original proposal: 3. if selected, how would you use your fellowship?

One of my long-standing interests as a student of music has been what happens when different musical traditions – and different people– encounter one another. This was the backbone of my junior project—a string trio that sought to highlight the synchronicities between folk musics from widely divergent sources (I include this piece and a slightly longer explanation as a supplementary item). Paul Lansky’s music evoked a more recent passion: the way noise can illuminate and even empower its place of origin. This idea has led me all over the world; last summer, during a Princeton in Asia fellowship, I collected ambient noise in China and examined the tonal music of Chinese languages. For my senior thesis, I am arranging the ambient noise of rural Ghana into Ewe dance forms to highlight the seamless tapestry of art and nature that so vivifies West African culture.

Next year, I want to return home to the land and music that originally captivated me, and pursue a major composition project focusing on overlooked American communities and the highways that connect them. The road has always exerted a powerful sway over me. I was the first of my friends to acquire a driver's license. Although the drive to school was a long one, I didn't mind. I enjoyed being on roads, and the highway to Harrisburg led me through interesting territory. Every day, I passed the Harrisburg City Incinerator, a three decade-old behemoth of steel and soot generally regarded as the largest source of dioxin-based air pollution in the nation. The train lines that import its trash separate the ghettos of Alison Hill from the rest of the city with clattering rails and screaming whistles before they disappear into the incinerator's maw. From the bridge over the tracks, you can hear the thing hum.

In the opposite direction is the Campbelltown Fire House, a long-deserted station converted into a venue for live music. For years, I played bass and sang in a bluegrass band, on the first Friday of every month, jamming with other amateur musicians. By day they were construction workers, shopkeepers, toll collectors and farmers; at night, they drew guitars, mandolins and banjos from their trucks and became musicians. Their voices were heavy with the long consonants of our rural Pennsylvanian accent, and their instrument cases would bang open the front door with a crack and a swoosh as they stomped into the old brick building's long front hall.

The noises of the Incinerator and the firehouse are sonically as well as culturally interesting. Today, I hear their sounds with new ears, and they sound like music. Also, after exploring cross-cultural musical encounters in my academic work and struggling to redefine my sense of nationality at home, I know that the encounter between very different people is one of the central things that makes America so compelling. Our country is a hotbed of such encounters, and this is evident in the music it produces. In the 19th century, when John Harris was building the railroad that eventually led to the Harrisburg City Incinerator, his workers were poor immigrants; Irish, Italians, and newly freed African-Americans. They were railway workers by day, but at night, they drew out instruments and became musicians. Then, however, these instruments – so familiar and reliably combined in my band – had hardly been played together before; the Irish brought guitars, the Italians brought mandolins, and the Africans brought banjos. What followed was the sort of musical encounter that fascinates me, and what it produced was bluegrass music. Those workers are long gone, but I can still hear their railroad from the bridge to Alison hill, and I can still hear their music at the Campbelltown Fire House.

Today, I see America as a taut string, still reverberating with every encounter that has occurred on its shores. History books tell of presidents and generals who shaped our history, but there is another history that you have to listen in order to hear: it's in the sound of train tracks and bluegrass bands. It's scattered out across the American road, and isn’t often heard unless you put your ear really close. I want to go out and record these sounds, and make music of them.

This country is full of such incinerators and firehouses. There is Manhattan’s “Unforgotten Voices,” a band of homeless musicians who meet at the Ethical Culture Society Shelter to share music, stories, and support. There are the people of Black Hills Reservation in South Dakota, where my friend and teacher Randy Gutwein taught for many years, who continue to struggle to reconcile old traditions and music with a radically new world that is rarely receptive to their heritage. There are coteries of itinerant musicians on the streets of Berkley, California, some of them longtime drug addicts, some of them holdouts from the upheavals of the sixties, and some of them privileged college dropouts seeking to cause an upheaval of their own, all indistinguishably mixed in a clash of djembes and half-broken guitars. These are just a few of the places I hope to visit. They may seem fringe communities, on the edge of the American experience and interesting only in their novelty. But to me, they represent vital encounters, and thus stand at the very center of the American experience – beating hearts connected by highway arteries. I hope through my music to highlight this centrality and in doing so foster a sort of artistic empowerment.

There are no schools for the kind of music I am writing. I have had to improvise and experiment on how to put my creative ideas into concrete practice, and have been learning steadily throughout my travels. I’ve tried to compose and record while on unrelated fellowships or jobs with haphazard equipment and little experience. In Ghana, I discovered that a standard minidisk player and a microphone from Radioshack produces only about a 20% yield of usable recordings. In China, I learned that in order to really dig into the environment I was recording, it was necessary to have the time to compose on location. Such limitations caused repeated setbacks in my compositional process, but I worked with what I had.

By now I’ve figured out how to make this kind of music the right way, but it takes greater resources of time and money than are currently available to me. A Dale fellowship would allow me to purchase the equipment I need and give me the time and support to devote myself fully to composition, working on-site and in the moment. Really, a fellowship such as this one may be the only way I can effectively write the music I want to write. I hope to produce a piece that will be central to my development as a composer, marking the turning point from warm-up student pieces to longer, serious, independent work. It will be the keystone of my developing portfolio, and the raw material I collect will remain an active and valuable resource throughout my career as a composer.

There are 160,000 miles of numbered highway in America. As next year's Martin Dale fellow, I hope to ride them and write their music.

original proposal: 2. discuss how your involvement in a recent activity has influenced you

Much of my education in music takes place outside the classroom, so for this essay, I'll focus on something entirely unmusical. Through my sophomore year of college, I worked hard on John Kerry's presidential campaign, phone banking, canvassing, and organizing rallies. Somehow I never really considered the possibility that I might lose; instead, I focused more on what I would do after helping to elect a candidate about whom I felt deeply ambivalent. I was spared the issue, however, when America instead elected a president about whom I felt no ambivalence. Instead, I felt a need to reconsider how I understood my national identity.

It's always been important to me to be American. When my fifth grade class rose to drone the pledge of allegiance, I really meant it. For me, the American dream was not a thick wad of money or even a house with a white picket fence and a tire swing out back. Instead, it was the belief that people coming here could be united with one another as citizens because they shared a common idea about human dignity, about freedom, about the rights of man. That this idea could transcend divisions of origin, color, and creed seemed something well worth my allegiance and more.

I now doubt that this dream was ever more than a dream, but it remains a beautiful one. If it ever was a valid reading of America – and I'd still like to think it has been – then ours is a nation destined for trouble from the beginning, like my own naïve but heartfelt patriotism. Growing up, I found myself faced with inadequacies and inequalities that mocked my ideals. But as the 2004 election approached, I fell into the red-state / blue-state mentality, deciding that my dream belonged to a camp that was faced off against an entirely different conception of America that had more to do with keeping gay people unmarried and black people poor than with things like human dignity and the rights of man. Returning to central Pennsylvania to find whole towns wreathed in Bush/Cheney signs, I felt confused, hurt, and alienated from my home.

This feeling exploded when my side lost. After many dark hours, I realized that my narrow-minded attitude towards my own convictions and the ways I applied them were even more ridiculous than the naïveté of the original dream itself. National identity is not a static, reliably definable thing; and if it is meaningful, it is probably also not entirely comfortable. It's something to be struggled with, hashed out, chopped up and reassembled. I am an American, and I take all the pride, regret, shame, and hope that goes with that. I'm not required to recite the pledge of allegiance anymore, but I live it in a way that is more active and consequential than I could have understood before.

original proposal: 1. what was you most significant intellectual experience at princeton?

It's of course hard to isolate a single most significant intellectual experience at Princeton, but one would undoubtedly be my exposure to the music of Paul Lansky. He was an early pioneer in computer music, but while other composers were interested in what new sounds computers could make, Paul was invested in what they could do with old ones. He took everyday noises – passing cars in “Night Traffic,” clattering dishes in “Tables Clear,” or spoken syllables in “Idle Chatter” – and organized them into elaborate pieces of music.

I first encountered Paul as a student in his composition workshop. I was immediately captivated by his music, but lacked the technical skills to pursue his method. Instead, I followed his advice and continued to explore the acoustic material that was more familiar to me, resolving to let the music of noises wait until I could focus on it in my independent work. But Paul's ideas involve a different way of experiencing sound, and simply thinking about writing noise as music completely revolutionized my auditory universe. I began to hear everything as a musical instrument: the staccato scribbling of pencils, the reverberant thud of steps in a stairwell, the way in which the steady rustle of leaves pans from left to right with a gust of wind. I remember spending an afternoon devoted to discerning the different sounds made by throwing berries into Carnegie Lake.

While Paul tends to value sound extracted from its setting–scoring the noise of kitchen utensils so they sound like a symphony orchestra – I became more invested in the ways in which sound illuminates its native environment. Pursuing African studies, I became increasingly disillusioned with conventional methods of international development, and I began to speculate on how sounds could become agents of empowerment for their places of origin. Although Africa was widely discussed in the West, its own voices were largely unheard, and so the continent could be characterized in terms that did not reflect it. Bringing its distinctive soundscape directly into my own music seemed like a way of both celebrating it and letting it speak for itself.

I'm still learning how to write this music, and I'm still thinking hard about its applications, but discovering its possibility radically changed my experience at Princeton, the direction in which I see myself moving as a musician and a composer, and the way in which I interact with and conceive of the world around me.