. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Ursula Kwong-Brown, check her out here: https://www.ursulakwongbrown.com/. This episode was originally recorded in February 2024.

This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano),  as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/15653027

Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Hannah Chen, Addy Geenen, Yoyo Hung-Yu Lin

Curious to hear music by Luna Composition Lab alums? Check out E4TT's annual concert of music by women and non-binary composers, "Midnight Serenades," on January 25.

Chapters

• 0:34 In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Ursula Kwong-Brown, who we spoke to in February 2024.
• 0:42 You're currently writing a piece for us for our season opener in the fall. And it's still in the early stages. But you're obviously thinking about it and kind of conceptualizing it. Do you have anything you'd like to tell folks about this piece that...
• 2:11 Do you have a favorite Beethoven piano trio? They're all so great, but...
• 4:27 ...who are your major influences as a composer, or mentors? What are you currently listening to? What did you listen to? And it's clear that with your connection with color, that the color is you know, Fauré and Debussy, and those would be important.
• 6:23 Are there any mentors you can think of who've been important in your career?

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  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 Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble For These Times. In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Ursula Kwong-Brown, who we spoke to in February 2024. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

Nanette McGuinness  00:30
You're currently writing a piece for us for our season opener in the fall. And it's still in the early stages. But you're obviously thinking about it and kind of conceptualizing it. Do you have anything you'd like to tell folks about this piece that you're dreaming up for us?

Ursula Kwong-Brown  00:46
Well, right now, it's acoustic, but electronically inspired. I feel like I've been inspired by like different electronics processing, but sort of coming full circle and putting it back. Yeah, into sort of imitative gestures and the piano and like resonance ideas in the cello, and again, in the piano. I guess, I guess I'm also just inspired by you know, I used to play piano trios when I was a kid, going to like Kinhaven Music Festival as a kid, and piano, and so I, you know, I am somewhat influenced by like the Beethoven. I just, you can't help but when you're writing something like this, like a piano trio, remembering what it's like to play them. So a combination of that which is fully acoustic and, yeah, and feeling inspired by these electronic ideas that I want to reintegrate.

Nanette McGuinness  01:47
It sounds really fascinating. And I neglected to mention that it is a piano trio as you were saying, so I can't wait to see what you do with these ideas because they do sound very cool. Do you have a favorite Beethoven piano trio? They're all so great.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  02:03
They're all so wonderful. I think my very favorite are there actually sort of the violin and piano things like the Spring Sonata and those just still can like move me to tears. Like the Anne- Sophie Mutter.

Nanette McGuinness  02:23
I don't know the violin-piano rep as well as I know the piano trios, just because I encountered them in grad school, if so.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  02:30
Did you? Were you analyzing them or?

Nanette McGuinness  02:32
One of my classes was on manuscript studies, that was with Joseph Kerman, as I recall, and I can't remember if the class was looking at it, or if I was looking at the Ghost Trio. The evolution of that one. Yeah. But yeah. So after I listened to that, that inspired me to go listen to like Archduke and other trios, and it's a specific field of musicalogical study, one that isn't what I was really drawn to, but was still really interesting, where you're looking at the paper and the ink and the different versions and how a piece evolved and how a composer came up with their quote unquote, final version, or their multiple versions along the way. And it's, it's very finicky and minute. And yet, at the same time, it's really important because that's how we wind up with the version that we have. And how do we know it's the version. It tackles a lot of very interesting questions. If that's a direction that your mind is wanting to go. That subfield is called sketch studies, basically. Yeah. And Joseph Kerman was one of the big names in that field. So I think he literally wrote the book about it, as I recall. So. So yeah, so that's where I hit the Ghost Trio and then was inspired.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  03:59
When I talk about being inspired by composers, I feel like I generally talk about like Fauré or like Debussy, and not so much like Beethoven. It just comes from playing Beethoven.

Nanette McGuinness  04:11
Yeah, yeah, I get that. That leads to the next thing I was going to ask you, who are your major influences as a composer, or mentors? What are you currently listening to? What did you listen to? And it's clear that with your connection with color, that the color is you know, Fauré and Debussy, and those would be important.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  04:33
Yeah, I think my earliest influences were definitely, was Chopin the pianist. Yeah. But then you know, as I got a little bit older, like Fauré and Debussy, and their, their, you know, evocative use of harmony. These days, I've been listening to a lot of women artists who do sort of electronic-y things. So one is Suzanne Ciani. She's super cool. Um, C-I-A-N-I. Suzanne Ciani. So she does all this stuff with a buchla synthesizer. She's in her seventies now. But she's just been rediscovered in the last, I don't know 10 years and now she has these like sold out performances and warehouses in Brooklyn and stuff. She's amazing. She also did a lot of the early Coca-Cola ads like like all those, those like classic sounds of Coca-Cola, yeah, so that was her too. So she does, I listened to a lot of her. Someone named Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith I really enjoy. She's a composer, who also does stuff with buchla synthesizers, and also vocals. And this other artists, Julianna Barwick. I just saw her a couple of weeks ago here in LA, and she does a lot with like looping pedals and harmonizers. She sings and it made me really want to get into harmonizers, I started exploring, like singing and harmonizing, like, yeah, I guess women, women electronic artists is my, is my current inspiration.

Nanette McGuinness  06:11
Are there any mentors you can think of who've been important in your career.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  06:15
Definitely Kaija Saariaho. She, I first met her as part of a workshop I did at Carnegie Hall on like, string writing, like, interesting uses of string writing. And she really inspired me to explore different colors, like a lot of like, sul tasto, sul ponticello, like playing you know, close to the fingerboard, or to the bridge and like harmonic trills, and just like all the rich kind of color that in some ways, you know, string players have been doing naturally for years without it being fully notated. But now like as composers, you can ask them do it very specifically. And I love it. I love it. It's such a rich, incredibly rich world. Who else? I feel like in terms of teachers, she's been my, my main main source of inspiration. I mean, you know, the, the, I feel like mostly, it's just been encouragement that I, that I needed through the years. My first piano teacher is the one who at first, like formally asked me to compose, and she had all of her students compose. And that's really what got me going, you know, she just say, okay, write. You know, I was like, seven, like, write 16 measures for next week. And I would, you know, write. And then that's sort of what got me going.

Nanette McGuinness  07:32
That's very special and wonderful. A lot of teachers are now in the last generation incorporating composition, and improvisation into their lessons, which is really cool. And it speaks to some students in ways that just sitting down and, you know, playing little exercises, does not. Organ was my early instrument. And I didn't have that, but I was writing pieces anyway, I was writing these little pieces from pretty early on.

Ursula Kwong-Brown  08:14
When I was teaching piano to like, a little a six year old boy, I was so surprised at how inventive he was, you know, I'd asked him to write a piece and, you know, he'd be like, "and then the helicopter came down" and, and they'd be like, you know, did it all had musical ideas. I was like, this is great.

Nanette McGuinness  08:30
That is, that's fabulous. I wonder what that kid will end up doing, you know, with this.

Nanette McGuinness  08:34
[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Ursula Kwong-Brown, 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 about 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 design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to 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]