When I was a junior at Cornell University 20 years ago I gave a concert that I called “A Celebration of Orange”. The program included lots of orange-themed piano improvisations, Debussy & Rachmaninoff, and modern interpretive dance to orange-themed music (including Charles Mingus’ “Orange Was the Color of Her Dress”).
I wore orange every day the week before the concert and hung posters up all over campus. I recruited my friends to come and we packed Barnes Hall auditorium, many of them sporting the only orange they had in their closets (how I had a week’s worth of orange I’m not entirely sure! I guess I just liked the color!).
I hadn’t thought about this concert in many years. Well, this weekend I was visiting friends from Cornell and they told their young daughter about the day Miss Catherine gave an orange concert. It was sweet to hear them remember the event and talk about it 20 years later. That in itself would have been enough and amazing. But, then the very next day completely out of the blue an acquaintance of mine from Cornell who I haven’t heard from in 20 years wrote to me through my website and told me that his kids had made him wear an orange shirt and he thought of that concert – the one that made him stand up and continue clapping after each song was over despite it not being the “proper” thing to do at a piano recital at Barnes Hall. And that he’s thought of that concert a lot over the past 20 years.
This was when I had only been giving solo concerts for a year and a half. A concert was still a super big deal for me, I was excited to share my music and to create an event that would bring my friends together. I was excited to express myself creatively through piano and dance, not knowing or caring if I had the “proper technique” – I was just happy to have discovered my creative voice and to share my inner musings through art.
The music was raw, unshaped. But because I was following my inner muse without an internal critic (or even external critics at that point) it was fresh- not like anything I had heard before. Many of these improvisations ended up on my album Strange Attractors, a live recording of a concert a year later.
As the years have passed, I see now that I became more and more interested in pursuing music that would please critics, or sell copies, or fit into a radio broadcast mode. I am proud of these recordings, and I think I still have maintained a unique voice- I don’t think my improvisations sound like much else out there – but, on the whole my recordings are more restrained than what I play for myself in my studio. I haven’t done much truly free improvisation in concert or even on recordings the way I did 20 years ago- when I do improvise I tend to use structures or harmonic bases or am trying to re-create a piece I improvised first privately.
I haven’t danced in many years. I stopped including modern dance in my performances because I wasn’t a trained classical dancer and didn’t have the associated strength or technique. I didn’t want to seem less than professional. Dance always brought me such joy. I miss it.
Where and when did that censor come in? It was subtle and ever growing- although I see myself slowly letting go of it now. I am about to release A Maiden’s Voyage– an album that is not New Age, not Classical, not Jazz, and yet all three- in other words it has no genre home and I have no idea where I will “market” it. Or if it will get played on the radio. Or if I can use it as a concert bookings calling card. It just is. It’s me (with a bunch of amazing musician friends joining me!). It’s 9 years of recordings ranging from solo classical piano to avant garde free improv. It has relaxing moments and moments of tension and dissonance. It takes a journey.
I hope that the Voyage is bringing me back to my roots- to the girl who improvised and danced for her friends in celebration of music and dance for art’s sake. If that girl can create an evening that people remember fondly for 20 years, I want to be her. Censor be gone! Let every concert be an EVENT. Let’s make some art for the sake of art and PASSION and JOY.
