Post Mortem: My artist residency at Mount Auburn Cemetery

Learnings from my 365+ day galavant through The Lively Place

On May 18, 2024, I shared an hour’s worth of new music with my cemetery community. The program spanned my residency, starting with Aboriginal Sensible Muchness, then an excerpt from the musical death awareness meditation Nothingness is Impossible, and ending with the world premiere of my Lux Æterna. It was the homecoming show for Argent & Sable, which returned to its old lair in Bigelow Chapel for one day only.

It would have been the Hook & Hastings pipe organ’s 100th anniversary. Instead, it returned as a “franken-instrument;” an agent of grief facilitation, wonder, and horror.

Percussionist Austin Birdy and I sprawled out across the pulpit of the gothic chapel with Luke Damrosch at the helm, recording it all for a live album dubbed The Cemetery Tapes, due to be released in summer of 2024.

Lux Æterna

Eternal light. 

For about a decade, I had wanted to write a work with this name. I originally envisioned it as a symphonic tone poem, having sketched it out several times over the years. No sketches sounded right, and I simply couldn’t harvest the right artifacts. When I heard Argent & Sable for the first time, it was clear that I’d landed on the right engine to power the piece.

Lux Æterna is a 30-minute, six-part piece for cello, voice, mixed percussion, and of course, the frankenorgan. It uses a 13-toned microtonal system that perhaps I’ll write more about later. Each of the three “trines” within the system has nine tones that modulate after each iteration. By the end of Lux Aeterna, each of the three trines have been used, and all 13 tones are heard in confluence. This is super nerdy, but my adherence to this system is what made Lux Aeterna’s sound world immersive.

Some other elements that made Lux Æterna what it is: 

• The first trine is always expressed in white voice, filtered through the largest pipe

• Austin pre-recorded Kalimba, which was played in reverse and filtered through the bottom two pipes

• A recitation of excerpts from Sir Isaac Newton’s treatise Opticks including his eight Axioms, along with the speed of light, 299,792,458 meters per second

• Argent & Sable channeling a 1900s Edison phonograph recording of dancehall music just before the first true “melody” emerges on Kalimba at 11 minutes

  • Conditioning the audience to stop expecting traditional melodies, then shocking them with two heartbreaking ones back to back

• Polyrhythmic 4:7 grooves combined with wahwahwahwahwahharmonic beating

• Ending with the sound of a film projector being switched off

The premise of the piece is a commentary on our ever-changing relationship with the illusion of time. When we’re young, we have all the time in the world. As we age, our concept of time begins to speed up. The illusion of “running out of time” can become terrifying. What physics and biology have told us about the reality of time has no bearing on our relationship to it.

L-R: Recording engineer and producer Luke Damrosch, his scarf, me, Austin Birdy

The week of the concert, I discovered, to my excitement, my first gray hair! (To be fair, I had a few in high school that were stress-induced but they went away. THIS one is from age!) Gray hair is so beautiful, and we can only be so lucky to live to see our hair change, our first wrinkles carve their way through our faces, that shitty high school pre calc teacher becoming a very distant memory.

But light? Oh, my sweet summer child. Light is forever.

What listeners thought

A smattering of notable responses Austin and I received at the shows, thoroughly and badly paraphrased. I am so humbled and grateful for some of these that it physically hurts:

• A listener’s family member passed away two weeks before the shows. Lux Æterna enabled her to finally cry and physically grieve. (I am so humbled by this it physically hurts my rib cage)

• My own beautiful aunt told me it helped heal something that was broken in her after her father/my grandfather died a couple years ago. Her questions reminded me of him

• Julie-Anne Whitney, the public events producer at Mount Auburn, hadn’t heard Lux Æterna before the shows. She told me that it sounded like an accurate manifestation of what it emotionally feels like to walk through the cemetery

• Some people walked out after Aboriginal Sensible Muchness – they had no idea what they were getting themselves into! (Then the second show was oversold. My Leo sun sign demanded I note that.)

• A listener noted how it brought back the grief of losing a family member about 20 years ago, and reminded them of the tragic inevitability of loss

Major learnings over my year + long residency

There were a lot. I was asked what I learned at the show, and it felt like staring into the sun. My thoughts are a tiny bit more collected now:

We don’t always need to perform on stage.

• I grew up in the classical world. I play concert halls with orchestras and stadiums with rock bands. Before the cemetery, a show meant go time. Look alive. Work your angles, miss no notes, make eye contact, never a dull moment. But in true flow, true presence, we can simply allow. I sat in silence with my listeners for the very first time. I stood and sat with my eyes closed, doing nothing. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done on stage, and it was also the most effective.

  You can’t PERFORM a musical death awareness meditation, that would be fucking weird. It doesn’t work that way. It’s musician as experiential facilitator, and I’ll take that with me on every stage from now on.

Not performing Nothingness is Impossible! with Ripley

Death contains multitudes.

• Perhaps I didn’t learn-learn this, but I certainly saw it more than ever. I met people walking in the cemetery for exercise, folks visiting their family members and decorating their graves, I averted my eyes from dour funerals from afar, I giggled along with people tearfully laughing about their deceased family member’s shitty old car in their funeral black after leaving their witness cremation.
  
  I met exhausted funeral directors, silently observant birders, shared “isn’t it beautiful”s with painters stationed in the wisteria with their paints and easels, truly obsessed horticulturalists, bubbly morticians, saw photos of toad orgies, a lot of dead bunny parts thanks to the many hawks-in-residence, and got to learn from some of the most progressively-minded, positive, welcoming “cemeterians” this side of the Mississippi.
  
  I waved to groundskeepers digging with backhoes the day after the frost. I watched as fresh native grasses and wildflowers sprouted from green gravesites mere weeks after a burial, giving literal meaning to “pushing up daisies.”

Photo by Billy Hickey

Community is not tribalism.

• “I’m a metalhead. I’m an atheist. I’m a master's degree holder. I’m a registered democrat. I’m white-presenting. I’m a millennial. I live in Boston. I’m cisgendered.” I question what value these identity qualifiers actually have after experiencing what I did at Mount Auburn.
  
  My colleagues often remarked how diverse the attendees were at my events. We had folks of so many different ages, subcultures, and walks of life, and we were, at least for that hour, united by our presence. All of us were down to hear and experience something for the very first time, something no one on the planet had heard before. In an active cemetery. Next to a running crematory. We were open to each others’ perceptions.

  Community, in 2024, means uniting by authentic experience and intentional consciousness.

Ask and you may receive.

• One of my major learnings from this residency is to ask for and accept support. We (especially as a millennial woman) are often conditioned to be completely self-sufficient. To ask for help can feel like exposing your soft white underbelly, and to speak your needs… even more vulnerable.
  
  But so often during this residency, when I needed something, I challenged myself to ask. I asked the cemetery when I needed space to store A&S overnight and help with transport, I asked Austin to learn really hard music at short notice. I asked for media coverage of the event by writing targeted press releases to my favorite local journalists (a task I usually reserve for my non-music strategic communications clients, certainly not myself)!
  

  I asked for the residency to begin with by applying, and received thousands in funding from unbelievably generous arts patrons to make this work and to hire experts, like metalworker Willy Blass, to execute my outlandish ideas.

  
  One of the most humbling asks I made was for audience members to pre-order The Cemetery Tapes before it was even recorded live. I was asking them to take a financial risk on music they hadn’t even heard. As a result, audience members from those two shows financed my next live album. I’ve been independent from the beginning as a solo artist, and it’s really my listeners who enable me to do this. My gratitude overflows.

• REST. Paradoxically, I started to learn how to rest because of this project. After a few months of unmanageable workweeks, I questioned what rest actually means. Because I certainly wasn’t recharging by rotting in bed binging shitty reruns, nor was I resting by reading acoustics manuals, self-help books on productivity, or trying to cram social outings in so I could “reset.”
  
  At a few points this past year, I was truly clinically exhausted. Burnt out doesn’t really express it. My mind would not slow down, and even in my sleep, I was actively composing, designing, and trying to solve problems.
  
  I’m still learning what rest really is, which feels hilariously like a lot of work sometimes, but the wilderness really, really helps. And being present with my cat. She doesn’t care about anything besides crunchies and doors being open.

Ilemauzar the baby queen knows how to rest.

What’s next for Argent & Sable?

At the time of the show, I quipped that what’s next is my basement for a while. But alas, that audience member with really cool eyeliner and great flower pics ended up being a director for New Directions Cello Festival. So into my car frankenorgan will go, off to play for a bunch of wild cello innovators in central Massachusetts.

Photo by Billy Hickey, obviously

After that? More, probably. Maybe more cemeteries? Score soundtracks? Raves? We shall seeeeeeeeee