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As I mentioned in the previous track’s blog, this piece is also a “trauma response”, my own musical improv response to reading a book about trauma. The book this time was My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, by Resmaa Menakem. I read this incredible book for a graduate-level class that I took this past summer. The final project was to respond creatively to anything we’d learned throughout the course, and I decided to improvise a piece on the piano, in response to this ground-breaking book.
I knew I wanted to do something that simultaneously expressed an eerie descending melody that would represent generational trauma, while also being in itself a way for me to process at least part of said trauma that I had been experiencing an acute awareness of while reading the book.
There were a few possible titles for the piece. The first one I thought of, the working title I came up with immediately after the improvisation, was “Over Time”. When I told my boyfriend about this title though, he at first thought it was in reference to working over hours. I thought maybe that could apply in this situation, then I later decided it was too vague of a title.
The next one was “It Ends With Me” / “it Ends with Me” / “it ends with Me”. As I mentioned before, I have been doing a lot of trauma healing over the last few years, and I feel like I have at times carried this somewhat indignant and righteous air around it. This title didn’t stick, because while I have done so much work on myself, to heal myself, the notion that there will never be any more trauma after me is just unrealistic. And I am done being a martyr, a savior.
Finally, “to be the First” came to me. A week or so into reading My Grandmother’s Hands, I emailed my professor for guidance on how to process the intensity of what was coming up for me around these deep issues of racialized and generational trauma. One thing they said that really stuck with me was this: “It’s possible that you’re the first person in your lineage to really confront these histories and their impact, and that’s no small thing.” I do believe I am the first person in my family to confront my own trauma in general, let alone trauma over generations. In addition, there’s also this sense of being the first, but not the last, to dive into the deep work of personal healing, and that feels really important, and hopeful. While this piece does indeed reflect my musical interpretations of what generational trauma feels like for me, ultimately it is also a statement of growth, healing, and transformation for myself, and hopefully also for my future descendants.
I sat down at the keyboard for a little while before recording—perhaps five minutes or so—to figure out the main motif. The descending melody would repeat in multiple octaves, and the goal at the beginning was to create a melodic line that sounded unsettling but not completely devoid of tonality; minor in nature but not beautifully somber; eerie and haunting but not spooky or evil in a trite or contrived way. All of this was mostly subconscious, as I messed around with various melodies. The notes I finally decided on were C# - A - G - F - Eb - D. The first five notes are part of a whole tone scale, with the final semitone throwing that pattern off and creating an incomplete scale reminiscent of both Phrygian and harmonic minor.
I wanted to keep this entire improvisation as close to the original as possible, to truly channel my subconscious as much as I could. There are very few edits. The beginning is, as discussed earlier, the eerie descending melody. As it hits the lowest register of the keyboard, the haunting, unsettling melody marinates and oscillates. The tonic for the majority of the piece is D, and I played around with the D against Eb for a bit. Close to the beginning, I switched the two around so that Eb was the bass and D lay above it, creating a major seventh (coincidentally, or maybe not, Eb major is my favorite key, and major seventh chords are star players in my repertoire).
The discovery of the beautiful major seventh early on was something to keep in my pocket but not lean into quite yet. In terms of this journey of exploring generational trauma, the major seventh chord almost feels like a reminder that while these horrible things did happen to—and perhaps also by—people in my lineage, generations before me, I am here. I am now. I am safe where I am, in my body, in this current time, in this moment. And knowing that, I can allow myself to delve into feelings of how others before me may have felt.
In my midterm assignment, I posed the question, “Where do I fit into this?” The next section of the improvisation happens mostly in the upper register of the keyboard, and rather than descending continuously, the melody descends and ascends, reflecting this questioning and uncertainty.
As I read in My Grandmother’s Hands about the Middle Ages in Europe, and the atrocities that European people inflicted on each other, I was overcome with grief. I generally steer clear of horrific content in media, because the images tend to stick with me for a long time (months, years), and I begin imagining those things happening to people I know and love.
In the past, when I'd learned about the Dark Ages in school as a kid, it had all seemed so far away, in the distant past. I couldn't even fathom that I myself could be a descendent of any of these people who had survived. Reading about these horrific ways that people were tortured and killed in the Dark Ages was so hard and I felt in my bones that people in my own lineage had suffered through these afflictions themselves, and/or were vicariously traumatized by watching others endure and ultimately perish. I felt the tears coming, and I did not try to fight them. Over the next twenty minutes or so, I found myself utterly weeping. My chest constricted, and the tears felt hot. I got up and jumped up and down, pushed against the wall, and lay down on the ground. At a few points I was amazed at how much and how hard I could cry, continuously. I knew the pain would cease eventually, so I did nothing to try and stop it prematurely.
Something I found myself saying in my head, and eventually out loud, was “How could they!?” How could people see other human beings as mere bodies to be tortured and destroyed? How could they see these atrocities being committed against their own people, and proceed to torture and destroy other bodies of people who they saw as unlike them? How could they not see that hurting others in the ways that they themselves were hurt was not actually solving anything, and just breeding and perpetuating evil? I felt distraught, disappointed, and livid.
The next part of the improvisation, the loudest and angriest part—with the descending melody over and over and over in the lower register then finally in octaves from high to low with the tremolo in the bass—reflects the trauma being blown through other bodies, and my own anger and grief over the situation that I was never part of myself but am feeling the effects of centuries later.
And as in the beginning, that major seventh finds its way in, grounding me in the here and now. Following this anger and grief comes another bout of confusion of where I personally fit into all of this. That major seventh keeps coming back, but also disappears just as soon as it returns. Some other chords find their way in, going back and forth between somewhat consonant and dissonant again. I am here, I am now, but what do I do about this? What can I do?
There is still some unsettledness left, as the melody descends again into the bass. The major seventh gets more room to breathe, but isn’t allowed to fully settle yet. The next part, happening mostly in the lowest register of the keyboard, feels like a heavy acceptance: these things occurred in our history as a human race, even though we steadfastly do not like it.
The next part finds the descending melody this time in the left hand/bass, as the right hand noodles around, finding new notes that weren’t originally part of the main melody. This perhaps represents my own discovery of new ways of being, of healing, that no one else in my family had found yet. Finally, we settle on Eb in the bass. It was the crunchiest note in the original melody, but now as the bass, it provides a more solid foundation as the melody moves around with more of a Lydian sound. The A-natural against Eb is still a bit unsettling—it’s not that we will try to forget about the horrible things that humans did to each other, or pretend they did not happen (or pretend they are not still happening in some ways). There is certainly more of an awareness though nowadays than back then. We can see now that what happened was undeniably wrong and there are profoundly better ways to treat one another.
What I learned from the summer course, and what I’m still learning from listening to my own improvisation, is that feeling and moving through the pain of our histories and traumas is such an essential step to healing, acknowledging our pain and where it came from. And while I myself cannot heal all the hurt in the world, I am doing my best to continue healing myself, reading, listening, and learning about others’ experiences, and finding solace in our shared humanity.