5.07 | 05.21.22
Headphones on for this episode!
For most people, nightmares produce insomnia, exhaustion, and unease. For Graham Gordon Ramsay, a spate of severe nightmares in April 2020 developed into something more lasting and meaningful: a five-movement, 18-minute musical work for organ or string ensemble called "Introspections." To me, it's one of the most arresting artistic documents of the opening phase of the global coronavirus pandemic, and so we've made it the subject of this week's Song Exploder-style musical episode.
Graham is a friend of the podcast; longtime listeners will recognize him as the composer of our opening theme. But he's also a prolific writer of contemporary pieces for solo voice, solo instruments, chamber ensemble, choir, and orchestra. In this three-way conversation, which includes organist and conductor Heinrich Christensen of King's Chapel in Boston, we retrace Graham's musical and psychological journey from the pandemic's dark, lonely early months (echoing through the turbulent, disquieting first and second movements of "Introspections") to the gradual adaptation and broader reckoning that marked the late summer of 2020 (reflected in the fifth and final movement's turn to more conventional major keys and harmonies).
As Graham himself emphasizes, there's no easy 1:1 correspondence between his pandemic experiences, his nightmares, and this composition. The piece is less literal than that, and listeners will, of course, bring their own experiences and interpretations to the work. But "Introspections" clearly takes its place among a genre of musical creations tied to a particular crisis or tragedy, with examples ranging from Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" to Krzysztof Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima" to John Adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls," which won the Pulitzer Prize for its portrayal of the 9/11 attacks.
Composers—alongside poets, artists, and even architects—help us gain some perspective on our collective traumas. And speaking for myself, both as Graham's friend and as one of the first to hear "Introspections," the piece will always be associated in my mind with the grim, stressful, baffling, but occasionally uplifting events of 2020.
After the interview with Graham and Heinrich, stick around to hear the string ensemble version of "Introspections" in its entirety.
I. Unrushed but steady (37:50)
II. With an improvisatory feel (40:56)
III. Quick, with a very light touch (46:08)
IV. Uncomfortable, plodding (47:12)
V. Poignantly, rubato throughout (50:38)
Resources Related to This Episode
For more on Graham Gordon Ramsay, including his discography and musical scores, see http://www.ggrcomposer.com.
"Introspections for Organ" — a YouTube playlist of the five movements for organ, performed by Heinrich Christensen at King’s Chapel, Boston
"Introspections for String Ensemble" by Graham Gordon Ramsay — the full Proclamation Chamber Ensemble performance on video
Notes
A special thank you to Graham Gordon Ramsay, Heinrich Christensen, King's Chapel, the members of the Proclamation Chamber Ensemble, and all the volunteers who helped with the GBH rehearsal and recording sessions on September 7 and 8, 2021.
Thanks also to Hrishikesh Hirway for his inspiring work on Song Exploder from Radiotopia. It's not just one the smartest and most educational music podcasts out there—it's one of the top podcasts, period.
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
The outro music is from "In Praise of San Simpliciano" (2009), also by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.
Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.
Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.
Full Transcript
Wade Roush: Graham Gordon Ramsay is a name that listeners of this podcast should recognize.
You hear it in the credits of every episode, because back in 2017 Graham wrote the show's opening theme.
He's not only a close friend of mine, he's also a prolific composer of all sorts of contemporary work, including a piece from 2020 called Introspections, which was written originally for solo organ and then re-orchestrated for string ensemble.
It wouldn't be right to say Introspections is "about" the pandemic. But it's definitely a product of the pandemic and all the other upheavals of 2020.
I recently sat down with Graham and our mutual friend, the organist and conductor Heinrich Christensen, and we had a conversation dissecting the piece.
That's what I want to play for you today.
I want to acknowledge here at the top that the inspiration for the format of this episode comes straight from the amazing Radiotopia podcast Song Exploder by Hrishikesh Hirway.
But one big difference is that where Hrishi tends to focus on highly produced songs by popular bands and artists, Graham writes music in the classical tradition.
Which, to me, is still one of the most expressive genres of music, and one of the most powerful tools we have for transforming collective trauma into art.
I think of pieces like Benjamin Britten's “War Requiem,” or Krzysztof Penderecki's “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima,” or the John Adams piece “On the Transmigration of Souls,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for its portrayal of the 9/11 attacks.
Great composers know how to use music not just to memorialize a horrible moment, but to help us all get some distance and perspective on it.
And as we'll hear, that's what Graham was doing with this piece.
He started composing Introspections about a month into the pandemic, in late April of 2020, in the hope that the creative work would help him process and pacify the nightmares that were waking him night after night.
Eventually the nightmares ended, but the piece kept growing into a full five-movement cycle.
Almost from the beginning Graham wrote two versions of the piece in parallel, one for solo organ and one for string ensemble, meaning two violin parts, viola, cello, and double bass.
Heinrich recorded the organ version at King's Chapel in Boston in the summer of 2020 and he also conducted the string version in a recording session at GBH's Fraser Performance Studio in the fall of 2021.
Apart from Graham, Heinrich knows the piece better than anyone.
So here's our conversation.
Wade Roush: So for folks who don't know you the way I do, I’d like each of you to introduce yourselves. So, Graham, can you start?
Graham Gordon Ramsay: My name is Graham Gordon Ramsay. I am a composer of contemporary music. I'm trained in the classical tradition. So I have an academic background, and I compose music for solo voices, solo instruments, chamber ensemble, choral works and orchestral works.
Heinrich Christensen: I'm Heinrich Christensen and I am the music director and organist at historic King's Chapel in downtown Boston. We are sitting right now in the parish house of King's Chapel. So it's a lovely setting to make music in. And so what I do here is play the organ, direct the choir and put on concerts, worship services, a little bit of everything in the musical context.
Wade Roush: So. Yeah. So before we talk about where this piece came from, can you start the first movement playing in your head and talk about what's going on. Just describe what's going on musically as the piece opens?
Graham Gordon Ramsay: So the first movement opens. It's a very soft opening. It's not very loud. It opens with an ostinato pattern. Two voices that are playing a four note motive. Ostinato, in essence, is a repeating pattern in a loop, if you will. So something that repeats it is. The two voices are already starting in intervals that are somewhat disquieting. They're not necessarily things that you would expect from a traditional sort of harmonic language. And this ostinato pattern just repeats and then enters a second voice with a tune, if you will, which is very slow and sustained and is changing notes over long periods of time with this ostinato pattern constantly going on underneath it. And so that's sort of the opening. It's slightly disquieting.
Wade Roush: Yeah, it's a little bit foreboding. It's I think it's saying there's some kind of story here that's about to unfold and it's going to be kind of an intense ride.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Yeah, I think that's probably accurate. We're setting a mood for sure, right?
Wade Roush: Now let's talk about how this piece actually came to be so. This piece was born when we were all in the first weeks, really, of the COVID 19 lockdown in March, April of 2020, right?
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Well, I think we were a little bit deeper into the pandemic than just the first few weeks. I think we were a month or so in by the time I started to to have the issue that created this this piece. So I was having horrible, horrible nightmares, really grisly, violent nightmares where I was being chased. The people I cared about were being killed. I was being killed. I was killing people against my will to stop them from killing other people that I cared about, to no avail, because I ended up dead and they ended up dead anyway. It was this horrible sort of litany of really nightmarish kind of things, and I would wake up out of these dreams at like 2:00 in the morning shaking, and just with this incredible kind of tension. And it was a really bad scene because it was one of those situations where you come up out of the dream and the dream is still with you. You know, you're awake and you're with and your your you're in reality. But the dream has been so powerful that your mood feels like like it's still the dream is spilling over into your waking hours. And we were in the pandemic. We were dealing with incredible political unrest in the country. It was you know, we're dealing with so many issues right now, but it was just all coming together in my in my psyche and it was spilling out. And the thing is that these dreams were repeating. So they were happening night after night after night.
Wade Roush: And you don't usually have your sleep interrupted that way?
Graham Gordon Ramsay: No, I'm not used to having repeated ongoing nightmares like that. You have nightmares occasionally and stuff happens. But this was this. They were really bad. They were visceral. They were following me out of sleep. And it was so disturbing that I was just I was kind of a wreck. So finally, after some period of having these these dreams, I got I kind of got fed up with it. It was like, you know, what am I going to do to make this stop? And I was up at 2:00 in the morning and I was in this disturbed state. And I said, you know, I'm going to start writing some piece of music about this. I'm going to try and expel this, put it out on paper, try and see if I can find some way of understanding what's going on inside of me. And, you know, I think in in therapy parlance, they talk a lot about sort of shining light on hidden things so that when you are able to look at it and put it out in the world, it's something that becomes less scary. You understand what the parameters are and you can sort of manage it and deal with it. So it was out of that whole kind of personal turmoil that the piece was born, and that's how I started writing it.
Wade Roush: I guess I'm curious whether you kept writing because it was helping you, or whether it was at some point you fastened on an artistic idea and then started playing it out on the page?
Graham Gordon Ramsay: I think the answer is yes. That is, both. I started writing because I really needed to sort of exorcise these nightmares, these demons, these things that were going on and, you know, composer heal myself, I have to tell you that after I got through a couple of the movements of the piece, the nightmare stopped. And it was it was very empowering. It was a great feeling like, oh, my gosh, you know, I actually am able to sort of take my life back and, you know, sort of put these these nightmares in a different place, you know? I think there was something about sort of having a composition to work on as a focal point that really helped.
Wade Roush: Heinrich, How did you come to know about this project?
Heinrich Christensen: I think the way I remember this is one morning he sent me the first piece that he had written and said, Hey, I wrote this. And to me, this music, at least for now, seems just so inextricably linked to that particular time. Those first few months, when you sort of think back and that was sort of just a scramble, right? Because everybody was isolated and at that point, not used to it yet at all. And I think at that point, we were also still all kind of scrambling to figure out how to do all of our things. And certainly one of those scrambles was very much, well, how do you make music at all? Because all live music had gone away. I think everybody, all musicians at that particular point felt extremely bereft, right. Because it all, you know, you had this most people had this very full spring schedule that just went away overnight. Right. Everything got cancelled. This is like whiplash. And so I very much felt that. And, you know, and so when Graham said these pieces and they started coming in, it was, you know, from the other side, kind of a welcome outlet of something, you know, that something positive and new that had come out of, you know, not taking the place of but, you know, come out of of of this situation as a contrast to all of the things that disappeared.
Wade Roush: Did this piece start out as an organ piece or as a string ensemble piece, or was it both at once?
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Interestingly enough, it was both at once. I mean, I started writing the organ version and almost immediately upon completing that first movement, I realized that it called out to me to orchestrate it in in string form. And so after I finished the first movement, it was clear to me that I was going to be writing the organ version and the string version in tandem. So I would write the organ version first, and then I would orchestrate it almost immediately upon completion. [00:47:40] It was like, I have got to get my brain in order and this is the way I'm going to do it. So we'll talk more about this, I think, as you're asking questions. But I also want to make clear that music is not a literal in this case, particularly. I'm not I'm not painting the nightmares. The nightmares were the impetus for this. And there are elements of the nightmares probably that find their way into the piece. But the pieces are not expressly about the nightmares. I didn't call the piece nightmares. I called it introspection for a reason because I was really this was about going inward and looking at what was happening to me and seeing how I felt about it and reflecting upon that. So it's not really there's a scenario where I'm being chased by a bear and the bear gets me and that's the end and that's the the arc of the piece. The piece really is much more abstract than that.
Heinrich Christensen: And some of the other pieces that we've collaborated on are extremely descriptive, right? That they are, t his is the exact point that this happens in the story, that they really fit a specific narrative. And this is this is how it goes. But I think exactly as you say, these are abstract depictions or maybe even they're abstractions from the nightmares.
Wade Roush: Well, that's all well and good. And I'm not going to belabor this. None of these movements is, quote unquote, about anything. And listeners are going to hear what they're going to hear.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Absolutely right.
Wade Roush: Still, I'd like you to talk a little bit about what is going on in that second movement, which is the one you wrote first, and how it reflects or how it translates or refracts, maybe what you were feeling that morning when you woke up with that nightmare.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Wow. You know, this is a hard question in large part because I wrote it so fast that and I wrote it kind of out of a haze. You know, it was one of these things where it was a it's one of those things that actually composers I think many composers really love, which is you sit down to work on the score and you look up and it's 5 hours later. And it was really, truly one of those things I was completely absorbed in in working on that thing. I do think that there was a sense of loneliness. I mean, there was a real sense of being isolated in darkness with this really rough kind of mood. You know, I think as much as I might have been composing from The Nightmare, I was also composing from this this space of coming out of the nightmare. Right. And so it's a it's a it's a very it's fairly dark. It's quite amorphous. That first movement, I think the other movements all have some sort of a solid beat and ostinato pattern underneath them. And this movement is rhythmically very amorphous. It's I mean, it's in strict time signatures, but when you listen to it, it feels very floaty, I think. And so there's this sense of kind of things that are just evolving and occurring, certainly when the piece opens.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: So there's an opening section, there's a middle section where things sort of pick up. The first part of the piece is very muted. In the string version, there are literal mutes on the string so that the sound is closer in the organ version. I think the suggestion is that we're looking for something which is very soft and. Very mysterious. And then the middle section sort of develops kind of more aggressively. It's I couldn't tell you exactly what the thought process was in terms of the emotional content, but it eventually leads into a sort of an explosion. The the the movement sort of gets out of hand. It gets faster and faster and and it gets louder and it kind of desperate. And it's repeating and repeating, repeating and repeating. And then it just freezes. And then we go back to the opening material one more time, very softly, very quietly, and altering it slightly as we go through. And there's a coda that develops from that. It is a. You know, and everybody will hear in it what they want to hear in it. But again, you know, the sort of senses of having all this anxiety and then sitting and listening to the silences that happen around all the noise, you know, that's a very important part of that movement.
Wade Roush: To me, that movement is the one that is the best representation of the whole piece. If you had to pick like 5 minutes out of the full piece that express most of the themes that are going to come up in the other four movements.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: What does the piece represent?
Wade Roush: I think the interesting thing about it is that it is scary. It is angsty in places, but not all the way through, not 100%. There are places where it's even verging on wistful or hopeful. Maybe it's certainly thoughtful, it's pensive. You know, it goes through all the emotions, which by the time we're done with the 17 or 18 minute piece, I think that the larger piece goes through the same set of emotions. I'm just saying, like the second movement is like a miniature of the entire piece.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Well, you know. Talking about this idea of things that are hopeful or wistful or sort of coming out of these things, you know, nothing is completely bad or good. And I think that there was a you know, upon completion of that movement, I looked up and it was the sun had come up. And literally, literally. And I was looking around and thinking, wow, you know, I made it through and I made this thing, you know, yeah, I lead a charmed life, you know, I get to write music, I get to collaborate with people. I, I have food, I have a place to live. You know, I may have my nightmares and I may be dealing with all of my, you know, my internal garbage. But I have the luxury about being able to express it and create something and to share it and to get feedback. And it's incredibly joyful, this process. Right. And even though I the the impetus for this piece was dark, it's important to remember that it's not all bad and even the ugly stuff can be beautiful. And that's a hard that's a hard pill for people to take. You know, it's like, oh, this is pretty. That's good. This is ugly or this is scary, it's bad. And I also think you need the contrast of the dark and the light in order to be able to understand the other.
Wade Roush: Heinrich. You were both the first to perform this on organ and the first to conduct an ensemble version of it, so you know it pretty intimately. How would you describe what's going on in this in this second movement? And can you also talk about any differences in interpretation when you kind of translated this piece from the solo organ version to the string ensemble version? Did you have to rethink it at all?
Heinrich Christensen: So just again, to sort of talk about the timeline a little bit, that the organ recordings were done in the summer of 2020 and this was, of course, before any vaccines or anything at all. And it was, you know, it was very warm because it gets very warm in the church in the summer. And we did these after dark because I think that was my suggestion. Also, it's quieter, you know, because it's a busy streets and all that stuff, although not so busy in the pandemic. But, you know, so we recorded them in July, I think it was. And, you know, and so it was dark in the church and we had very little light on. [00:57:52] And so that whole ambience, I think after you do that, we recorded them over two nights. Is that right? That, you know, that we just it's it's very ingrained in you then that you know, and as I was saying earlier, that's for me, these pieces are very much sort of flashes in time in that timeline. And, you know, now it's been two years and be interesting. If we talk about this in five years, will those pieces still be so set in time for me? I mean, you get older and I guess it all accrues and there's just so much music, but there are certain pieces that are locked in time for you because it was a very important time in your life.
Wade Roush: So this is sort of the soundtrack of the pandemic for you.
Heinrich Christensen: Oh, absolutely, yeah. And also those sort of stations within it. Right. The early lockdown when when they were written and when they arrived. And then that summer, you know, those hot nights in a dark church is also very specific. And we have the video of evidence to prove it. Right. So it sort of it lives on its own life in that sense. I have actually never answered your question about the differences in interpretation. But what I was starting to say is once you get to that point that you've recorded a piece, then it's, for me at least, it's very internalized and I have a definite opinion about this is what this music is and this is how I think of it and how I interpret it. For me, at least, if I'm conducting something, and even more so if it's something that I've played physically because it's a very it's a different thing when you're playing a keyboard instrument because it's kind of in your body in a different way than if it's if it's a piece that you've ever only conducted, I think of it as slightly more ephemeral. Or if it something I've actually played, you're just, your body is engaged in a more also because with the organ, you know, your feet, your hands, everything, it's just sort of more physically engaging in a very sort of literal sense where as when you're conducting, it's much more about gesture and, you know, character and things that are not so tangible. So you sort of go in thinking this is how it's going to go, and then you're in rehearsal and you realize, well, this is not working or it's not coming back the way I thought it would. And then you sort of have to decide on the fly. And I think that's a big part of the excitement is that, you know, is this actually better than what I had in mind or is it am I doing something that's not helpful? And can I what can I do to adjust and be helpful for, you know, again, being the conduit of creating this music and transferring it from the very physical act of playing the keyboard to the bigger picture of conducting an ensemble.
Wade Roush: So let's talk about the third movement, which is a completely different beast from the other four.
Graham Ramsay: So the movement is it's it's a minute long if that, maybe a little bit longer with the rests. [1:16:50] And what you get is a dee-da-dee-da. You get an event and then you get a silence and the event is quick and it's light and it's fast. And then it then you're held and it doesn't finish. It's not completed. It's an open ended thing and. Silence is hard. Silence is hard for listeners. Silence is hard for speakers. Silence is hard for musicians because we are taught to fill the silences with sound. [01:17:15] And so when you're asking people to make cessation, make cut in the middle of something that has a gesture that clearly should be going forward and doesn't. It's very disturbing. What I wanted was a sense of a gesture. And then another gesture that would happen......And then another gesture that would happen on top of that. But you would be going through the sentence and....Waiting for that thing to happen. It's very disturbing, right? I mean, you look at me and you're like, oh, gosh. Cut it out.
Wade Roush: Heinrich, for you, what was it like to have to learn this piece internally? As you said before, as an organist, you kind of absorb it into your body. Just talk a little bit about what you had to go through to make it work for you and then kind of like translate that into something that the performers could understand.
Heinrich Christensen: Oh, the things I had to go through! So I do think because most of the other all the other movements are about some element of sustaining something, right? And as we talked about before, the organ is a wind instrument that can sustain forever and strings can sustain by going back and forth. And so having this movement where nothing sustains, everything is very fleeting, I think is a great musical contrast also because it is so short. Right. It's just what was that? And then also I think for me personally, in the context of, you know, nightmares and things, I always think of this movement as if you've ever had a mouse in your house. You're asleep or maybe not quite asleep, and you hear a noise and it's very slight and it's very brief. So what was that? And then you wait. Will it come back? Will it not? This moment, it's a little bit like that for me. That is that I'm mouse or was that just something? What was that noise? Right. And then it comes back and I guess it turns out maybe it is a mouse! Who knows what it is. I think the string players kind of experienced exactly what I had experienced playing it because it is very hard to be super high energy and super exact and doing these exact eighth notes. All right. And counting them. Exactly right. And then have to stop and suspend the motion and then immediately dive into it again. It just it's surprisingly difficult.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: I think you're talking about something which is really critical, which is the rest are not a lack of energy. They're very energized, but they're suspended and they're anticipatory.
Heinrich Christensen: Wait and see, the mouse is coming back.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Yeah, absolutely.
Wade Roush: So, Graham, you wrote the final movement, the fifth movement in late summer 2020. Right. So we're now in August? July or August. What was up in your life at that point?
Graham Gordon Ramsay: I know exactly when I started the movement, I was visiting Rockport, where friends have a house near the ocean. It's a very lovely place. It was somewhat isolated, so I wasn't around a lot of people. I was with friends and it was a moment the ocean I remember was just stunning. I remember I was sitting on a rock and just watching the waves thinking, okay, you know, this is really pretty. Wonderful. And. I started writing. I had one thought, which was when I finished the fourth movement. It ends on a low sustained C pedal in the work and celli in the string version. And I wanted to start the last movement in C major in a very traditional sort of way. And it wasn't that everything was resolved or everything was better or that the pandemic had ended, or that my nightmares were never going to come back again. But I think it was a moment of recognition that, you know, there's beauty in the world. There's always beauty in the world. There's always stuff that's going on that is really wonderful. [1:38:30] And, you know, the fact that I was able to write these pieces that I got to create something which is a huge personal pleasure, I can't describe how wonderful that experience is to be able to do it, to share it, to collaborate.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: It's another inroad in my friendship with with Heinrich. We we got to explore stuff. And there's always kind of a mix of art, work and play when we get together to talk about stuff. And you know the pleasure about being able to take something that started from kind of all this kind of morass in my brain and come out and have, you know, playful, collaborative times, learn new things, express something, make art, and be able to still be in the world and see it as a beautiful place. You know, that's a pretty lucky, lucky position.
Wade Roush: Well, not to go again to this place of being way too literal about the music, but we're talking August of 2020, and that was nowhere near the end of the pandemic. It sounds like you're you're not saying that you were feeling in August of 2020 that you could see the light at the end of the tunnel, that the pandemic was waning or that you had figured out how you were going to survive this. It was more just that you were somehow emerging from a very dark place, and you were starting to be able to see that there was more to life and that maybe the human spirit will somehow endure.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Well, you know. Learning to make peace with these things. I mean, I hate to make this all, you know, a giant internal psychodrama about Graham's, you know, stuff. "It's all about me and my anxiety and my dreams." But, you know, it was the start of this piece. I'm not an easily trusting person. I think I have a lot of anxiety about a lot of things. You know, my my big joke is I've been having a mini midlife crisis since I was about seven. Low grade, but chronic. Nobody said it was supposed to be comfortable all the time, you know, but at the at the bottom of it, I'm an optimist. And that's that's the thing that is important to sort of dust off. And for me to find that, you know, at the bottom of all these things, I really am hopeful and I am optimistic despite all of the barriers that I put up in the distance and the dirt and the fear and the anxiety. I really am hopeful about the world, and I think maybe that's what the the last movement expresses.
Wade Roush: So, Heinrich, we've mentioned how this piece, in a way, turned into kind of a soundtrack for your experience of the pandemic, too. Were you grateful that Graham sent you a final movement that was a little bit optimistic?
Heinrich Christensen: I do think that after putting the audience and everybody through the paces of the first four movements, it's gratifying to have that glimmer of hope and glimmer of beauty and which comes across maybe even better in the string version, because it's just very expressive. And I think the string players really took to it because it has this sort of almost, you know, Tchaikovsky. It really embraces all the things that are beautiful about a string ensemble. I thought it worked particularly well for them. And it also just again, the circumstances and again, we have the video and audio to prove it because, you know, we recorded that at the end of the night. And so just that, you know, sense of gratification that we've created this thing together and, you know, then we get to create this moment of beauty. And after all the travails of all that, I think it sort of all came together. And they really seem to enjoy playing that movement in particular, probably for all of those reasons.
Wade Roush: Let's wrap up. So I know this piece was intensely meaningful for both of you. Getting it written. Getting it performed in both of its versions. Can you talk a little bit more about what the collaboration and the performance meant to you sort of personally, emotionally, professionally, musically? Did this in the end. Was it part of the way you coped with the pandemic and got through that very strange year? Two years, really.
Heinrich Christensen: Yeah, I think for me it was certainly part of the coping strategy. I think also ultimately, you know, I have all these thoughts about what live music really is that I had never in my life really spent any time pondering before this happened. Write that how much of it is and even human interaction, how much of it is being in an actual room with actual people in real time and how that's different from having a cocktail on Zoom, which is not a very tangible or describable thing, but to me at least is very, very real and to an astounding degree that I wouldn't have thought it would be before I experienced it.
Wade Roush: Graham, I'll give you the last word. So what did this piece mean to. I mean, clearly to me, you were able to create something amazing, beautiful and meaningful. And if nothing else, out of this horrible period, you created that. And that's that's remarkable and amazing. And I just I'd like you to put that into your own words.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: It can all be taken away in an instant. If you have the opportunity to do it, do it. And that's what the piece meant for me. I, I, I found a way of getting myself out of a bad mindset. I made something positive out of something that was very hard for me in terms of my experience. I got to share that. I got to collaborate. I got to express stuff. I got to bring other people in. I got to have a dialogue. So from a personal standpoint, just remembering, you know, these things are not a given, you know. And when you have the opportunity to make something beautiful, expressive, communicative, to open up dialogue, to bring people into a discussion or supply them an environment where they can. Contemplate and think about their own lives. Do it. Don't wait.
Wade Roush: Well said, Graham. Thank you, Heinrich. Thank you so much.
Heinrich Christensen: Thank you.
Graham Gordon Ramsay: Thank you.
Wade Roush: And now, here’s “Introspections,” by Graham Gordon Ramsay, in its entirety. It’s performed by the Proclamation Chamber Ensemble, Heinrich Christensen, conductor.
I. Unrushed but steady (37:50)
II. With an improvisatory feel (40:56)
III. Quick, with a very light touch (46:08)
IV. Uncomfortable, plodding (47:12)
V. Poignantly, rubato throughout (50:38)
Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush.
Our theme music is by Graham Gordon Ramsay, and all the other music in this episode was also by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
There's a video of the recording session at GBH's Fraser Performance Studio and I'll link to that from the web post for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.
A special thank you to Graham and Heinrich, and to all the members of the Proclamation Chamber Ensemble.
You can follow me on Twitter at @wroush and you can follow the show at @soonishpodcast.
If you enjoy the show, please consider becoming part of the Soonish community by making per-episode donation on Patreon.
For five seasons now, donors have been using their dollars to express their support for high-quality, ad-free independent podcasting, and I couldn't be more grateful.
A special shout-out this time to patrons Elizabeth Blachn, Tracy Staedter, Mark Pelofsky, Julianne Zimmerman, Kiran Wagle, John Diniz, Daniel Imrie-Situnayake, Victor and Ruth McElheny, Paul and Patricia Roush, Jamie Roush, Celia Ramsay, and Kent Rasmussen.
You can learn about all of our cool membership rewards, including the Soonish coffee mug, at patreon.com/soonish.
Speaking of independent podcasting, Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of brilliant, funny, moving podcasts from some of the smartest and most humane audio producers I know.
This week I want to tell you about a Hub & Spoke show called Subtitle. The show is all about languages and the people who speak them, and we're proud to say it's supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In one recent episode, host Patrick Cox goes Louisiana’s Bayou Country and talks about the sea level rise that's forcing French-speaking Native Americans and Cajuns out of their homes. One big question is whether they'll be able to take their language with them, or whether climate change will wipe out Louisiana French.
[Audio clip from Subtitle plays here]
You can find that episode at Subtitlepod.com, and check out the whole Hub & Spoke lineup at hubspokeaudio.org.
That's all for this now. Thanks for listening, and I'll be back with a new episode...Soonish.
