Composer Andrea Clearfield Presents Tibetan Recording Project

Two time Wurlitzer Foundation resident will share her field recordings, discuss their influences on her life and work, 

and perform her own compositions as examples

With Nancy Laupheimer (alto flute) and Heidi Svoboda (gongs)

The ancient Lo Monthang horse culture, only open to foreigners since 1990, is one of the last remaining traditional Tibetan enclaves, and the highest kingdom in the world. 

The trip to Nepal to make recordings, supported by grants from The Rubin Foundation, American Composers Forum, and The University of the Arts, was part of a wider effort to help preserve the music, dance, medicine, religion, language, and art from the region. Just getting there was arduous, requiring several planes to reach Kathmandu, then two smaller planes before horse-packing for several days over 10 mountain passes to reach her destination. Some of the research required rapelling off cliffs into caves, an experience Clearfield says she found terrifying.  It was only her love of high-mountain hiking that conditioned her for the trek.

John Sanday, a leading architectural conservationist who had been restoring the frescos in Lo Monthang’s monasteries, suggested that Clearfield record the court songs of royal court singer Tashi Tsering. They’ve been an integral part of festivals held at royal court, from weddings to horse races, but in recent years, no young people in the region have been interested in learning these songs.

Clearfield says the arduous journey ultimately changed her as a person and as a composer. Numerous compositions since her trips to Nepal have been influenced by the melodies and instruments she collected there.

In all, 130 songs that had never been documented before were recorded and the research is now part of the permanent collection at the University of Cambridge’s World Oral Literature Project which is dedicated to the preservation of dying cultures.

Clearfield sent cassette tapes of the songs back to the village along with boom boxes and batteries, making Tashi Tsering’s songs available in the local library where the repertoire might be taught to children.

“This has always been about going forward with respect and honoring this traditional music,” Clearfield says. “Something has shifted in me as a result of these travels. My interest in bringing people together and bridging cultures has deepened.”

When she played an early version of one of her pieces for Tashi Tsering in 2010, he told her, “This is a place where your world and my world meet.”

It’s that kind of response that has helped fuel Clearfield’s new body of compositional work, incorporating Tibetan instruments and melodies discovered on her treks to the Himalayas. Pieces like the large-scale cantata, “Tse Go La” (at the threshold of this life), reflect those discoveries. “Tse Go La” was co-commissioned by The Mendelssohn Club and the Pennsylvania Girl choir, and premiered with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia in 2012 with subsequent performances in New York, New Jersey, and Texas.

At the end of the presentation there will Q and A session and ample opportunity to stay afterwards and speak personally with Andrea.

To find out more about Dr. Clearfield’s work, and get a view into how it is inspired by her desire to help preserve Tibetan culture, join us at Enchanted Mountain Performance Space:

114 Los Pandos (see the map below)

7:00 PM, Sunday, August 30, 2015

(The above information is taken from an article in The Monadnock Ledger-Transcript published on Thursday, June 26, 2014 during Andrea's residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire)

Watch a video of Andrea's composition Shar Ki Ri (Mountain to the East) 

based on a traditional Mustangi song with images from her treks.

Read the article in the Taos News' cultural magazine Tempo by clicking on the image.

Andrea Clearfield is an award-winning composer of music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance, and multimedia collaborations. She has been praised by the New York Times for her “graceful tracery and lively, rhythmically vital writing”, the Philadelphia Inquirer for her “compositional wizardry” and “mastery with large choral and instrumental forces”, the L.A. Times for her “fluid and glistening orchestration” and by Opera News for her “vivid and galvanizing” music of “timeless beauty”. Her works are performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. Among her 100 works are ten cantatas including one for The Philadelphia Orchestra. Dr. Clearfield is a recipient of the 2014 Copland House Award where she lived and composed in Aaron Copland's home. She has held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Wurlitzer Foundation among others. She was on the faculty at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts from 1986 - 2011 teaching composition and interdisciplinary performance art. She is active as a pianist, performing in the contemporary music ensemble, Relâche and with many ensembles including the Court of the Dalai Lama. She is also the founder and host of the renowned Philadelphia Salon concert series featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music since 1986 and winner of Philadelphia Magazine’s 2008 “Best of Philadelphia” award. Dr. Clearfield is currently writing an opera on the life of the 11th Tibetan yogi, Milarepa, to libretto by Jean-Claude van Itallie and Lois Walden commissioned by Gene Kaufman and Terry Eder for premiere in NYC. More at www.andreaclearfield.com  

Nancy Laupheim and Heidi Svoboda