ITEA Journal Volume 49 Number 1 (Fall 2021)

back to contents
Increase or decrease font size: |

The Barbara York Project Part 3
By AJ Beau & Travis Scott

Welcome back to the final installment of a series of articles on the life and works of our treasured composer friend, Barbara York. Prior to Barbara's passing, Travis Scott, AJ Beu, and Gail Robertson had the pleasure of interviewing and documenting Barbara's life, career, and some of her works. Please refer to the ITEA Journal 48, No. 2 (Winter 2021) and Journal 48, No. 4 (Summer 2021) for previous articles.

Barbara York in the late 1980s

In this article, we will discuss How Beautiful (2009) written in memory of Eli Reuben Brown, Sonata for Euphonium and Piano: Child's Play (2007) written for Steffan Michel Thurman, and Sonata for Euphonium and Piano No. 2: Tidings of Comfort and Joy (2012) written for Ryan Mathews. Please join us as we continue to discover the "behind the scenes" discussion about Barbara York and her music.

How Beautiful (2009)

AB: You wrote How Beautiful in remembrance of Matthew and Kristy Brown's child, Eli, who died within hours of being born. I noticed you attached a biblical scripture, Isaiah 52:7. How do you handle memorializing some of the worst and some of the best times in people's lives? Are you a method composer who tries to get inside and live the brain of the characters?

Barbara at Piano (need to give photo credit to Andra Stefanon)

BY: I'm an empath. I'm not a method person. I do get inside the brain to a certain extent, or the emotions, but I do that with the idea of 'How can I help in this situation?' The idea was that they could explore that feeling of grief, or sometimes anger, and then release it. How Beautiful was a little different. It was one of the few pieces that I have thrown out starts repeatedly. If I get a start for a piece, it's going to stick, usually. With this piece, I threw out start after start after start because I didn't know what to do. Matt and Kristy had written me emails as I like people to do. I said 'How? This is such a difficult thing.' Kristy told me they knew Eli only had a short life expectancy and that they wanted him to experience only love. The interesting thing in this situation was that they were there in the room for the two most amazing, yet transcendent experiences: birth and death.

What I wanted to do was put a bubble around the experience. When you're there as somebody is dying, and also with birth, it's like this holy place. A holy place that you're in, away from the rest of the world, and it's just itself. It's a sacred space. So, I finally decided on the text and once I had decided on it they said they didn't want this to be an unhappy piece or to be about grief. What a difficult situation to write about something that isn't just unhappy. It was because of them [Matt and Kristy], especially what Kristy wrote to me, that gave me so much inspiration. I was moved.

I remembered when my mother had died that there was this bubble in the room and nobody else was there. I was in a sacred place. That's when I decided on the text of How Beautiful. This little person had come into the world as a peace-bringer and nothing happened outside of this little bubble. When I finally got the start of the piece right, it was the hardest thing to keep it simple and to not let myself get too complicated. I learned from this piece that writing simple music is way harder than writing complicated music. This is one of my all-time favorite pieces because of that. It meant a lot to me, and I learned from it as a composer to not be clever, not be too emotional, but to just let it be there.

Sonata for Euphonium and Piano : Child's Play (2007)

GR: Many of us want to know if the repeated D's in the first movement stood for the letters in Demondrae Thurman's name?

BY: No, that would be too clever for me. I just liked the key. I thought it sounded bright and urgent as opposed to the keys of D-flat or E-flat, which seem to be more mellow keys. It just seemed bright and 'Here we go!'

TS: With multi-movement pieces, do you compose the movements in their published order?

BY: Mostly I do, but then there's sometimes that I will just not get a handle on one of the movements, so I'll leave it until later. This one followed a story for me, so it was ok to write in that order.

You know, it was for Demondrae and Jenny's son, Steffan. I've always been pleased with that piece. It was really funny, because Demondrae didn't know who I was. I met him when I was at the 2006 ITEA Awards Banquet where I won one of the Harvey Phillips Awards for Excellence in Composition. Demondrae played at one of the concerts and I listened to him and said 'I want to write for that. I love that sound.' So, when my publisher Bryan [Doughty] put out a consortium for four pieces, one of them was for a euphonium sonata. I wrote to Bryan and said I'd like to write for Demondrae Thurman, and he said, 'Oh! That's interesting. Demondrae and his wife have just had a baby.' So I wrote to Demondrae and said I have a consortium from Bryan at Cimarron, and one of them is for a Euphonium Sonata - I'd like to write it for you. He was very polite and wrote back. He probably didn't know who the hell I was. He knew I'd won an award, but he'd never played any of my music. I think he was going: 'Ok? I hope this girl can write.'

Getting back to the story, Demondrae and his wife, who is French Canadian, were having a baby. [In this sonata] I'm depicting this story where she goes into labor and 'We've got to go now!' Everybody is rushing out of the house, and he [Demondrae] is going: 'Oh my God. I'm not ready for this.' Which, of course, no husband ever is. Women don't have a choice about that, they just go into labor. They don't get to choose when it's going to happen, and the father almost is never, in his own mind, ready for it. I went to these thoughts: the thoughts of what they were going through at the time. This sonata includes the blending of French Canadian, American, and African American styles of folk music. The only tune that is actually quoted is a French-Canadian piece called Les Raftsmen. It's about the raftsmen going down the Ottawa River which has lots of rapids, so it's very fast. On the barges, they would bang on a metal ring to let people know they were coming and to get out of the way. The folk song is Patois-French, which is half-English and half-French. Laissez passers means let them pass, let the raftsmen pass.

So the sonata's first movement borrows just a snippet of Les Raftsmen, but it's like: 'Let me pass! I've got to get through here! The baby's coming. Let's go! We've got to go now!' Later in the movement, we switch over to a tune that is a little reminiscent of Had I Wings Like Noah's/Nora's Dove, I'd Fly Away to the One I Love . Here, the father is going: 'Oh my God, I've got to get out of here. I'm not ready for this.' The mother is going: 'Let's go, let's go, let's go!' This slower middle section is influenced by African American music and is bluesy. Here, he's going: 'It's a hard life, baby. You don't know what you're getting into here, you know? I'm going to look after you, but I'm going to teach you about the tough parts of life, because it's not all roses here.'

Stefanoni, Andra. "Barbara at Piano." October, 2015. Pittsburg Community Theater Archives, Pittsburg, KS.

I really like the second movement. It's very beautiful and another example of the bubble we talked about in How Beautiful. You have that moment that is separate from other things and separate from time: that's what I was doing for Demondrae with the birth of his son. He stopped panicking and worrying and thinking and doing all of that stuff that fathers do when they have children - and just took the baby and there it was. The third movement is Steffan. I asked him later on to tell me about Steffan, and he said, 'He's really energetic and he just laughs and laughs when I play trills.' So it's this jazzy, boppy movement with lots of energy and trills.

Sonata No. 2 for Euphonium and Piano: Tidings of Comfort and Joy (2012)

BY: Travis, I think that you should tell us a little about why you led the consortium for this piece. Tell us a little bit about Ryan [Mathews] (1983-2011), because everything that I learned about him, I basically got from you.

TS: Ryan was a dear friend of mine I met at the University of Akron who lived with a condition called Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita (Type 151). For Ryan, this resulted in him using a wheelchair his entire life. At some point a big white van (that he dubbed 'white lightning') was modified so that he could drive. Unfortunately, just five months after earning his Master's in Divinity at the Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, he had a car accident and passed away from complications of that accident. There was an ordination performed at his memorial service, so he is officially Reverend Mathews. I knew I wanted to commission a work for his memory, and I knew almost instantly that I wanted you to write it!

BY: Travis gave me a lot of ideas and a lot of thoughts about Ryan that I was able to use in the piece. I noticed just today there are some thematic references to A Caged Bird, and I had not noticed that before. Ryan was, in fact, a caged bird in his wheelchair.

TS: Tell us about the first movement. I thought the reference to Plato's cave was perfect.

BY: That was one of my intuitive things also, because I didn't even know that he was so interested in philosophy when I wrote it. The Plato's cave analogy describes all of these prisoners in a cave, chained so that they can only face a wall. Behind them is both a fire and people walking across in front of this fire like puppeteers, making shadow puppets on the wall. The prisoners think that these shadows on the wall are a reality. One of them escapes and goes out of the cave into the big world, and it takes a long time for him to adjust his eyes to the sun. Then he begins to realize that this is the real world, and all these people in the cave are being tricked into thinking that they're watching the real world, when they're only just watching a bunch of shadows. The shadows are being manipulated by other people and the prisoners are not seeing reality. They're seeing a manipulation of reality that isn't even truthful and they won't listen to the truth teller.

I saw Ryan as somebody like that who escaped the cave, and in wanting to be a minister, wanted to go back into the cave and explain to people that there was a much bigger, more truthful world and that they weren't seeing it. They were confined to their vision. It was true in Plato's day and it's true now. I saw Ryan as the person who escaped, came back, and nobody would listen to him, but he still wanted to try.

We should also discuss the optional bass clarinet part. That came about later on because Ryan's stepfather [Richard Thomason] played the bass clarinet and he wanted to participate. So I actually wrote two separate versions of the first movement and the epilogue: one with bass clarinet, and one without bass clarinet. I actually like it with the bass clarinet, but I think it's very impractical.

TS: Tell us about the second movement, "Psalm of Peace".

Barbara at Organ (NO CAPTION)

BY: I think the two psalms I was thinking of were "The Lord is My Shepherd" and "I Will Lift Up Thine Eyes Unto the Hills." There's a section in the middle that gets a little darker; it has a little more pain in it. The first part is a little more like "The Lord Is My Shepherd."

TS: The third movement, "White Lightning", embodied his optimism and his laughter.

BY: What a daredevil! Yes, the "White Lightning" is him in the van. I love that movement. It's really fast and jazzy and it's a big favorite of mine.

TS: Do you want to discuss why you circled back to the beginning music at the end (in the epilogue movement)?

BY: I saw him [Ryan] as the person who found more and wanted to make people understand how little they were seeing. Now he's gone and he's only seeing more. He's not stuck with the cave or the people in the cave anymore. He's out in the big world, I guess.

The Legacy of Barbara York

Barbara on Brightsand Lake in Northern Saskatchewan

AB: What does your musical legacy look like or what would you want it to look like?

BY: This is a problematic question because when you're a composer or even an author, you don't even know if you have a legacy. It's not the same as presidents who are already historical figures, who know what their place is in history, and are trying to at least accomplish some things so that they will be remembered for. I have no idea if my music will even be played in twenty years, let alone longer than that. My greatest idea of success would be that I was still being played, that I would still be, in some way, part of standard repertoire for people. Because in that sense, it means that I would have some legacy.

Barbara and her husband, Joe York

I feel like my music has been useful to people, especially low brass players, in terms of filling in holes in the repertoire, and also useful to people in terms of giving them an expression for things and emotions that they didn't have an expression for. Other than that, I have no idea if I even have a legacy.

GR: I don't think there's another female composer who's written more for the tuba and euphonium than you. I would say that you're certainly on the best path to go down in our community's history. You've written and continue to write for us. We are looking at almost 20 years that you've devoted.

AB: At the very beginning of this, Gail was talking about how you came along and filled this hole. From what I have seen in my short life, Barbara York has become an entire genre of low brass playing. What's unique about that is that you're not a tuba or euphonium player, and you're not even married to one of us.

GR: To me, what you have changed for our instruments is that you have shown the players, and other composers, that you can write beautiful melodies that have hidden difficulties. You create a sense that, even for the first time reading the piece, you feel like by the end of it that you've known this "person" [or piece] for a long time. So I think that's the legacy from what I see: you write beautiful things that have hidden challenges. You teach the musicians and their audiences how to be very musical people.

TS: Don't worry about your music being performed. That's going to happen, Barbara. I know that hardly a conference or recital goes by without the music of Barbara York, and there is a reason for that: we love to play your music and the audience loves to listen and hear your music.

Young Barbara

I've never wanted to be anything else than a musician, including a

composer. Never wanted to. Never have liked having to do anything else to

earn a paycheck. This is what I always wanted to be."

-Barbara York (February 23, 1949 - November 6, 2020)

Rest in peace, our sweet friend.

Dr. AJ Beu is a Music Educator for the Wichita Public Schools (Wichita, KS), and Principal Tubist with the Bartlesville Symphony Orchestra. Dr. Gail Robertson is Associate Professor of Tuba and Euphonium at the University of Central Arkansas (Conway, AR) and Past-President of the International Tuba and Euphonium Association. Dr. Travis Scott is Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Low Brass at Xavier University of Louisiana (New Orleans, LA).

ITEA News Headlines