Composer Nina Shekhar Offers You Her Glitter Monster

One of the best things that Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra does is their Sound Investment program which provides a commission and a tryout period for composers to work on a new composition and for investors to watch the creative process. Previous participants have included Matthew Aucoin, Sarah Gibson, Shelley Washington, Juan Pablo Contreras and Marc Lowenstein. Let me introduce you to this year’s composer: Nina Shekhar.

Shekhar is a first-generation Indian-American composer. Her most performed work to date is Lumina. Her music has been performed by most of the major orchestras in this country including LACO.

For her Sound Investment composition she has written a piece entitled Glitter Monster. The world premiere will be Friday, May 24th at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. There is a second concert on Saturday, May 25th at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Both programs also include Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor and Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C Major.

Glitter Monster is a work she wrote without any real rules. She let her imagination roam freely. This was part of what I learned in a recent conversation with Shekhar. What follows are excerpts from my interview with her. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel.

Q: Matthew Aucoin called the Sound Investment program “very Bernie Sanders” and that it seemed “deeply Los Angeles specific” and that “there are a lot of supporters, not all stereotypically super rich, who want to support music.” How does his perspective align or not, with your own experience?

I think that the Sound Investment program is a really unique opportunity. On the composer’s side we rarely get a chance to workshop a piece or try ideas out. Usually we write a piece for an orchestra and then the orchestra rehearses it, performs it, and it’s very quick and you kind of turn around.

But in this case, we actually get the opportunity to workshop things and we get to have some contact with the performers in advance. We get to try things in a chamber setting and then have a reading of our piece in advance and the donors get to be part of that experience. They also get to sit in on all of these rehearsals. They get to hear what the piece is about. They get to offer ideas. I think it’s a really fun communal experience for everybody.

With so many people offering opinions, how do you distill what are good ideas, what are bad ideas? How much do you want to just remain faithful to what your vision is for a given composition?

Much of what my practice is as an artist is about my own voice; my own experiences and channeling that. That’s part of the reason I became a composer in the first place. I think of music as almost like my diary. I can really share a lot of my experiences [and] get to really understand myself better in that process.

But at the same time, I think a lot of composers forget that music is a communal experience. It’s not just my identity that’s being reflected in a work. It’s also performer’s identity. Everybody in the orchestra is interpreting the work. Also really importantly, it’s the audience’s identity that they’re putting into hearing the work and receiving it. That’s really important to acknowledge.

So in creating this, getting to hear some sort of feedback from the donors and having them say how they received the work or how it made them feel, definitely gives me a sense of how others are going to receive the work. It’s helpful for me to know that when creating a piece.

How important is how an audience responds to it? I think of countless composers, if they relied on audience response, would be grossly disappointed. Take, for example, Philip Glass. People didn’t understand his music until much later. Is the audience that important when writing music?

This piece, Glitter Monster, I felt a freeness in writing this piece that I usually don’t feel. I really took a lot of risks. I really just wanted to write something fun. Partly for myself, partly for the orchestra. In that sense it didn’t really matter what anybody else thought. But on the other hand, I do think it is important, just as an artist, to understand the perspectives of others and understand how others are going to receive your work.

This piece really builds a really, expansive sound world that I think many people can find different things in different kinds of meaning in the sound world that I’ve created. I’m glad that sometimes an audience member might receive something differently than I do. Even if my piece isn’t necessarily about what somebody else thought it was, that’s okay. 

Was this particular work that became Glitter Monster something you had been thinking about in advance of this Sound Investment commission or did it did it come about specifically because of the commission? 

I started brainstorming the piece after I received the commission. I had known I was going to be a Sound Investment composer in advance for a little bit. I’d been thinking about it, but I think really this past fall is when I started brainstorming the piece. The themes in it are about reclaiming femininity, but also as something that could be powerful, or it could be scary, or it could be angry. You know, rather than thinking of feminism as this dainty thing. So the title Glitter Monster came out of that.

I was thinking about this idea of glitter, which is so stereotypically feminine, and thinking about how can I harness that into something that could be maybe scary or angry. And thinking about my own self as a woman who is conditioned to take up less space, to be submissive and realizing, wait a minute, I have my own feelings too. Sometimes I get angry too. That’s how the title came out and then eventually morphed into this really subversive, or surrealist, psychedelic kind of piece, that moved beyond that initial theme.

Coming at this from a male, non-composer point of view, I’m thinking of glitter as shiny and sparkly. But when you combine it with the word monster that could mean any number of things. Does it have more than one meeting to you as a title?

It morphed into being a creature that I’ve created. There’s parts of the piece that sound underwater, there’s parts of the piece that sound like in outer space. It’s like this really large creature that I’ve created that is moving through all these different spaces, and it feels very expansive.

In writing this piece, part of the fun I had was creating this really surreal creature that didn’t exist and creating something that is unexpected. I mean, nobody would think of a glitter monster. For that reason it can mean many different things. Even in the course of writing it, it moved from this one idea to something much larger.

Glitter Monster is going to have its world premiere on a program with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 24 and Schubert’s last symphony. Do you see a through line from your work through those other two works?

As a composer who’s pretty active in the orchestra world, I’ve been thinking about the pieces that I’ve been paired with. I grew up playing a lot of Bach on the piano. I was a flutist also. I grew up playing a lot of Beethoven. Growing up, I think I did have a love for classical music. I still do. That’s part of the reason I work in that space. And I think that all of those elements have still influenced my music.

I think that my music has a strong sense of counterpoint, which I think comes from that classical world. There’s a lot of rhythmic, intricate details. Some of that comes from that world. I think with Mozart, there’s a clarity in his music and I try to aim for that in my music. In that sense, there is a through line. Although I do think that this piece is pretty shocking compared to those other pieces. But I think that’s great.

Schubert is quoted as having said, “The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention.” Do you agree with him? What role, if any, does convention play in your life and work?

As an artist we often are trying to make something that is reflective of ourselves. In that sense we’re all unique and we do break convention in that way – by presenting a new point of view. At the same time, though, I think that we are part of a larger network of artists. We are part of this lineage. Even pop artists today have been influenced by artists that came hundreds of years ago.

My work is also influenced by Indian traditional music and Hindustani traditional music. That’s thousands of years old. And in that sense, I think that we are a part of convention, but at the same time we can break convention. I’m embracing convention, but I’m not totally following it. I am breaking it in some ways – in a way that feels right to me. There’s no rule that says you can’t do this. This tradition has evolved over time because of that.

If audiences are familiar with any one of your works, it’s probably Lumina, which is getting a lot of play. But you have other compositions that are not getting as much attention. How do you deal with that?

We often say getting the second performance of a piece is probably the hardest thing. There’s so much allure around a premiere. Everybody wants to be the first one to perform something, or the first one who commissioned something and give the premiere. But I think that part of the challenge, and why it’s difficult to get second performances of orchestra works in particular, is because of recordings. With Lumina I had a recording that is publicly available because the first orchestra that played it was a university orchestra. A lot of this has to do with players unions and things like that. 

I’ve been lucky as several of my other orchestral works have been performed more often recently because Lumina got my name out more and people were more interested in performing other works of mine. With chamber music, it’s kind of a different thing because recordings are more available. So it’s much easier for me to have chamber works performed frequently. But I think with orchestras, that’s probably the biggest challenge that composers face.

Homer wrote,”…like that star of the waning summer, who, beyond all stars, rises, bathed in the ocean stream, to glitter in brilliance.” What is the stream to glitter you would like to see in your professional life in the next ten years?

In writing Glitter Monster I’m really learning to trust myself in my work. We talked about the role of the audience and all of this. But I think ultimately, as artists, it’s really important that we have faith in ourselves and that we are willing to take risks and try new things. I think that’s something that I’m hoping I carry going forward. With this piece I kind of threw all caution to the wind and said I’m just going to write whatever I want. I wrote something that was very out of the norm. Kind of campy, kind of 80s, larger-than-life, psychedelic, very unusual. But at the same time, it felt like me.

I realize that now going forward I’m writing more works that mean something really important to me. I feel like I want to continue that going forward. So for me, the glitter that I’m hoping that will shine through my life is that I continue to be on a path and continue to just take risks and explore who I am as a person in my work and really be confident in myself.

To see the full interview with Nina Shekhar, please go here.

Main Photo: Composer Nina Shekhar (Photo by Shervin Lainez/Courtesy Nina Shekhar)