The following interview is a continuation of the first of four journal posts, which will be a transcription of a conversation between Trade Winds Ensemble Artistic Director and Founder Midori Samson and Seungmi Cho, PhD candidate in social work at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Seungmi Cho: Can you tell me more about the nature of voice as a musician? I ask because empirical research tries to be voice-neutral. I think music allows for a distinct voice; it really does destabilize the idea that truth is discovered. I think appreciating voice could make a case for knowledge as translation of voice versus knowledge as discovery of something that didn’t exist as knowledge prior to its discovery by the researcher.
Midori Samson: I actually think that music and the way music education operates—at least the way I was brought up in it—totally eliminates voice and oppresses individuality, having opinions, and talking about truth. I think music—again in the small corner of music making that I was brought up in—is really oppressive. It is really about preserving tradition, following a set of rules, and getting really good at following those rules.
S: So is it about limiting individual voice for purposes of stewarding the traditional voice? Or is it voice-neutral and this is a standard that needs to be preserved?
M: I think it’s to preserve the tradition… We’re supposed to be…
S: Stewards of a collective voice?
M: No… of a composer’s voice. My job when I play Shostakovich, for example, is to follow exactly his markings, know about his life so I can do what he intended. We also have to learn all the technique and fundamentals of our instruments so that we can serve what the composer intended.
S: Oh, so within this paradigm, it’s the composer’s voice that you serve, and the emphasis does not seem to be on a relational process between the composer’s visions, and the musician’s voice, and maybe instrumentation or…
M: I don't think it’s going back and forth at all. I don't think I’m part of it.
S: Classical music is not a relational process…
M: I suppose it’s relational between me and a conductor maybe. The conductor is interpreting the composer’s voice and I’m there to do what the conductor is telling me to do. So maybe there’s something between conductor and composer? But I’m always the steward for what someone else wants.
S: Which is so interesting because if you think of the historical context in which it is great white men composing, then generation after generation, people of color, or poor people, or women, are put in the position to just preserve white men’s voices versus cultivate their own.
M: Definitely, except that women and people of color are not as present even in the role of “musician”. Bassoon, for example, was forever an instrument for white German men. The makers of my bassoons resisted for so long making the keys smaller or closer together. It’s very recent thing to make bassoons slightly smaller and put keys closer together as to finally include people outside of white men. So it's a new thing for us to be included at all.
S: That’s super interesting. The hegemony of white men in classical music… oh…
M: This is why I feel that the one place I can truly be creative or have autonomy over my musical activity is in TWE (Trade Winds Ensemble) —where we’re trying to destabilize this system that we were all brought up in, and destabilize The Orchestra. We love playing in orchestra, but we’re sick of the colonialist tendencies that it has as an institution. So we’re trying to build curricula where the number one priority is upholding our students’ creative voices; letting the students be the composers is the way we do that. We’re still serving their voices as the instrumentalists, just like we would with Shostakovich. But at least we’re serving the voices and stories of people we actually want to be celebrating!
S: It seems that the practice of antiracist imaginings is critical. If TWE didn’t cultivate imagining—a space informed by antiracism—then there is no space for children, or your ideas, or your critical questions.
M: Mmmhmm. Isn’t that fucked up?
S: It’s super fucked up. You know I encountered this as a struggle with friendships in my early 20’s because I would often agree to do things with my white friends and they would think those were plans but… they weren’t. I thought we were just having fun pretending we were going to do them. So I think I’m too confident with my imaginings as being a form of reality. I need to cultivate imaginings as a reality as a person of color under conditions of racism. But being able to articulate this to myself helped me communicate better with people because I could say, “actually I’m not going to do that, it just feels real to imagine it.” I do that all the time.
M: Can you give an example? What do you mean?
S: Let’s talk tangibly. I talk about being in Korea as the greatest place ever. In reality, I know that Korean people criticize my accent; I know that I'm too tan; I know I’m “puffy” as they say. So I land in Korea and I’m immediately annoyed. But when I’m here under crushing whiteness, I always imagine going back to Korea because it gives me great comfort. To think: I get to go there and eat that food and be surrounded by my people. Then I get there and I’m annoyed. But the imagining itself creates a location where I can exist and escape white supremacy; I can re-energize in my antiracist imaginings to engage in the present material-reality.
M: You kind of have to do that in your research too…
S: I’m thinking about my dissertation research and I’m thinking about how I can carve out antiracism in my day. Part of that might be to journal to my Korean mother. She has since passed away and I’m not fluent in Korean, so it is an imagined space. However I can create a material time in my day (say, 12–1pm) where I just write to my mother (and that is in contrast to the idea that I don't have a Korean mother, which was the narrative under which I was adopted!)… But I have to “science” this all a bit more.
M: That’s how I feel about my work. It’s feelings and imagination and then I have to “science” it. But maybe doing a tangible-material activity gets closer… do you think we have to do that part?
S: Well I want to approach it like this: I want to propose this idea of allowing adopted children of color to explore their antiracist imaginings. This is possibly an intervention that adoptive families can work together on with children.
M: Is that a new idea?
S: It is, and it’s something that I am sort of bringing from my activist roots and I’d like to apply to myself as I do my research. I will do this exercise in antiracism-journaling that is located in my antiracist imaginings where I can write to my Korean mother. I will do some coding too, like I also might have another journal where I write to another person and sort of look at what is different or similar, see what isn’t there and what is when I’m talking to my Korean mother versus when I’m talking to my white mother.
M: And that’s what makes it auto-ethnography.
S: Yes, because I’ll also be engaging in a process of critical self-reflexivity of what is emerging.
M: That is SO artistic.
S: It is. I think because I’m an adopted Korean and was assimilated to English and my voice has been obscured by white supremacy, asserting a voice actually is a form of antiracism in itself. It wouldn't be appropriate for me to use the voice-neutral empirical research voice because I would argue that is situated in the hegemony of whiteness.
M: Definitely.
S: So to cultivate my artistic voice destabilizes that. It also creates a space for previous artistic production by adopted Koreans. My community has used memoir in particular. I think using auto-ethnography—a blend of ethnography and autobiography-narrative—can help make space for those memoirs too. That seems consistent to social work’s commitment to social justice.
M: This all sounds like an activity that TWE would do for our students, this idea of “imagine a place and journal” or “write to someone”. That’s why it feels so artistic to me. Then that writing can easily turn into a song or a piece of music.
S: Yes! Also, I use letter writing because that’s an important part of Korean adoption communities in that when I started my search process for my family in Korea the agency required me to write a letter to the family. It’s so archaic. But for any adopted Korean, one of those first steps to reunion is writing the letter that might not even go in the file or may never get picked up.
M: Letter writing has so much history in other parts of Asia, too. I’m thinking about my family’s culture and Japanese and Filipino women as picture brides or immigration based on matchmaking through letters. Interesting.
S: I think letters are especially important to diasporic communities because you have to send and hope that it reaches someone.
M: Wow. Everything you think about and everything you do is a version of antiracism.
S: Yes. I would like antiracism to permeate my research not just as a topic, but as method and as analysis. I will think carefully and obsessively and surgically about this. I get frustrated with this notion that someone who has an artistic point of view doesn't have a rigorous and careful point of view. So I go in with such intention.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
