Last week, I had the enormous opportunity to travel to Boulder, Colorado, to premiere my work Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet at the 51st International Double Reed Society Conference. I was excited for the conference and to introduce myself and my music to a larger audience.
As it turned out, I had woefully underprepared myself for what actually happened. This is the story of Three Aviaries, how it came to be, and how it has already changed me and the way I work.
A few years ago, while I was working on my Master of Music at UNLV, I had the opportunity to have a lesson with Michael Torke, who was visiting UNLV for a residency in which Nextet (UNLV’s new music ensemble) performed a concert of almost entirely his music. In that lesson, I showed a reed quintet work entitled Moonlit Meeting, which is about heartbreak and hooking up on Tinder and (at the time) was my most emotionally devastating work. I told him that I didn’t believe that I could ever go back to that place to write something, to say something so personal through my music. He gazed at me for a moment, and then he said, “ I think you can — and I think you should.” But I never did.
I initially came up with the idea of Three Aviaries in November of 2021, when Stephanie Carlson, one of the most ardent champions of my music and one of my best friends, proposed creating something for IDRS 2022. At the time of our phone call, I was walking through the San Diego Zoo, the place I would often come to relax while I lived in San Diego. I proposed Three Aviaries as a tribute to the Zoo itself, and Stephanie responded enthusiastically. We prepared the application together along with Susan Miranda, and sent it in.
Between the time that we submitted the application to IDRS and the moment I started writing Three Aviaries, I experienced the most difficult time of my life. I was living with a hostile roommate hellbent on training the autism out of me (didn’t work), I was hemorrhaging financial and creative resources to stay afloat, facing the constant threat of burnout, and, on the day I started seriously planning Three Aviaries, I was sexually assaulted on my way home from a rehearsal. I escaped San Diego by the skin of my teeth, moved back to Tucson with my tail between my legs, and spent two months writing Three Aviaries while trying to find a kernel of myself in the rubble of my life.
One of the people I sought out when I moved back to Tucson for help and guidance while I tried to reclaim a lost version of myself than San Diego had taken from me was Annika Socolofsky. She had said something to me on Twitter about how what I was good at in my music would take me far — but I no longer had a concept of what that quality of my work was. She agreed to a Zoom meeting and I told her how I had so heavily researched being able to anticipate and manipulate audience reactions to my music and I wanted so badly to know what about my music was special and what about it drew people in. She said something I did not expect.
“ I think you need to let that go. The times people have most responded to my work have been when I have made myself the most vulnerable.”
Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet was the hardest thing to write I’ve ever written. When I finally had the space to figure out what Three Aviaries was going to be, I realized that work was no longer really about the aviaries of the San Diego Zoo, but instead it was about the profound anguish I had experienced that had made those aviaries so comforting to me. I could not return to that sterile place in which I wrote about the aviaries themselves, and I chose to use my music in a way I had only ever used it once before, in case of Moonlit Meeting: as an opportunity to process what had happened to me.
When I finished Three Aviaries, I experienced a period of terrible depression full of questions and no answers, but what emerged most present in my mind during the time that elapsed between its completion and performance was the horror I felt in the moments when I though about what would happen when people hear what I had to say. I was petrified by the fear that I had said too much, that I had revealed too much of myself in the work. I felt encased in that fear, buried alive by my own creation and the knowledge that I had no idea how people would react to it. I told Stephanie Carlson about these fears and she said, “ This piece is going to change lives and I think people are going to really respond to it.”
About two weeks before Three Aviaries was performed, I came across an essay that Nina Shekhar had written for I Care If You Listen. Within it I found a lot of things comforting, realizing that I was not quite as alone as I thought I was. There were best practices that I built into the performance of Three Aviaries at IDRS, namely, the reading of a trigger warning before the work. I sought out Nina’s advice, any small encouragement that I was doing the right thing. In a very thoughtful and profound email, she told me, “ I think what’s most helpful is to focus on your relationship to your work and disconnect that from everyone else’s reactions… What Three Aviaries means to you matters most.”
And then it was performed. And its premiere brought me many things I had never expected.
The first thing that I did not expect was for Three Aviaries to work at all. It’s ten movements long, in which only four of them are tutti. Three of the movements are soli movements (narrator and string quartet, narrator and English horn, and narrator and oboe), and the other three are aleatoric. The work has so many moving parts that I had convinced myself that, instead of the audience failing to connect with Three Aviaries, the work would not connect with itself. The first time Stephanie, Susan, the Carpe Diem String Quartet and I met and rehearsed the work in Boulder, we got to the first aleatoric movement and the musicians simply followed all the instructions and it just… worked. I burst into tears. That first aleatoric movement is only movement that the narrator is tacet, and I just felt myself melt into the sound and all the memories of the Scripps Aviary just flooded in and it all just overwhelmed me.
I also did not expect how it would feel to perform Three Aviaries. Boulder is at an altitude of about 5000 feet, and the air is thinner up there. After each performance, my body needed a break, because so much energy went into narrating. I sought out Rosanna Moore, another of my best friends and regular new music narrator, and she gave me some very good advice, but I still felt faint after each rehearsal and the performance. I don’t know how much of that was the altitude and how much of it was me pouring myself out into the world, but I now know how much it takes to perform Three Aviaries and how physically taxing it is.
I did not expect to be healed by performing Three Aviaries. I did not imagine that its performance would feel as if I had closed the door on the period of my life that caused me so much pain while I lived in San Diego. It never occurred to me how refreshed and empowered I would feel through performing the work., how it would change the concept of myself as a musician. I never thought that I could be so validate because music I wrote worked. And I still don’t really know what to do with this newfound healing energy I somehow discovered hiding in my music. I think I need more time with it before I know what I want to do with it and I hope that’s okay.
I did not expect to walk away from Three Aviaries wanting to do it all again with any number of the human experiences I have had. I expected to perform this work once and move on to the next, not for it to call into question all the work I have ever done and the work I continue to do. I want to write more like Three Aviaries — this is the work I was meant to do.
And the last thing that I did not expect was the reaction from the audience. In the last few measures of the work during its premiere, I felt myself start to fall apart. My last quavering word, which only with the greatest effort I have ever given during a performance even left my body, was whispered into a shivering stunned silence that I will never forget. The exhale, the moment I finally let go, tears falling freely, unable to really see the standing ovation that I did not feel was deserved. I could have never anticipated audience members bounding on stage to meet me, showering me with compliments rather than criticism, with empathy I have rarely experienced as an autistic person. One told me that Three Aviaries was the best they’d heard at IDRS and I should put it on Broadway and win a Tony for it, which I responded to by bursting it to tears and mumbling an incoherence of gratitude, because that’s among the best things anyone’s ever said about my music. I was already struggling with hearing and receiving compliments about Three Aviaries from my collaborators and the few people who had heard it before its premiere, but the feedback I heard was arresting. How do you hear something like that? How do you process something like that? What was I supposed to do?
I never expected to hold someone whom I did not know tightly in my arms as they freely cried in the aftermath of my music. I had no idea what to say. All I knew is that the best thing I could was be there for the person who I could have known needed to hear what I wrote into existence in Three Aviaries. I told her that it was okay to be like me, and she thanked me and thanked me and thanked me for making her feel visible. I will never be able to forget that this was my impact, just because I told my story in music.
Michael Torke was right — I could go back to that place and I should have done it sooner. Annika Socolofsky was right — people did react the most when I told my truth on that stage. Nina Shekhar was right — I needed to separate my feelings about Three Aviaries from anyone else’s reaction to protect my own healing. And Stephanie Carlson was right — Three Aviaries changed lives, starting with mine.
After the performance of Three Aviaries, I was repeatedly told that by Korine Fujiwara, the violist of the Carpe Diem string quartet, that the work “ has legs.” Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet is special and deserves to be experienced. The question that percolated through my brain since leaving Boulder has been “ What next?” and I’m going to commit to make this work as available as possible.
If you were at IDRS 2022 and you did not get a chance to experience Three Aviaries at the conference, my understanding is that it was audio recorded by IDRS. According to the recording policies of IDRS, I am not authorized to share or post the recording of Three Aviaries or any derivative of that recording on my website or social media. I am only authorized to use the recording of Three Aviaries for archival purposes, so if you email me at wizard@kincaidrabb.com and ask for a perusal score and recording of the work, I can then share the recording with you. Due to IDRS’ recording policy, I was not authorized to create my own recording at the conference and this will be the only recording available of the work when it becomes available.
The other option for you to hear Three Aviaries for Oboe, English Horn, Narrator, and String Quartet is to organize a performance of it yourself. At this time, I am uncomfortable having any other narrator perform the work other than myself, so I will promise that if you choose to perform this work, I will fly to you and guide you through the performance of Three Aviaries. I will hold your hand every step of the way. I will prepare your audience for it and I will be there for them when it is over.
The next thing I plan on doing is writing more things like Three Aviaries. I already have one work in the very early stages of development as result of having the work performed at IDRS. I had a long conversation with someone who was at the premiere of Three Aviaries, and I think we’ve come up with something really deep. I don’t want to say too much about it because I don’t really know what it’s going to be yet, but I can say that it’s going to be about nostalgia, regret, and pancakes.
I am working to reclaim the place that Michael Torke encouraged me to return to creatively. Three Aviaries proves that I deserve to give myself healing. I am so humbled to have found that power within myself and I have to continue to use it.
The last thing I have to say is thank you. To the people who took time out of their days to choose the autistic composer during a busy conference and experience Three Aviaries, thank you for your kindness and empathy. Thank you for telling people what happened in that room between us. You had to be there, but it was special and I can’t thank you enough for that. To Susan Miranda and the Carpe Diem String Quartet: I have never been so seen by an ensemble in my life, and no one has ever blessed me and my work like you have. To the mentors who I don’t believe know how deeply the influenced me in writing Three Aviaries: thank for saying the things I needed to hear. And to Stephanie Carlson: none of this would have happened without you, and I can’t express how much that means to me.
I am so, so lucky to have found people like me in a world that says that just enough is never just enough.