News

We hope this newsletter finds you healthy and well, and looking forward to 2023. We’ve had a busy but rewarding past six months, and thought we’d share what we’ve been up to – much of which could not have happened without your support.

Our commissioning project continues to grow, as we meet and reach out to composers that intrigue and interest us, who in turn are interested and excited in working with us. At the time of our last newsletter from this past July, we had received commissioned pieces from three composers – Taiwanese-American Yiheng Yvonne Wu, Navajo Juantio Becenti, and Uruguayan-American Miguel del Aguila. Shortly after that July newsletter we received our piece from Chinese-Samoan/Hawaiian Michael-Thomas Foumai, and last month we received our piece from Haitian Jean “Rudy” Perrault. And we have three more commissions coming this spring – from Taiwanese-American Chihchun Chi-sun Lee, Chinese-Australian Melissa Dunphy, and Afghani Seare Farhat, and we have just recently commissioned Japanese-American Michi Wiancko for a piece in 2024. That’s nine composers we have been able to commission through your support and grants!

So many rewarding moments and experiences have come from this commissioning project, both behind the scenes and with audiences. For us, what we have perhaps valued the most is learning a little bit more about each composer’s own cultural and racial story as they tell us what inspired the work they have written for us. The only directive we give the composers is to write us a work that is based on a folk song or children’s song of their heritage or culture.  While we originally perceived this as a song the composer might have heard as a young child (perhaps a lullaby or children’s tune sung to them by a parent), several of the composers have chosen to quote a song that holds historical or current significance for their ethnicity or race.  And in turn, their work becomes an expression for social justice.

Michael-Thomas Foumai’s piece “Breath Water Spirit” is a tumultuous work that includes melodies and rhythms based on Hawaiian chants. Michael writes: On January 17, 1893, the United States of America aided in the overthrowing of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Some 94 years before my existence, these events marked a dismantling of Hawaiian identity. ʻŌlelo Hawai'i, the Hawaiian language, was systemically banned from being taught in schools and spoken in public. In addition, foreign and commercial interests had already disenfranchised native land ownership and voting rights. Hawaiians were faced with renouncing their Hawaiian identity, the Queen and Kingdom of Hawaii, for an allegiance to a new foreign constitution. A Hawaiian renaissance awakened in the 1960s, a revival and reclaiming of the Hawaiian language and cultural practice by the descendants of lost generations. This movement and the propagation of indigenous knowledge and practice continue to live and breathe today, defying the near extinction of the culture. Identity to the Native Hawaiians is central to their fight for recognition and visibility in the domain of the United States of America today.

Rudy Perrault’s piece “Fallen” quotes the Haitian Vodou melody Erzulie malade, as well as fragments of the Ukrainian national anthem. In Rudy’s own words “Fallen” is about the shifting policies impacting Black and Brown people all over the world. “Fallen” is about the proverbial goalpost moving, whenever Black and Brown people get too close to an equitable plane. “Fallen” is about a different set of rules being applied, depending on the color of your skin or what country you hail from. Whereas the Ukrainian national anthem reminds us of the importance to rally in support of our neighbors in adversity, the Vodou song points to the lack of parity between nations. This piece speaks for all of those who feel shunned, oppressed, or have fallen out of grace, fallen out of favor.

Inspired by our conversations with Michael and Rudy (the benefits of zoom!), we reached out to Michi Wiancko with a slightly more specific request for a commissioned work. We asked if she would be willing to address the U.S. government’s incarceration camps of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Michi’s works sometimes involve multi-media, so her work may include recorded audio readings of letters or diaries from the incarceration camps – we will wait and see!

So, where have we taken these pieces and where will we take them this coming spring? We had a pretty busy couple months in the Fall of 2022 – we played programs of our commissioned works (sharing the short videos the composers recorded for us) at Susquehanna University in PA where Naomi teaches, at the University of Delaware, on the Chapel Restoration concert series in Cold Spring, NY, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and we also did a three-day residency at Butler University in Indiana. At the University of Delaware and at Butler we had opportunities to meet with students and student composers - opening dialog and questions about our commissioning project, the composers we’re working with, how classical music can be a vehicle for creating cultural awareness and understanding, and how it can promote social justice. In addition to these college communities, we also had the opportunity to play for and talk with high school students in Indianapolis, middle school students outside of Columbus, Ohio, middle and high school piano students and teachers in Frederick, Maryland, a church community in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, and with Pennsylvania state music teachers at their regional conference.

Perhaps the most rewarding performance from this Fall was our evening at the middle school

outside Columbus, Ohio – we were set up in their auditorium (which doubles as their cafeteria during lunch and is thus labeled as the "cafetorium"), on a tiny upright piano in front of a rather small audience consisting of a handful of kids and their parents. A predominantly white school, amongst the students who came that evening were a few Indian and Chinese students. On our program that evening we shared Yiheng Yvonne Wu’s three movement piece (based on Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese folk songs), Michael-Thomas Foumai’s piece based on Hawaiian chant, and a work by Indian-American Reena Esmail (not commissioned by us). Reena’s work quotes a lullaby she remembers her grandmother singing to her, and one of the young students in the audience knew the melody and words. The middle school band director who helped set up our visit remarked afterwards that, despite it being a really small audience that evening, these kids in the audience were the ones who needed to hear our performance – they are the ones who need validation that their culture and their identity are important and valuable.

We were thankful to have a December free of performances so we could slow down, catch up on much-needed office work, and breathe for a bit! We will hit the ground running again in about a week’s time – to run the inaugural Winterhaven Chamber Music Retreat in New Hampshire, a week-long intensive session for adult amateur chamber players. While this is a side project of the Duo, we are so grateful to be able celebrate the beauty of classical music and our love of teaching by playing side-by-side with the participants. 

Towards the end of January, we will return to Susquehanna University to play three of our works that address social justice (Michael’s and Rudy’s pieces, as well as Juantio Becenti’s piece) for the annual “Martin Luther King Teach-in Day” at Naomi’s university. In February, we head to the San Francisco Bay Area for a week of performances – the biggest of which is on the Old First Concert series on Friday, February 24th. In early March we head to Mississippi for a few days to perform several works and give a lecture recital on Yiheng Yvonne Wu’s commissioned work (Three Adaptations) at the annual Music by Women conference, which we will then follow with a performance of Yvonne’s and Michael’s commissioned works for the College Music Society’s annual regional conference in New Haven, CT. Mid-March finds us spending a few days in Florida performing our programs in Estero and at a high school in Lakeland...and then we can stop and catch our breath! Please remember that you can always visit our website for a calendar of our performances – we hope to be able to see you if we are in your neck of the woods! www.Bardin-Niskala-Duo.com/calendar

And then a very important news item on the “office work” front: we are excited to announce that we have begun the process for establishing the Bardin-Niskala Duo as a non-profit corporation. Many of you have donated over the past year and a half through the Brooklyn Arts Council, which enabled tax deductible donations. As they are restructuring and are no longer offering their services to many of the classical music organizations that were under their umbrella, we have decided to incorporate the Duo and file for non-profit status. Naomi was fortunate to speak with a retired attorney and Susquehanna University professor who graciously asked a partner in his firm to file the legal paperwork for us at a greatly reduced cost.  For this we are extremely thankful, as we know from several musician colleagues that this process can be quite costly and cumbersome. So, we hope to finish the filing and be able to announce our Board of Directors by our next newsletter! While donations to the Duo are not currently tax deductible, if you should choose to support our work directly, please feel free to write us for direct donation instructions. Some of you have also inquired about making another tax-deductible donation - if you would still like to do so, please let us know and we can be back in touch once we are set up as a non-profit, hopefully by this spring.

Just a few last words about the future a year or little more down the road: hopefully a tour in January 2024 to Hawaii where we can collaborate with Michael-Thomas Foumai in person at various high schools, performances in Washington and Oregon, Iowa, Michigan, Texas, Colorado, and Massachusetts, and heading to the recording studio in Spring 2024 to record some of our commissioned works. Also, we have open dialogs with several additional composers who are interested in writing for us, but are booked into 2025. We will keep you posted!

2022 was an exciting and busy year - a year that saw live performances and gatherings cautiously returning. We are extremely thankful to be able to do what we do – to continue to commission ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Native American) composers, share and

promote their works with a variety of ages and audiences, bring awareness to minority cultures and the underserved, create curiosity and a genuine interest in others who may not look or think the same, and humanize and personalize the struggles of minorities in this country. 

We cannot do this without your support.

Thank you.

Naomi and An-Lin, December 2022

As the New Year rolls in and things seem to once again be upside-down and full of the unknown, we are staying optimistic and hopeful for the light at the end of the tunnel! We had several incredible and touching opportunities to return to music-making for live audiences this past November, and engaging and exciting conversations with the composers we are commissioning continue, and it is through these experiences that we remain hopeful. The beautiful thing about composition is that composers work in solitude – writing requires isolation and quiet and time – as does the learning of such pieces. 

Here is a bit of what we’ve been up to in 2021: 

In August, we were fortunate to be able to spend two weeks at Avaloch Farm Music Institute in New Hampshire – a retreat for professional musicians who seek to work on a specific project for an intense period of time. Our first commission, “Three Adaptations” by Taiwanese-American composer Yiheng Yvonne Wu arrived, completed, the first day of our residency. Over the two weeks at Avaloch, we worked on Yvonne’s piece, sending her bits of recordings and working with her over Zoom. We also started to put together the remaining works on our “Of Innocence, Loss, and Healing – Songs My Mother Taught Me” recital program – song transcriptions of Mahler and Dvorak, Janacek’s Pohadka (Fairy Tale), and works by Nadia Boulanger, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and William Grant Still. Our residency at Avaloch was an important and special time for us – it was the first time in 18 months that we found ourselves amongst fellow musicians, engaging in conversations about music and performing for each other. We knew how much we had all, as musicians, given up during the first year and a half of the pandemic, but we didn’t really know how much we had given up until we got there.

We premiered Yvonne’s piece at Susquehanna University (PA) in early November, and then we took our program on a tour to Wisconsin and Minnesota. You can find a video recording here of the last concert on our tour – at a church in Beloit, Wisconsin – where Yvonne is the composition professor. After we returned home, Yvonne’s composition students wrote about our performance – here are a couple of their responses. This is why we perform and share with audiences.

“Seeing you two perform together was awe inspiring. I don’t usually listen to much classical music, but the entire performance I was transfixed. I appreciate the time and energy you both put into coming to our little campus. Thank you!” 

“Thank you so much! This was such an incredible experience, and it blew me away. The performance was amazing and had points that were very emotional for me. Absolutely beautiful and I am so appreciative you all came to Beloit!” 

“Seeing such world class musicians like the two of you performing in a church in such a humble place like Beloit is probably my most memorable and fulfilling experience this senior year. Thank you for bringing art and your passions to us.” 

“It was an honor to see such reverence for the emotion of music. Your performance shows your mastery and I appreciate you sharing your interpretations of the pieces with such grace. Your intuition and flow were inspiring and engaging to me, and reminded me of the importance of presence within performance. Thank you for coming and making an impact!” 

So what does 2022 hold for us? We are currently awaiting our second commissioned work, from Navajo Juantio Becenti – we should receive the work towards the end of this month! Juantio has selected the Navajo song “Shi Naasha” that was composed after the Navajo left Ft. Sumner where they had been imprisoned for numerous years after conflicts with the US, Mexico, and various other Native American tribes aligned with the US. Juantio writes that “after (this) period of conflict the Navajo were rounded up in 1864 and forced on a walk from our traditional homelands to an internment camp 300+ miles away. Many Navajo died during that journey and those that survived were imprisoned until 1868 when a treaty was signed. The Navajo homeland is bordered by 4 mountains with the southern-most being called Tsoodzil (turquoise mountain) or Mt. Taylor in New Mexico. When the returning Navajo saw the mountain, they were overcome with joy and composed Shi Naasha. It talks about going in beauty and freedom.”

Our third and fourth composers to be commissioned – Ugandan-American Niles Luther and Chinese-Samoan/Hawaiian Michael Thomas Foumai – are working on our pieces, with the goal of completing them in August of 2022. Please stay tuned for more information on their works!

We are hoping that this performance season can continue as close to normal as possible – there will definitely be some hiccups along the way, but we are hoping for the best. In early February we will perform again at Susquehanna University (where Naomi teaches), during a day of colloquiums and programs celebrating the work of Martin Luther King. We are preparing a program entitled “What is Identity?  Where Do I Belong?  Answers In Music.”  Many of the composers featured on our program have agreed to record videos speaking about how they find, express, and communicate their sense of identity and belonging, and their sense of culture, in their compositions. We will intersperse these videos with performances of Yvonne’s piece, Juantio’s piece, and of two more works: “Jhula-Jhule” by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail, and “Brother Malcolm…” by Haitian composer Rudy Perrault. 

We have additional performances in the works in New York and Connecticut this spring, and if the pandemic allows, a performance on WVIA public radio here in Pennsylvania. In the meantime, we are working on setting up performances in North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, and hope to be able to visit and perform for K-12 schools once pandemic restrictions subside – we will keep you posted!

And lastly, we want to thank you again for your generous support in our project – without your support we would not be able to continue forging ahead. We had a very successful fund-raising year, which has allowed us to contact additional composers to inquire about their interest in composing a piece for our project. We are speaking with composers from Haiti, Peru, and the Chickasaw nation. As things become finalized, we will send you an update and post on our website as well.

We wish you a happy and healthy 2022, full of curiosity and new experiences! 

-- Naomi and An-Lin, January 2022