Elisabeth Blair
"I am shocked (though perhaps I shouldn't be) that I hadn't heard of Maud Powell before. Both her life story and her virtuosic, relaxed, and seemingly flawless playing are fiercely inspiring to me. A major component of my creative practice is lifting up the voices and stories of women. To write a piece in honor of an exceptional historical violinist, which will be performed by an exceptional living violinist--and both of them women--is a thrilling and humbling opportunity."
Esse Quam Videri
To Be Rather Than to Seem
The title takes its cue from violinist Maud Powell's Latin motto meaning "To be rather than to seem." In the piece, I interpret this as being versus seeming to be present. In our contemporary world, with screens, headphones, over-packed schedules and long commutes, we are all too often not truly present in any given moment. It may be only with the death of a loved one that, with hindsight, we can see our chronic lack of real presence painfully clearly, and all the opportunities we wasted. Structurally, the piece plays with analog telephone sounds (the busy signal and a disconnect tone) and Westminster Quarters, the clock chime melodies commonly used in clock towers. I believe that these recognizable auditory cues can be used as powerful calls-to-presence for an audience, as they represent so much all at once: the passage of time, mortality, being late, the act of interruption, the reality of missing out, being disconnected from ourselves and others, and the all-too-common experience of getting (or giving) a proverbial busy signal instead of focused engagement. For the sake of the ones we love, let us strive to be present, not merely seem to be.
Elisabeth Blair is a poet, podcaster, composer and multidisciplinary artist. After earning a BA in photography in 2004, she spent many years on the singer/songwriter circuit in Chicago before moving into both free improvisation and formal composition. She received a Specialist Certificate in Music Composition for Film and TV from Berklee in 2015, and from 2015-17 studied music composition part-time at Western Michigan University. Her works have been performed in New York, Melbourne, Canberra, Berlin, and Montreal.
In the last three years she has been an artist-in-residence at Wildacres, ACRE and the Atlantic Center for the Arts (on two occasions, working with improviser Karl Berger and poet Heather McHugh, respectively). In 2017 she was a participant composer at the Toronto Creative Music Lab and was composer-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
Poetry forms an important part of her creative practice and a chapbook of her poems, We He She/It, was published in 2016 by Dancing Girl Press. Her poems have been or will be published in a variety of journals including Feminist Studies, cream city review, Acumen Literary Journal, and S/tick.
An active feminist, she is on the board of the International Alliance for Women in Music and is the founder and director of Listening to Ladies, a podcast featuring interviews with women composers, and Compass New Music, showcasing the music of all those whose gender identities mean they do not benefit from the patriarchy.
Learn more about Elisabeth here