Figuring out “Anyway” required about seven weeks of intense studio time, spread over 18 months, along with months of practicing and fund-raising on my part. Such was the complexity of the work that a technician told me it posed one of the more intricate challenges that he had seen in his many years at IRCAM. For all its pyrotechnics, though, the work has arresting moments of stunning weightlessness as detuned strings at the top of the harp interact with overtones from lower metal strings to proffer slow undulations. The subtle accompanying electronics constitute a duet with the harp, playing with acoustics to make the room feel like it’s moving, even breathing, like a human lung.
OF COURSE, all this takes a lot to put together: having conversations about fund-raising; missing friends’ weddings; lying when a caring partner asks, after a difficult performance, “Are you sure you’re not hurting yourself?”; being honest enough to admit that the loneliness of focusing singularly on promoting and supporting new works of art induces intense depressive episodes.
Six days before the premiere of “Anyway,” I whacked my elbow against a wooden music stand hours before an evening-long dress rehearsal that had been years and tens of thousands of dollars in the making. I made it through that day and the concert, but I wondered whether I’d regain feeling in the ring finger and pinkie in my left hand. The next morning, it was no better, and a friend sternly looked at me over breakfast and told me firmly, but kindly, “It didn’t have to be this way.”
I powered through the next few months, but on the night I was to perform another new work, the numbness in my left hand returned. Soon, I was back in Paris, where I met with an orthopedist who kept a life-size poster of Alain Delon on the wall. I was told I had a pinched ulnar nerve, which would require a two-month break from the harp.
Although I recovered, it took a while for me to learn the lesson that while I can challenge the limitations surrounding the harp, I can only push so hard. And some things are beyond my control. I was planning to bring “Anyway” to my 92NY recital for its New York premiere, but the colleague from IRCAM who coded the electronics was not able to obtain a visa to travel to the United States. There was no other choice but to program something else.
In instances like that, it can be difficult to maintain energy or garner excitement when so much can potentially go wrong. Fortunately, composers are as much of a lifeline as my family, and have helped me learn to ride the waves. After an idealistic stretch in Paris, they helped me get back to New York, somewhat with my tail between my legs. Now, I’m taking a bit of space, and starting a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, before the next round of commissions in 2026. There may be some new constraints on time, but if there’s anything a decade of working with composers has taught me, it’s that boundaries are what force us to be creative.
