Tammy Evans Yonce
Dream Grow Like Slow Ice
2018 | Classical, Experimental
— from the poem that inspired track 7: “Behind the Day”
Tammy Evans Yonce: The flute is a very, very traditional instrument. It’s arguably the oldest. You might find people who say percussion is older, but we kind of go back and forth on that. It obviously has changed considerably from an instrument that used to be made out of, maybe, a piece of bamboo or a piece of bone. After that it was made out of wood, and made out of metal after that. But then we have this. This is a glissando headjoint. It was invented by a flutist and a composer named Robert Dick who is a visionary in the flute community and in the new music community. His idea was he was going to create a whammy bar for the flute. If you’re not sure about a whammy bar, you can also compare it to a trombone slide, right? I saw the headjoint around, I heard him play it. He plays it in maybe a little bit more of an improvisatory way, which I don’t tend to do, I’m usually just playing notated music. As you’re playing a pitch, that note can be bent in a true glissando, but then also what you can do that goes beyond what the trombone does when they move their slide, is that I can change fingers on the flute with the keys, and so it adds a different layer of just sort of a smearing sound. You can play regular pitches with an altered placement on the headjoint so it changes the timbre. So there are lots of really interesting — I mean, yes, it’s novel — but there are a lot of really interesting sounds that you can get depending on how it’s being used.
It wasn’t just a decision where I woke up one day and decided I was, like, going to do new music, but it’s just sort of where things led. And so I found myself working more and more with composers, you know, living composers, because the interaction is kind of fun sometimes to be able to talk to them and say, “Hey, what do you mean about this?” And so I just found more and more of my time was being spent working on new music, and I’d seen [the headjoint] and I had a composer that I worked with a bunch [Jay Batzner], and he was really interested in it. And I said, “Okay, if I spring for the purchase, are you willing to write me some music to go with it?” And he was all for it. And I thought, “Okay, let’s do it.” So he’s written me a handful of pieces, and I’ve commissioned a bunch for it. So it was just another way to kind of explore what could be done with the flute which is such an old instrument.
There was a pretty steep learning curve. At this point, I feel like I have a better handle on it where I’m able to kind of sight read some of these things. Before, I couldn’t, absolutely. I had to figure out where the pitch was on the slide, and figure out what the tendency was. Was it going to run high or run low? You also, of course, can play microtones on it, and so some of [the composers] write that. Some of them want quarter tones, some of them want it to be flattened or sharped just a little bit, and so you’re having to look at the tuner as well. Now I feel like I’m a little bit more — I mean, it’s been what, eight years or so? Like, I feel like I got it under my belt a little bit more, but still it can be a little challenging. But it’s the best ear training teacher I ever had, you know? There are no lies. You’re performing and you’re supposed to hit this pitch, and there’s no way to fake that. So you just have to know where it is, and your ear has to tell you.
Only so many people, at least used to, be able to come to recitals. Now, of course, that we’re live-streaming everything, that opens things up a little bit more. But [recording the album] just seemed like a good time to say, “Alright, this is where my career is up to this point.” I see myself as sort of an evangelist for these new composers, right? Like, they write it, but my job is to get it out there. And so it felt like a really good time to just sort of say, “Alright, this is the point where I am at now in my career. These are the works that have been commissioned that I’ve done over the past eight years or so, and this is the kind of collection that I have, and here: enjoy! This is kind of what the glissando headjoint can do, and this is what some other also cool pieces that don’t use the headjoint can do as well.”
Instead of maybe limiting our collaboration to a local area, we can use the internet, of course, to collaborate locally, in our region, in our state, in our country, and truly globally. This is the primary way that I meet musicians for my collaborations at this point. It allows us in more rural areas to really not have to stay isolated. We can bring in new ideas from outside and enrich our communities locally. So, hooray for Twitter. That’s where I meet my collaborators.
If someone’s like, “Yeah I’m looking to write a flute piece,” and you’re looking for a piece similar to their style, you’re like, “Oh yeah, let’s do this.” It’s kind of who you know, whose music you know, what opportunities you’re looking for, what they’re looking for, and eventually you just, you know, come to a project, a lot of times. Some of them are a lot more interactive during the process, others are sort of, “Well what kind of things are you looking for?” And then they come back in however many months with a draft and say, “Okay, now let’s talk.” So it just depends on how they work. I don’t really care, like, I’m fine to work either way. If they want my feedback all the way through, that’s fine, especially for the headjoint, if they’re not familiar with it and they want to run things by me to see if it’s even feasible, then I’m happy to do that. So it really just depends on the composer and you just have to be a little bit flexible with their process.
[“Dreams Grow Like Slow Ice”] came about because of the job I got here [at South Dakota State University]. I’m from Atlanta, and so... it does not snow in Atlanta, except on really novel occasions. I had not experienced a winter yet when we cooked this thing up, and so people are, of course, trying to scare me about what’s to come. And [Jay Batzner] was in Michigan so he’s like, “Uh, yeah, I kind of know what you’re in for a little bit.” So he just had a collection of titles he hadn’t used yet, but that he thought were cool, so we were going through them and I’m like, “Yeah, ice is probably what we need to do to mark this first year in this frozen place.”
Yeah, [the recording process] was excruciating. It was terrible [laughs]. You know, it was one of those things where you’re really glad you did it, but when you’re in the middle of it you just think, “What have I gotten myself into?” Because, I think, as musicians, we’re perfectionists, and we want things to be right, and for a live performance you give yourself a little bit of leeway, but for a recorded artifact you don’t want to listen to it and be like, “Ugh, that note!”
I hired a friend of mine, Andrew Rodriguez, who also wrote one of the pieces. He is an amazing producer and has just such a fantastic ear, and fantastic musical intuition. So he came out and we spent, I don’t remember, two days, three days, I mean it’s a blur, and, um, yeah, we’re still friends, but… it was a frustrating process [laughs]. Just again, because, like, I had never recorded a real produced album before, everything else had been live. And his ear is fantastic and he’s like, “You know you can do that better.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I know you’re right but it’s been thirty hours and I don’t want to look at this piece anymore.” So, yeah, I mean, it was really intense, and I’m really grateful that he’s the one I worked with because I’d do it again. Um, you know, you have one child, right?, and then you’re like, “Huh, do I want to go through that again?” But I have three children, so I’ll probably do another album.
Comment from a YouTube video of Yonce performing “Dreams Grow Like Slow Ice”:
I love that comment. I love it. I’m one that tends to focus a little bit more on new music, um, and so the question is, “Why?” Like fundamentally, why do that? Why not focus on the traditional canon? Why not focus on Bach, who I also absolutely love, because I studied baroque flute as well. Why not focus on Bach, and Mozart, and all those composers? But I also teach music history, and I teach early music history. All music at some point was new music, right? There are always going to be people in every musical era who prefer the more traditional sounds. But it wasn’t really until relatively recent in music history that we went back to the older stuff. Most music that was composed was used for that time and then it was forgotten (if it’s from the oral tradition), or it was put away in a dusty pile somewhere up in the church loft, or, you know, it didn’t see the light of day. So, um, yeah I mean, people have always been the same, and some are really going to be interested in new developments, and other people aren’t. And, you know, there’s no judgment. If people don’t like it, that’s totally fine. But for me, one of the fundamental questions is, how can you take this really, really old musical instrument from early in human history and make it relevant era, after era, after era? It continues to change from the point where it was made out of a thigh bone of an animal with holes drilled in it to what it is today, which is a fairly sophisticated piece of machinery, but it’s still making new music. So for me, the experimentation is part of the point. It’s just like, “What can we do with this thing? How can we reinvent this instrument?” And so, yeah, people don’t get it sometimes, and that’s totally fine. And you know, I’ve done some recitals at SDSU — and other places, it’s not just South Dakota — where people are like, “Yeah, that was really terrible.” And I’m like, “Yeah, you know, if you don’t like it that’s absolutely fine.” And I’m not being sarcastic, I truly believe that. But, you know, maybe listen a couple times and just see if it makes you think of something. And I also don’t think that music is only for entertainment purposes, so it might have a different function as well, and we’re kind of, I guess, geared towards always wanting music to be entertaining, or pleasant, and sometimes that’s not the point.
SOURCES
Lantsoght, Eva. “I Am Tammy Evans Yonce, and This Is How I Work.” PhD Talk, 14 Aug. 2018, www.evalantsoght.com/2018/08/i-am-tammy-evans-yonce-and-this-is-how-i-work.html.
Yonce, Tammy Evans. “Fulbright in the Time of Corona.” The Flute Examiner, 25 Nov. 2020, thefluteexaminer.com/fulbright-in-the-time-of-corona/.
Yonce, Tammy Evans. “LINER NOTES for DREAMS GROW LIKE SLOW ICE.” Tammy Evans Yonce, www.tammyevansyonce.com/dreams-grow-like-slow-ice/.
Yonce, Tammy Evans. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 22 Feb. 2021.
Yonce, Tammy Evans. “Reinventing Classical Music for a Modern Era: Tammy Evans Yonce at TEDxBrookings.” YouTube, 28 May 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw0ovwMD5wk.
