West Virginia native Jess Baldwin’s new EP Anima explores themes of finding her own original inner voice after years of self-repression.
“Home is where one starts from.” ~TS Eliot
Anima, from the Latin meaning “spirit,” is an apt title for the journey Jess Baldwin has taken to find her personal musical expression.
It may seem odd in this age of social media sharing saturation that a musician would struggle with personal expression and yet this is exactly what happened to the Bluefield native.
Growing up in a family where religious observance was taught and strictly practiced (the family was in church four times a week), as a child she felt that her own feelings or thoughts were not as important as “the word of God, God’s will” and therefore were not expressed, but suppressed for fear that she was being “selfish.”
To compound this feeling, mental illness in the family made her feel a personal responsibility to “help the family be OK as much as possible.” She says that there was not an overt “you’re not allowed to have something to say,” but this was her interpretation within the family dynamic.
In her twenties, her inner voice began to emerge. First by joining bands, playing covers and then taking interest in arranging (a re-harmonization of Somewhere Over the Rainbow can be found here) and eventually songwriting.
Anima is her new EP where six original tracks highlight her jazzy, soulful with a touch of pop songwriting style. The moods vary from quiet and reflective to joyous bursts of anthem-like choruses, but it is her tender, warm and expressive voice that draws us in. (Mountain Stage’s Ryan Kennedy is the guitarist on this album.)
To be sure, Jess Baldwin has made a journey of self-discovery and has come out confident, in full color with all of her wildness intact.
The digital revolution has created new outlets for long-form journalism, music and storytelling as print publications close down. One example is the website WestVirginiaVille.com.
Douglas Imbrogno created the site to feature West Virginia creatives. Later today, he is going to premiere a new music video by Mountain Stage bandleader Ron Sowell called “Be The Change.”
Imbrogno and Sowell spoke with Eric Douglas about the project and the song debut.
Douglas: Explain to me what WestVirginiaVille is.
Imbrogno: WestVirginiaVille is a multimedia magazine that is able to do everything from regular print feature stories to short documentaries, music, videos, photo essays. It’s really a multimedia magazine on the web.
Douglas: So why did you create WestVirginiaVille in the first place? What need are you filling?
Imbrogno: One of the first things that goes when newspapers contract and shrink and their staffs are decimated, is feature writing, long-form feature stories of the interesting people that make up a place where people live. And that’s a great loss. There is a need for stories about the way that life is lived on a daily basis; why it’s worth living in West Virginia; why people stick it out in a place with some seriously benighted politics at times.
Douglas: So rather than a print magazine, you have all the advantages of moving imagery and sound on top of everything else, plus no printing costs.
Imbrogno: I hope eventually to spin off special edition print publications because that’s where I came from, growing up reading everything from the New York Review of Books to Esquire. That’s why I wanted to become a writer. But we’re also able to do things like short documentaries and we just bought a drone. So we’re doing a lot of really cool drone photography in West Virginia. It’s really amazing because we’re seeing images and views of West Virginia that I’ve never seen and I think most people have never seen.
Douglas: You’ve got a new video coming out. Tell me why this was an important direction to go for WestVirginiaVille.
Imbrogno: Ron came to us with this song called “Be The Change” and I just am in love with this song. I’ve probably heard this song 40 times and I still love it. WestVirginiaVille exists to demonstrate that world class work can be created with these new digital tools in a place like West Virginia.
Douglas: Ron, tell me about the song.
Courtesy WestVirginiaVille
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Ron Sowell sings in a scene from the music video Be The Change.
Sowell: This song came to me out of the political turmoil of last year, and it was an inspiration about “what can I do as a person to change the world or change my little corner of the world?” I felt compelled to interject this into the national conversation.
Douglas: What do you want people to take away from the song?
Sowell: Ideally, I want them to reconsider how they relate to other people. That they would consider not judging people and be more accepting and to listen to each other.
Douglas: Is there a particular lyric? Any favorite lyric in the song that kind of summarizes it?
Sowell: It starts off with “fighting in the street, shouting on the screen, who can be heard, when everybody screams.” And the chorus is, “Be the change that you dream of, Be the change that you desire. Be the healing water, the tames the raging fire. When the hurt and hate divide us. It is the love that will unite us. Be the love. Be the change.”
Our rock-friends Steelism released their new EP The Drawing Room, Volume 1 a couple weeks back. Since the duo came to Mountain Stage last month with their new music (and snazzy dress jackets) in tow, we’re posting this performance of the first single “The Serge.”
The rest of Steelism’s June performance on Mountain Stage (alongside Dawes, Gill Landry, Natalia Zukerman and Seth Glier) will be broadcast on 150 NPR stations this September. Whether you’re interested in hearing the show on radio or being part of our next live audience, we’re sure you’ll have a good time.
Igor Stravinksy’sThe Rite of Spring was a monumental work in so many ways: its size, its structure, and its ability to push the limits of what is known as music. The piece was so groundbreaking that at its premiere in Paris, France, on May 29th, 1913, a near-riot erupted in the audience.
This was partly due to the evocative nature of the ballet performers, but also due to the avant-garde qualities of the piece. Dissonances and pounding rhythms with quick tonal shifts and bursts of energy caused a discomfort in the audience, a discomfort composers would exploit in the coming century.
Today, The Rite of Spring doesn’t seem as wild as it did during its premiere. In fact, some would call it tame compared with some of the more modern works that have evolved since then. What The Rite of Spring did, however, was start a trend of composers who wanted push the limits of music and what audiences could handle aurally.
In the early part of the 20th century, Atonality, where there is no home key or pitch, emerged partially through the works of the Second Viennese School—The school of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Atonality meant that all notes were equal so that the hierarchy of pitches and chords was eliminated, which would put audiences out of their so-called comfort zones.
To ensure the equality of pitches, the composers of the Second Viennese School created Twelve-Tone Serialism, where pitch order was predetermined by a sequence of the 12 pitches where no one pitch was repeated (as found in Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite). This continued to break the tradition of tonal patterns that was inherent in the works of the Romantic Era of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Serialism then evolved to include not only pitches, but an ordering of all parameters of music such as dynamics, articulation, and length of notes as we can see in Oliver Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités from 1949. Here we can see the breaking of traditional patterns in several aspects of music: pitch, rhythm, and volume.
Soon, electronic music developed through the invention of magnetic tape. Through electronic music, composers could record anything they heard in the real world and make music out of it (Musique concrète). Thus, again, our definition of music changed to include all sequenced sounds that we can hear like the ones might hear in Edgard Varèse’s Poème électronique in 1958. This idea was also captured in John Cage’s 4’33”, where a piano player goes on stage to seemingly play the piano, but only sits at the bench in silence. The noises of the room, nature, and the audience then become the music rather than using sounds from the piano.
So, now our definition of music includes all sequences of pitches or sounds, and even the lack of sounds. Thus, music has seemed to have stretched the limits of what is possible. Because of the achievements of these musicians, ANYTHING can be music. The new challenge is making music that is still new and creative but is still familiar enough to audiences so that they will want to come out and hear it.
This is where new composers today step in. Composers today have to build up from the stretching and decomposition of the definition of music, and now they can follow any number of musical directions that they so desire. Rather than following one or two trends (like serialism or electronics), composers today often will use and combine the experiments from the compositions of 20th century composers to create a new form of expression with them. Tonality, atonality, bitonality, serialism, Romanticism, Classicism, electronics as well as world and popular music—any of these can be used to weave together an individual perspective on music. Just like the trend in popular culture is becoming more focused on individuality, so too is music.
Dr. John Beall, composition professor at West Virginia University claims that, “We do seem to be moving into an age of hybridization in music. The boundaries, once so clear, between art music and all other kinds is becoming is becoming quite fuzzy. As [Samuel] Adler points out, experimentation is out now, except for a few. Music is more audience-friendly. Dissonance has been quelled and put back in its place. The internet and especially social media, has enabled all art music composers to reach an audience.”
Another point to consider is that many composers are now writing for audiences again. Many composers, instead of having ambivalence towards audiences, now HAVE to worry about what audiences will think or they won’t listen (especially with the rise of pluralisation of music). Classical music audiences have dwindled in the 20th and 21st centuries, partly because listeners were turned off by the avant-garde.
Don O’Conner in his article “What Took us so Long? 12-tone Music” says that many musically literate concert-goers “had no problem with say, Bartok, Ives, William Schumann, or Stravinsky, but simply could no longer stomach 12-tone work or its even uglier baby, serialism.” He also claims that, “Even the most ingeniously constructed row or series seems to most people merely a string of random pitches, and any variations or permutations of it are similarly perceived.” Thus, some composers are choosing to go the route of making music that is both creative and refreshing for audiences in order to connect with them, rather than blindly following a trend. Because, after all, if a composer falls in the woods and no one is around, will he or she actually make a sound?
