Dorothy Lawson Interview
Below is the transcript to my interview with cellist and composer Dorothy Lawson. You’ll find the link to the podcast and video versions below with the show notes. Dorothy Lawson is one of the founding members and Artistic Directors for ETHEL, a string quartet celebrating 25 years of setting the standard for contemporary concert music. In this episode, you’ll hear about many fascinating and meaningful collaborations with musicians including Alllison Loggins-Hull, Robert Mirabal, and Layale Chaker. It was really inspiring to hear how they got started with adapting the concert experience into something less-predictable, and ways to connect with new audiences. Dorothy also shared her insights into playing and teaching the cello and staying healthy. We also talked about many of the long-term relationships with the Metropolitain Museum, Denison College and the Grand Canyon Music Festival’s Native American Composer Apprentice Projecct. You’ll be hearing excerpts from 3 of ETHEL’s recent albums, including wonderful music by Leilehua Lanzilotti, Sam Wu and Migiwa “Miggy” Miyajima.
Dorothy Lawson (00:00:00):
It's been just the most wonderfully social engagement and so good for us. We get to play our music regularly, and for an audience who are in a great mood and are ready to talk about the things they hear. I recommend it to any group, anybody who can find a space where they could have a regular, just an easygoing evening appearance. I know the Beatles did it back in the day, right? They had a regular club spot in Berlin for I think a couple of years.
Leah Roseman (00:00:35):
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a diversity of musicians with in-depth conversations and great music that reveal the depth and breadth to life and music. Cellist and composer Dorothy Lawson is one of the founding members and Artistic Directors for ETHEL, a String Quartet, celebrating 25 years of setting the standard for contemporary concert music. In this episode, you'll hear about many fascinating and meaningful collaborations with musicians, including Alison Loggins-Hull, Robert Mirabal, and Layale Chaker. It was really inspiring to hear how they got started with adapting the concert experience into something less predictable, and ways to connect with new audiences. Dorothy also shared her insights into playing and teaching the cello and staying healthy. We also talked about many of the long-term relationships with the Metropolitan Museum, Denison College, and the Grand Canyon Music Festival's Native American Composer Apprentice Project.
(00:01:29):
You'll be hearing excerpts from three of ETHEL's recent albums, and everything is linked to their website in the show notes. This is my final podcast for this year, episode 51 of Season 4, and Season 5 starts in a couple of weeks in January. Please check the links for different ways to support and follow this independent podcast. I really do need the help of my listeners. I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. The podcast theme music was commissioned from composer Nick Kold, and you can use the timestamps to navigate the episode. Now, to Dorothy Lawson!
(00:01:57):
Hi, Dorothy. Thanks so much for joining me here today,
Dorothy Lawson (00:02:05):
Leah. It's a pleasure. It really is, and so nice to connect with you in Ottawa.
Leah Roseman (00:02:10):
Well, just before we started recording, I was remarking that my husband actually knew you way back from your Toronto days, but you've been in New York for many years.
Dorothy Lawson (00:02:19):
Yes, yes. I've lived in New York for more than, well, I think it's almost 40 years now, so it way more than half my life. But Toronto was, it was a huge experience, a very strong imprint. I like to feel that I've carried some of that culture forward to infect some of New York with some of that nature. New York is a fabulous creative environment, but Canada has a sense of support for the arts, which is sorely missing in a lot of the United States.
Leah Roseman (00:02:58):
So you founded the quartet ETHEL many years ago, and you're Artistic Director as well as the cellist with the group.
Dorothy Lawson (00:03:04):
I'm one of the two remaining founding members and one of the two co-Artistic Directors, yes exactly.
Leah Roseman (00:03:13):
Okay. Yeah, with the violist, right?
Dorothy Lawson (00:03:14):
Yes, exactly. Ralph Farris. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:03:16):
Okay. So you and Ralph got this started, and I was just fascinating researching this wonderful ensemble and all the different projects. So we're going to touch on a few projects, but one of your recent recordings that's been released is Persist with some emerging composers, and I was really interested to hear some of these works.
Dorothy Lawson (00:03:34):
Oh, good. I'm glad to hear.
Leah Roseman (00:03:36):
Do you want to talk about how that got started?
Dorothy Lawson (00:03:40):
Yeah, sure. I'd love to. ETHEL has, even when we began, we knew that we wanted to focus on contemporary music on actually, the idea was to give, to champion music by contemporary composers, by people we knew, people who were not yet famous or well-recognized, or who could use the high quality delivery. And it was an identity that we really enjoyed, and it has always been that way. This project generates from that because we began a commissioning, sort of an iterative commissioning project many, many years ago. About every three, four years, we would do a round where we raised the money, we approached or put out a commissioning call and chose composers we thought were exciting and appropriate. And I mean, really, one of our background criteria is always just is this music we want to play ourselves. It is not a value judgment on the composers per se. It's actually more just how do we acquire more music that will look good on us, and we want to do a good job for them.
(00:05:23):
So this round, this was part of that project, we call it Home Baked, and this round we reached out to Allison Loggins-Hull, who is a very rising star, very, very well known now, although when this began, which was under the pandemic, so it's been a few years already, she was just reaching sort of another stage of her career and was taken on by the Cleveland Orchestra, one of their composition fellows. We've known her for more than 10 years, actually. We had even worked with her, not as performers, but as she worked for our foundation, and we always liked her. We always thought she was a terrific talent, and that we were able to kind of catch the rising star and commission a piece for her own instrument, the flute with the quartet, and then expand on it with this larger project to bring in a number of other composers we did not know for flute and quartet, which has produced this group of pieces, which we group underneath Allison's title, Persist. It is very demonstrative of an internal culture, the culture of ETHEL, the way that we think of ourselves as kind mediums between, well, certainly between composers and the audience, between cultures, between the old and the new. We enjoy that. We enjoy being a kind of a bridge.
Leah Roseman (00:07:29):
And it might be interesting, even before we get more into that album, for people that don't know your music, that you really have a lot of improvisation, and you've played across many genres. You've toured with rock musicians, right?
Dorothy Lawson (00:07:42):
Yeah. Sort of the moment when ETHEL started, which is just around the millennium, just a little before the millennium was an interesting crisis point in the American music scene, maybe even wider than that. But the traditional concert models were starting to kind of break apart. The audiences were not showing up anymore in as fully or as regularly, and it was an interesting moment. It just like there was a rising wave of a new attitude, a new approach, and we were among the early adapters, the people who sort of enjoyed it. We were creatures of a next culture, and we were all well enough established as professionals in New York that we could live on our own productivity, on our own incomes without having to make a lot of money at doing this right away. So it gave us some time to develop the relationships, to develop the new repertoire, to explore possibilities, and this, as I was saying, this sort of curiosity about what would be interesting and viable to this new audience that was emerging because people just weren't responding as happily to the classical model, the sort of more time honored, well-respected, but more predictable forms of musical concert music experience.
(00:09:48):
And the New York environment just was so busy with commercial projects and movies and visiting artists. And yes, we got to play lots of classical music as well, but in regional orchestras, or I even did a few freelance dates with the New York Philharmonic, lots of other experience, and it was just the joy of meeting these kindred spirits who we all embraced this idea that if we enjoyed it, literally the Ellington credo, if it sounds good, it is good. And we felt very strongly that it gave us the artistic license to just do music that we personally respond to, and we continue to look very carefully at the audience, very carefully at the environment and say, is this still viable? Is this still the necessary? Are we still supporting a kind of a culture that's growing here? Because things continue to evolve, everything continues to change, and I just say that New York was an essential element of getting us going both because we all had the access to these wildly different experiences and different friendships, different connections.
(00:11:37):
I mean, some of that rock tour that you talked about, whether the one big one was with Todd Rundgren and Joe Jackson, and that really came out of two friendships. One was with a presenter who was in an alternative music space downtown New York, next to the public theater, and a man called Bill Bragin, and he was curating this fascinating new set of performances, but also the free public concerts in Central Park in the summertime. So part of it was an invitation from him, and part of it was actually this preexisting friendship between Joe Jackson and one of our original violinists, Mary Rowell, who Mary had played on every one of Joe's albums for a decade. So when we emerged with this quartet, Joe was very intrigued, and he thought, oh, that'd be great. Why don't I involve the Quartet in my next album? So we did a recording with him, and when this opportunity through the public theater came up for a concert in Central Park with Todd Rundgren and Joe Jackson, Joe Jackson was actually the one who vouched for us. He said, oh, they're great, don't worry. And Todd said, okay, fine. If Joe likes 'em, great. Let's do it. So it is just funny how these things happen. They are, I would say there's always a social element. There's always something about the relationships and the trust between people that plays a role in how things move.
Leah Roseman (00:13:32):
Yeah, really interesting. Well, let's get back into the Persist album.
Dorothy Lawson (00:13:35):
Okay.
Leah Roseman (00:13:36):
So I chose a few clips that I particularly appealed to me. I really liked Terraria by Sam Wu.
Dorothy Lawson (00:13:43):
Yes. Yeah. Yes, thank you. We too. Yeah, he's a brilliant young man. I mean, I think he only finished his doctorate this year or something. Anyway, he's already got a teaching position. He's written many pieces for major orchestras, extremely talented. When he showed up as part of our search, we were thinking, oh, this would be great. Let's just grab this guy before he gets too big. And he wrote us this exquisite little, it is a kind of a meditation on microscopic gardens, and yeah, there's the hanging gardens and the bonsai, and it's, it's adorable. We really, really love it. Yeah. I hope these are pieces that we can contribute to the general repertoire. I mean, I really think other people will enjoy it.
Leah Roseman (00:14:50):
You're about to hear a clip from Terraria by Sam Wu.(music)
(00:14:53):
Yeah. Thanks for that. And of course, people can click on the link in the description of the podcast to go to the album, and I wanted to include a clip from, We began this quilt by Ann Lanzilotti. Does she use her middle name?
Dorothy Lawson (00:17:08):
I think she does say Leilehua Lanzilotti. That's right. That's her kind of her stage name. Yes. Yeah. Well, again, she has, she's been a finalist for a Pulitzer. She's a brilliant, beautiful voice for the music of Hawaii, the culture of Hawaii, which is also why we chose her in this particular set of commissions. We were very concerned to bring as much diversity into the project as we could, and her voice is completely unique and beautiful. It's a very dreamy kind of patient piece, but it actually speaks about the imprisonment of the last queen of Hawaii, the last authentic queen of Hawaii under the American government. She was imprisoned in her own home, in her own palace, and one of the backstories to the piece is that she was kept in contact with her people by these very quiet, very, very, very mild-mannered gifts that people would bring mostly gifts of flowers or food or something, and they would leave them with the guards, but they were wrapped in newspapers, and the newspapers would carry the messages or the information of the day. So there's such an integrity to these cultures that you can't destroy just by overwhelming them with force.
Leah Roseman (00:19:10):
This is an excerpt from, We began this quilt there (music)
(00:19:13):
And Reconciliation Suite by Migiwa Miyajima.
Dorothy Lawson (00:20:38):
Yes, yes, "Miggy" Miyajima. Well, she's a masterful composer. It's very good mature writing. She's in her forties, I think, but she's, she's a self-taught composer. She came to America from Japan because she was so urgent to learn jazz, to speak jazz, to make a career as a jazz musician. She leads her own big band, but like I said, she's a masterful composer. The music is beautiful, original, fun, sweet. This was part of what thrilled us so much out of the group of pieces as they emerged, was each one of them were so loving and good natured. They're not a problematic set of pieces it's quite wonderful. Because we don't put any restrictions on our composers. We don't ask, except, I'm sorry. The definition is really just for the quartet. Hopefully, they'll look at what we are and what we sound like and work with that. But for us, and between nine and 12 minutes long, that's kind of the definition of what we ask for.
Leah Roseman (00:22:08):
Yeah, that's good to have time restrictions.
Dorothy Lawson (00:22:12):
Right. It turns out to be very, very, very, restriction isn't a bad thing, makes creativity more essential. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:22:23):
Although one of the composers I spoke to recently, he was saying that you'd be surprised that to write a miniature can take so much time, just like a great short story as opposed to a novel, because it has to be so perfect.
Dorothy Lawson (00:22:33):
Very true, very true. Yeah. Well, yes, we're aware of that. We're aware of that. It's not like we think, oh, this is just a light thing that is literally the shape of the music that we perform. Most of the time, we don't do. In fact, I don't think at the moment, Miggy, Migiwa Miyajima, may be the only one who gave us a multi movement piece that we will use it. It's very little of our repertoire at the moment is in more than one movement.
Leah Roseman (00:23:11):
This is a clip from the first movement of Reconciliation Suite by Migiwa "Miggy" Miyajima (music)
(00:24:11):
And of course, we must include a clip from Persist, Allison's piece.
Dorothy Lawson (00:24:16):
Yes, please. Yeah. Well, and she speaks about it extremely elegantly. It is autobiographical towards her family. It's her family's journey in enslavement across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. But it's, again, it's got this patient, it is persistent, it's very patient. It has kind of a slow but irresistible sense right from the beginning of just in a way, almost inscrutable patience, just that this is going to happen. It's going to keep happening. These rhythms that continue, there is quite an episode where you actually, you really hear oars dropping into the ocean. In fact, even she uses electronics. So in the very, very beginning, there are plopping sounds that really evoke oars in water. She takes it on a journey. It goes towards a anger and frenzy and some amount of distress, but then it resolves again into this long, long patience. And it's extremely, it is just very listenable. It tells the story, it tells it beautifully. There are sweet moments. There are very, very high tension moments. But the overall, I think she created a musical experience that really ties it up, really brings it back to the way that this just becomes part of your nature. It's like part of your cultural identity.
Leah Roseman (00:26:36):
This is an excerpt from the beginning of Persist by Alison Loggins-Hull.(music)
(00:26:40):
I was thinking about how just the emergence of iPads on stage must have been such an incredible help to your quartet, because you use kind of minimalist, small iPads, I noticed, and you often perform from memory as well, depending on the repertoire, right?
Dorothy Lawson (00:29:04):
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, so I think we started using the iPads back in 2008 or 09 when we were building a show that required projections, big projections, and it was just so clear that as you're saying, the smaller piece of technology rather than the big old metal stands with the paper, the small pad on a single foot, the microphone stand was much less distracting, much less intrusive in front of us, and in front of the projections. Of course, over the years, we've recognized what a facilitation it is to be able to carry around literally our entire repertoire in one piece of equipment. And it never gets any heavier. You can load it with all the different scores that you want, but it is just what it is. And we've had a few technical challenges with it over the years. That very first show was our Docuamerica Show at the Brooklyn Academy Music.
(00:30:26):
I was a complete novice to the iPad during the opening night of a three night run. During the premier performance. I had not realized that because I had my wifi open, my various accounts associated with my online identities were available. And in the middle of the show, in fact, in the middle of the most difficult piece on the program, I received a FaceTime call and my music disappeared. It just evaporated. It was like watching something physical evaporate, and I was shocked. I was what, fortunately, the actual request also had a red button on it saying decline. So I quickly reached for it and declined it. I didn't even know what would happen, but fortunately, it reverted to my music, which was a huge relief, but I had no idea that could have happened. So yes, iPads are fun, but they're a bit of a learning curve as well. Yeah,
Leah Roseman (00:31:43):
I saw some clips, actually, I think you have an online, there's a YouTube of your circus performance, which is a very interesting project. So I wanted to ask you about that, how it came about.
Dorothy Lawson (00:31:54):
Thank you. Well, the Docuamerica Show was the first one where we had invited a video designer to work with us sample sampling materials from an online database from the Environmental Protection Agency, which they called Docuamerica, which was generated back in the seventies. And we weren't even really sure if it was going to be relevant enough, but it was so inspiring. The composers responded to it beautifully. The video designer came up with just a fabulous show, and actually it was a partnership between a video designer and a theater director, and they just designed an amazing experience, which we wrote, and the composers we engaged all wrote original music for. So we traveled with that. We've been traveling, and we still do occasionally perform this show for many, many years. And we took it at one point to Sarasota, Florida to the Ringling Museum and performed it there, and they loved it.
(00:33:11):
And they realized quite quickly, just immediately, they realized they have a visual archive as well. They have a huge collection of circus memorabilia and images from a century worth or 150 years worth of photography and old movies and fan generated documents that have been sent to them over and over the years. And they just asked us, they said, Hey, would you work with our collection on a show like this? And we said, of course we'd love to. Oh my gosh, what a treat. So that project, I think it took us about four years to get from that point, from the point of getting the idea and creating the relationship to being on stage, performing it live. And the video, the YouTube that's online came from, I think it was the final dress rehearsal for the show at the theater, at the Ringling Museum Theater. It's one of our deepest, most heartfelt relationships. We love the people there. We love that museum. And part of the joy in that show was drawing from their collection. They have a body of interviews, of video interviews that they've collected with the retired circus stars who live in Sarasota, and they tell phenomenal stories about their lives, about the adventures, the experience of living with circus, being in circus, and it is so interesting. Anyway, yeah, it was a beautiful experience, very inspiring, and we learned so much.
Leah Roseman (00:35:20):
You learned so much about the world of circus or just how to put together a show like that?
Dorothy Lawson (00:35:24):
Both. Well, in the case of that show, the earlier show was really visuals married to sound. It was very a concert with an integral visual experience.
Leah Roseman (00:35:41):
You mean the Docuamerica?
Dorothy Lawson (00:35:43):
The Docuamerica Show. Exactly. The full title was Circus: Wandering City, and that was more theatrical. That was actually fully staged. Again, we worked with a very brilliant young director, a man called Grant McDonald, and we pulled together an entire team, sound, lighting, costume, and set design. We actually also did a certain amount of circus training ourselves because we wanted to evoke it without somehow projecting that we were actors. We're not actors. We are not going to pretend we're doing that. But my colleagues, Kip Jones and Corin Lee, the two violinists, wanted very, very much to have a fencing moment with their bows. So we got some fencing training. We actually engaged a trainer and got them their skillset. And again, part of the director's job in that show was to make sure that we stayed on the right side of making these gestures, not doing things that we would look really, really fake at. Just things that were funny and credible enough to make a good moment on stage. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:37:21):
Okay. Hi. Just a quick break from the episode. You may be also interested in my episodes with the Euclid Quartet, the Cheng2 duo, Martha Mooke, Meg Okura, Rebeca Omordia, Pat Irwin, and so many more all linked in the show notes. It's a joy to be able to bring these meaningful conversations to you, but this project costs me quite a bit of money and lots of time. Please support the series through either my merchandise store or on my Ko-fi page. You'll find the links in the show notes for the merch. It features a unique design by artist Steffi Kelly, and you can browse clothes, phone cases, notebooks, and more ,everything printed on demand. You'll also find the links to sign up for my newsletter where you'll get access to exclusive information about upcoming guests. Please check out my back catalog with weekly episodes going back to 2021. Now back to Dorothy Lawson.
(00:38:07):
Now, the name of your group originally was Hazardous Materials.
Dorothy Lawson (00:38:14):
That existed for about five months, I think.
Leah Roseman (00:38:18):
Okay.
Dorothy Lawson (00:38:18):
Yeah. We realized back in 2000, 1998 when we started, we tried, we tried Hazardous Materials. We were experimenting with philosophical names and poetic names, and we thought, okay, that's kind of representative. We're breaking the mold. We want people to know that we're not doing the classical, the regime, but we also realized we want to have fun. We wanted to have a good time. We also didn't want the audience walking in expecting everything to sound edgy and dangerous. So we left that behind very quickly. And the way we got ETHEL, which I really do enjoy, was people will remember the movie Shakespeare in Love. It had appeared in, I think it was released in 1997. So we came along very shortly after that. And as we were kind of fussing around with names, one of the original violinists Mary Rowell, who has, she's just this fabulous Vermont type Vermont farm girl, very wry sense of humor, brilliant violinist, incredible jazz player, blues.
(00:39:50):
We were talking about improvising. Yeah, improvising has been part of our necessary skillset. Right from the beginning. She came into one of our rehearsals laughing because she had been thinking about the movie Shakespeare in Love, and she was saying, it just hits me in Shakespeare and Love. There's this fundamental joke, almost the first thing you hear, Shakespeare's boss at the Globe Theater is challenging him to write the next big hit he's going to write. It's going to bring the entire village into the theater, and it's going to be a comedy. It's going to be so funny. Nobody can resist it, and it's going to be called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's daughter. So we realized that that joke really hinges on the idea that you're expecting Juliet ,and Ethel, the pirate's daughter, walks into the room and we realize that's really us as a string quartet. We're not Juliet. We're Ethel the Pirate's daughter. That was the fun moment. We got our own permission out of choosing something that was really just deflecting the entire serious legacy of string quartet.
Leah Roseman (00:41:11):
And let's face it, band names are hard, right?
Dorothy Lawson (00:41:15):
Yes, yes. You may have heard a lot about that. It's true. Yeah. Well, and it's one of those crazy things about being in a group for 26 years is realizing what the long outcomes of some of these choices are and going, oh, yeah, we chose that out of a certain spirit, joie de vivre, but a certain spirit of the moment. But it created an interesting long struggle in just explaining what the heck we're doing. It's
Leah Roseman (00:41:52):
Fascinating. Yeah. I interviewed Pat Irwin, who's a composer and band guy. Yeah. He's been on this podcast twice. And so his band SUSS, I asked him why it was capitalized, if it was an acronym. He said, no, it's just cooler that way. So I think ETHEL,
Dorothy Lawson (00:42:08):
Yes. Well, and the only reason we capitalize ETHEL is because otherwise, we thought very early on, people would expect a woman called Ethel to walk onto the stage and was saying, no, there's nobody called Ethel. Pat's awesome. I love Pat.
Leah Roseman (00:42:24):
Yeah. Okay. So you've had some changes in personnel, which is normal for such a long lived group. So I'm curious in terms of the audition process or finding the right fit because you need these improvisatory skills and this kind of showmanship.
Dorothy Lawson (00:42:37):
Well, you can also imagine that every audition is just what happens in its own time. You don't have the same body of talent available. You don't have the same, you're trying to get the word out, but you're also trying to inform yourself who's there, who's available now. And we've really evolved, I guess large scale twice. So this is our third iteration for a long term. And this is actually the longest lived of our groups. This foursome is now about 10 years old, and I think it's got a new maturity to it, which is very, very lovely and exciting. And we're all from different generations. I mean, the violinist I was referring to before Mary, Mary and I are exactly the same age. So we've always been kind of the oldest people of the group. And then now Ralph, also my founding colleague is the next generation, but we're several years apart.
(00:43:58):
I think we're like 12 years apart. And then Kip Jones is in his forties, and Corin Lee is in his very, very early thirties. So we have very, very different perspectives and skillsets and a history and identity of doing things that stray across genres and across cultures. And we look for auditions. We look for colleagues, new colleagues who are interested in that and who have maybe some skills to add to that mix along with a high, very high level of classical training. We, we still need that classical core, and that's part of what we offer to our collaborators. And we've looked for collaborations across any kind of cultural perspective.
(00:45:08):
But we feel like one of the values that we offer to our collaborators is this very recognized and accepted level of classical skill, which brings us into a certain relationship with our audience. And then when we are doing one of these collaborations where we are working with somebody whose life and art form are substantially different, there's a blend. There's a way of speaking to each other in the music that our audience will still hear, will still recognize, and we hope anyway, our intention is that this opens the mind and the heart to a deeper kind of sharing.
Leah Roseman (00:46:08):
Yeah. Well, maybe we could talk about you've had many, many years of collaboration with Robert Mirabal.
Dorothy Lawson (00:46:14):
Yes. Yes. Thank you. Have you ever interviewed him?
Leah Roseman (00:46:18):
No, I've not.
Dorothy Lawson (00:46:19):
He'd be a great interview, I'm saying!
Leah Roseman (00:46:19):
Maybe we could include, could include a clip from the Red Willow Suite and point people to that project.
Dorothy Lawson (00:46:28):
Beautiful. Love that.Yeah, please.
Leah Roseman (00:46:31):
So you've done residencies in Taos. Do you want to talk about that project a little bit?
Dorothy Lawson (00:46:35):
Yeah. Well, let's see. We reached out to Robert. Oh man. May I give you a rather longer view of how that works?
Leah Roseman (00:46:48):
Sure.
Dorothy Lawson (00:46:48):
We were engaged, again out of New York, out of the friendships, out of just all the different relationships that we had when we were only five years old. Oh, sorry. No, I guess we were just reaching seven. We were just reaching seven years old. We were invited by the directors of the Grand Canyon Music Festival to work for them. At the end of the summer in their festival, they had designed a program to reach out to the natural Native American, right around the Grand Canyon, notably the Navajo Nation, Hopi Nation and Pima Nations engaging composer with a Western European training and the ability to compose and notate music in our style. But then also a performing group like ours, like a string quartet from that tradition, from the western European tradition. And they had been running this program for I think five years at that point. And they reached out to me, to us, to the quartet. They're very, very old friends of mine and said, would you like to do this with us? Would you like to come out and experience this great project we've got with Native American composers, apprentices. These were high school students all around Navajo Nation, I think it is still going. This is a project that began back in 2000, initiated at the millennium.
(00:48:42):
There was funding available at that moment for cultural projects of cultural advancement, also projects for the national parks. And so they won one of these grants, and they engaged the Native American composer, Brent Michael Davids, to help them design this program. So we were one of those first groups who got to travel there, and we did that work every year at the end of the summer. We would go there for 10 years, for a decade, and we were working with these kids who had always written music for themselves. It's just part of the culture. Music is an applied skill. It's something you do. In fact, it's almost kind of an insanity to imagine you would pay somebody to do it. They wouldn't even think that way. We all make music. This is just what we do. So these kids had deep understanding and experience with music.
(00:49:50):
They had no difficulty creating music, but they had never used our technology of writing it down. And what we came to realize was the music they wrote was perfect without any discussion, without any intercession on our parts. We were not teaching them how to write music. We were just giving them advice on how to communicate it through the notation. And on the other hand, as a kind of a biofeedback, we were playing their music and they were telling us what they needed to hear. So we had to realize what an incredibly big and heavy bag of baggage, all the stuff that we had learned in our culture, that we were dragging around as if this would apply everywhere. And we were told very clearly, no, no, no, no, don't do that. Don't make it louder. Don't make it faster. We don't need it to be more exciting. We need it to be more patient, more beautiful. Oh, got yes, please. Thank you. So we saw so much about ourselves in that, and we learned so much about the respect and nature of music in these cultures.
(00:51:24):
So after doing that work, after doing that for several years, we proposed to the Brooklyn Academy that we do a show for them. They wanted something that was quasi theatrical. So we proposed that we would invite four master musicians of as many different cultures as we could find to work with us in talking to each other with our music, and just figure out ways to collaborate, ways to speak and make music together. So we reached out Brooklyn Academy, loved the idea. They accepted it and funded it. And we began the process of reaching out to these master musicians who had never heard of us and never remotely imagined they would ever get an invitation from a string quartet in New York City to do a musical event together, let alone with each other. So we approached it very carefully. We knew that we'd have to win their trust because walking into any of these settings with a string quartet had such an immediate impact, such a set of assumptions that we would be coming to teach them something. There'd be some amount of condescension going on. And we were very, very careful to meet these artists in their communities on their ground and show them that we were very, very interested in their culture. And we would, we traveled to them, we stayed with them. We would go to their community concerts, their celebrations.
(00:53:23):
And one of those four musicians we reached out to and who was immediately interested was Robert Maribel, who is a Taos Pueblo native flute player. He is an elder in his community. He is also a dancer, a singer, a poet, a movie star. He has lived all over the world. He's traveled through Russia, he's lived in Japan. He's traveled all over South America, and in a lot of ways, he showed us how to do it. So Robert became just an ongoing collaborator, somebody that we worked with. Now, I think we've created now four more shows with him, and we learn every time he continues to teach us. But he also, he honors us deeply. He speaks about us as family. He depends on us when it comes to musical projects where he has to, because he's been engaged now to do movie scores and compose pieces for orchestra.
(00:54:42):
So he does come and sort of say, okay, that's your skillset. How do I work with this? We work with each other in many different ways. It's so rewarding. We love, we love him, we love working with him. We love his family. He has three beautiful daughters who have all grown up since we've known him, and we're just family and friends and the music. I would be delighted to share any of the Red Willow project because that has the latest imprimature of what we're doing, and it's become even more developed, even deeper. We tell stories about his culture and we draw on his tribal music, which it's unusual actually, that he's been that willing to share it with us, and it's out of this trust. And he also feels that when we perform together, he appears as a kind of an emissary of a world that's disappearing and a world of an ancient sets of awareness that our culture misses and needs. And it's his opportunity to communicate. To some extent, those events are more like ceremonies than they're like concerts.
Leah Roseman (00:56:26):
Beautiful. Thanks for that.
Dorothy Lawson (00:56:27):
Yeah. Thank you for listening. Thank you for giving me the chance to talk about it. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (00:56:34):
This is an excerpt from the trailer for the Red Willow Project with Robert Mirabal and ETHEL (music),
Robert Mirabal (00:57:38):
110 years ago. It was a few days before Saint Geronimo Feast day or Harvest days. I remember this white man that came up to the village. He wasn't too tall, and he wasn't too big. He said his name was Thurlow Lieurance. We call him Lolo because he was small, and he told me, I want to know about your songs. I want to know about your drums. I want to know about your flutes, and I want to know about the melodies. So we invited him into our home.(music)
Leah Roseman (00:58:46):
And you have another new album coming out, your album, Vigil with the Lebanese violinist composer -
Dorothy Lawson (00:58:54):
I believe she says "Layal Shakesh". I don't know. I do not know why the R becomes a "sh" sound, but yes, apparently, that's how she says it. Yeah. She is glorious. She's a phenomenally beautiful person, beautiful woman, beautiful soul. She's generous and sweet and patient, and that she has engaged with this poetry, this devastating poetry Vigil to create a set of pieces, a set of movements that are huge, hugely dramatic, but also wailing and emotional. I don't what to - it is gorgeous. She plays, she's also the composer performer on the record. She plays mostly with a very specific Lebanese original style, authentic violin style. But she is also trained as a Western violinist. She graduated the London Guild Hall. I think she's married, lives in New Jersey, I think now, or Brooklyn, maybe. It's Brooklyn, very close to New York.
(01:00:26):
So again, we're now very deep friends. We were introduced by ETHEL's manager, who was just listening to an NPR broadcast one day and heard her being interviewed, and she was talking about this project that she planned to write about the poetry, and she needed a string quartet. And he sort of asked us, you'd be interested in that. And we said, of course. So he reached out, he proposed it. She was thrilled. And now, of course, again, we've become very, very deep friends. The music is just glorious and heart, very moving, very beautiful, but also very heartrending. She lives as sort of, not a refugee, but an expat from Lebanon. She can't go home. Travel is impossible right now. Her family can't leave. And there's such interesting patience and courage among these cultures that live with these deep, deep limitations and disruptions, and there, there's huge wisdom there.
Leah Roseman (01:01:52):
This is an excerpt from Vigil with Layale Chaker.(music)
(01:01:55):
Dorothy, I wanted to ask about your role as a teacher and mentor with your cello students, because you do teach cello.
Dorothy Lawson (01:05:14):
Yes, yes, I do. I love teaching!
Leah Roseman (01:05:18):
Yeah. Is your approach different than your training considering the type of career you've had?
Dorothy Lawson (01:05:27):
My approach is really to try to understand what the student wants to do with the instrument. Even with younger people, it's not usually so much of a question. They just want to be able to do what all their friends are doing and hopefully fit in with their school orchestra or something like that. So I kind of know a lot about what they need, and I'm happy to work with them. I also have always had a number of adult students, and some of them want to play with a rock group, or they want to play folk melodies, or one of my longest and dearest dearest friends is a cellist with whom I no longer, I give her lessons. We actually just get together and play duets or cello trios sometimes if we're lucky. And we've made all kinds of adaptations of music that we just want to be able to play great old songs like Cheek to Cheek, and I Could Have Danced All Night.
(01:06:32):
We have a lot of fun with it. So I guess my own technique and my teaching method have changed very, very fundamentally from the way I was taught, because I've been blessed to have learned a lot more about the ergonomics of the instrument. And I've had training in Feldenkrais and various kinds of body alignment, yoga. I've never had Alexandre Technique, although I know that's extremely influential. And just learn so much more about how the different muscle groups can impinge on each other or how they support each other, how to draw energy from more of your body, rather than being quite so limited and specific about the ways we were trained, mostly to use very specific muscles in a very limited way. And the health of the whole system is not really addressed in a more traditional model. And a lot of us end up with trouble over the long run.
Leah Roseman (01:07:52):
Yeah, I agree with you, and like you I have explored many different mind body things to help, and I think it's an ongoing journey, really.
Dorothy Lawson (01:08:00):
Yeah. Yes, yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, well, these days, of course, I am in my sixties. I'm in my high sixties, and I'm watching very carefully. My diet, for example. I mean, that's less immediately effective on the instrument, but boy, does it affect your health? Boy, does it affect your energy and your sense of comfort. It's phenomenal how much that drives your wellbeing. Yeah.
Leah Roseman (01:08:31):
Do you have strategies for staying healthy when you're touring?
Dorothy Lawson (01:08:35):
Yeah. Yes. Yes. Again, watching my diet, it's very difficult actually. When you're on tour and you have less control. You have to deal with more immediate food sources. You don't often don't always have a kitchen. You don't always have a local store with a good variety of food. And I do spend time, sometimes I will try to carry certain foods around with me, like foods that I think of as basic. I do yoga just for myself. I will, sometimes I'll do an online class, but I have a small routine that I do for myself, which just keeps the joints relaxed, open, the muscles reasonably toned.
(01:09:28):
I prefer myself. I prefer not to expend a lot of energy doing other things while I'm on tour. I know that when I was younger, I would love to go out and to the local museums or the art galleries, or see the city get to get some experience. I don't do that so much anymore. I value a little bit more of the downtime, the chance to relax and get my energies to their peak at the moment when I have to be in the theater and ready for the show. Yeah, yeah. Oh, and just saying, just for anybody who has to do it, please take air travel very, very seriously. It is very, very deleterious. It's very harmful to our health. And you do want to take remedies to, if you've had to sit up for hours and hours and hours, you want to make up for that. You want to breathe more oxygen than usual because you've been in a diminished environment as all kinds of side effects. Just to the travel, the impact of the travel.
Leah Roseman (01:10:45):
Great advice. Well, I was curious in terms of engagement with different types of audiences. I know ETHEL has this longstanding residency at the Balcony bar of the Metropolitan Museum, and even during the pandemic, you had this whole virtual series from there.
Dorothy Lawson (01:11:01):
Yes, yes. Oh man, that has been just Heaven sent. That's been our gift to have that position. The Metropolitan Museum has late opening hours on Friday, and Saturday nights has done for years, 40 some odd years, I think. And they realized very early on that their audience, their public wouldn't think of coming into a museum after dinner. It just wasn't normal. So they incentivized it by making special things happen, doing extra entertainment spaces and concerts. Of course, that's a natural, they have an auditorium. They've always had concerts there. But because they were expanding their hours, they opened what they call their Balcony Bar. It's in the Great Hall, which is the very, very first foyer you walk into. It's huge and glamorous, and over your head, over the main doors is a balcony with their collection of Chinese porcelains, and it's lined with these tables.
(01:12:15):
And we get to sit there and perform music on Friday and Saturday nights. And of course, it's a little bit more like a cabaret. You still have the hubbub from the entrance way. You have people walking through, you have people having conversations and having glasses in their hands, but everyone's in such a good mood. And we play our repertoire. We play ETHEL Music, and they love it. We've gained so many friends that way. We've got to meet people. We talk to them, we visit with them, and they learn more about our music. And we also curate. We program the other performers. We can't be there every week ourselves. So we have other performers, and we program that they meet another audience. It's been just the most wonderfully social engagement, and so good for us. We get to play our music regularly. And for an audience who are in a great mood and are ready to talk about the things they hear, I recommend it to any group, anybody who can find a space where they could have a regular, just an easygoing evening appearance.
(01:13:35):
I know the Beatles did it back in the day. They had regular club spot in Berlin for I think a couple of years, and it was essential to their skillset. They really trained and rehearsed and became the well, the well-formed group they were by the time they hit America, they had lots of experience, and they had been able to explore their interest in American Blues, music, all kinds of stuff. For us, that relationship is fundamental. We just love it. I will say it was because of, we were championed there by the director of what they call Live Arts, being the performing arts at the Metropolitan Museum, a woman called Limor Tomer, who is also very, very old friend of mine. And she came into the museum like 12 years ago in a moment where they wanted to make the collections at this very respected museum, make them more urgently available.
(01:15:00):
How do we get the audience to approach these collections that have lived here for decades? How do we get them to approach them, like something time-based that you got to see it, you got to go. You got to be there. And so her identity at the museum has been creating these much more time-based events in the galleries and in the Chinese court upstairs, in the Spanish courtyard, in the Greek and Roman collection, and in the Temple of Danor, the Egyptian collection, where people are now used to this idea that art can happen everywhere immediately at a given moment. And we are among the artists, she brought in to do things that were much more time-based and relevant, not music that you could hear anywhere or you might've heard for your whole life. This is now music that you will never hear anywhere else. And it's of its time and of its community and of its place.
(01:16:08):
And in fact, it was also her courage and her championship under the pandemic that kept this relationship going because the museum closed for two years. And why would they continue an entertainment contract with people who couldn't even get into the museum? Instead, what they said was, we need to offer things to our community online. We'll have ETHEL continue making these concert offerings. We'll release them at the same time as they would normally start playing on Friday night. And it became two years of activity that we would never have had otherwise. Where we videoed and edited and produced and released, it was over a hundred concerts, and they have acquired now, I think, more than 2 million views. So it was a huge opening for the Met for us, for everybody. And again, we were able, because it was online, we were able to invite artists. We had never met to participate, and we were able to release concert performances by Native Americans. We'd never met by artists in Asia, by artists in the Middle East, by artists in South America, in Mexico. It was just brilliant. We kind of miss it.
Leah Roseman (01:17:47):
And in terms of engaging with the public, you guys have a, well, it's not really that's the topic, but you have this residency at Denison University. It's a liberal arts college. So I was curious what kind of engagement you do with the students. Are there workshops? Are you coaching groups? How does that work?
Dorothy Lawson (01:18:05):
Well, yes, of course, we do work with the music department. We do. That's part, that's a very natural, good connection, easy to do. And we perform works by their composers, by their student composers. We also coach and teach, just directly teach the musicians who are trying to do this kind of performance work. But a big part of that relationship spins from the college's identity as a liberal arts institution where they propose and really demonstrate the value of bringing the arts and sciences closer and closer into communication. And they use us for that largely. We actually, we will walk into classes and neuroscience and classes in chemistry and classes, and in philosophy classes, in geoscience, eco studies. And the teachers, of course are very interested. They're very aware.
(01:19:22):
They've framed it, they're ready. And the class has been sort of brought into an idea that this is a conversation, and sometimes we make music for them or we make music with their ideas, even with their study materials. Sometimes it's just an actual communication across experience, across wisdom, across what are our experiences or learnings in their various fields, and how do we relate to each other? It's wonderful. Again, it's tremendous for us as people, as thinkers, as citizens, citizens of the world, but it's also very, very clearly a step forward in the mission of the liberal arts, getting these communities even sometimes it's rarer, it's more difficult, but bringing the various departments into relationships with each other and letting them build projects that relate. We're busy building another program like that with the city university system in New York City. They have an honors program called Macaulay.
(01:20:45):
Macaulay Honors College, and they are very, this is right up their designation. This is what they're trying to do. They're kind of a leadership program. They're trying to get, the students of every background is a public school, public college, and a lot of their students are maybe first generation college or recent immigrants or financially underserved, and that we can provide some kind of deeper connection and enrichment is thrilling. It is just thrilling. So we're building based on the Denison experience, we're building a new relationship with McCauley, and we're very hopeful that this is something we could continue to travel with and any university system that would like to consider something like that, because it's interesting how many different boxes it checks, and we'd love to be available and more useful for people.
Leah Roseman (01:22:04):
Wonderful. My impetus behind doing this podcast is really to show the world that there's such a breadth and depth to a life and music, and it can mean so many things. And Dorothy Lawson, ETHELString Quartet, just a beautiful example of that.
Dorothy Lawson (01:22:18):
Thank you. Thank you, Leah Roseman, really great to meet you. I'm thrilled we were able to have this conversation.
Leah Roseman (01:22:25):
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. Or you can browse the collection of merch with a very cool, unique, and expressive design from artist Steffi Kelly with notebooks, mugs, shirts, phone cases, and more. I'm an independent podcaster, and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. Have a wonderful week.
