The musician Tim Long was sitting at his dining room table on a September morning, looking at old family photos and talking about how good can sometimes emerge from suffering.
Long’s mother, Stella, a member of the Choctaw Nation, grew up destitute in rural eastern Oklahoma. When she was young, her widowed mother remarried and moved nearby, leaving Stella and her four brothers to fend largely for themselves. The Oklahoma government put the children in boarding school, where Stella caught tuberculosis. One of her lungs had to be removed, and she endured two stints in quarantine that lasted a total of five years.
One thing that gave her solace was her discovery of a classical music station on the radio. She developed a special fondness for Beethoven.
“Without that, I wouldn’t be in music,” Long, 56, said over cups of oolong tea. “My life would not have happened if she — if my parents — had not had that broader outlook.”
Long’s wide-ranging life in music has included playing the violin and piano, conducting, coaching singers and teaching. And now, he has taken on a new role, perhaps the most significant yet: commissioning.
During the pandemic, he conceived and started the North American Indigenous Songbook, a project that aims to create a new body of vocal works by Native American composers. A set from the first round of songs will be premiered on Nov. 16 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, including pieces with a firm grounding in traditional styles as well as forays into avant-garde music and groovier singer-songwriter veins.
“I find this project to be beautiful in the way that it expands the repertoire,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, a contributor, said in an interview. “And it just lets people know who of us making music exist from tribal backgrounds.”
The idea for the songbook emerged in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Long is warm, even sentimental, but he can also be direct to the point of bluntness. He recalled how artists started coming to him four years ago “freaked out with guilt,” suddenly interested in performing works by people other than white men. They asked if he knew of songs by Native American composers.
“But there were none,” he said. “Really, hardly any.”
For him, this is a corollary to the broader invisibility of Natives and their culture: “People don’t look at us, hardly ever. The most educated people don’t know almost anything about us.”
The Trail of Tears, the American government’s forced displacement of tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast, brought both sides of Long’s family to Oklahoma in the 19th century. His mother’s Choctaw family was poor, but his father’s, Muscogee Creek, ended up in an area where oil was discovered.
“He grew up in a nice house,” Long said. “He looked like a little rich kid. And I would not have ended up like I did if I did not have the benefit of ancestors in those generations with wealth. The oil eventually dried up, but the psychology, the sense of pride and success, was still there.”
As a boy in small-town Holdenville, Okla., Long grew obsessed with his mother’s Beethoven records, and “consumed by” classical music in general. When his early experiments on a toy piano were advancing, his parents borrowed a real piano from family members, and he became the first student of a local teenager. She turned out to be a talented teacher; he was 5, and flourished.
Introverted, he had a private fantasy life full of synesthetic meldings of sound and image. He could play with toy cars for hours, imagining each as a different flutist with a sound influenced by the car’s shape and shininess. He would hold mock violin auditions in his mind, creating teams of fantasy players whose styles were determined by the visual qualities of their names.
“I lived in my head a lot,” he said. “My parents gave me freedom because I was just in my room quietly.”
It wasn’t the only way that Long was quietly different. “Growing up gay in Oklahoma, in the Bible Belt, in the ’80s during AIDS,” he said, “I felt great shame about myself. Both, in a way, for being Indian and for being gay.”
He was terrified of being associated with the out gays at Oklahoma City University when he was an undergraduate there. And his sense of guilt and unworthiness persisted through his time in the master’s program at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. — where he now teaches and directs the opera program — and a move to New York City in 1994.
“Despite everything that I had, and where I was and where I was working, I was kind of living the life of a reservation Indian,” he said. “I was getting wasted, like so much. I was living out a life of shame.”
Slowly, with age, he grew more focused and confident. He met his future husband, the baritone and teacher Christopher Dylan Herbert, in 2003, and started to conduct. It wasn’t an easy fit at first.
“The biggest thing about conducting is, it’s psychology, group psychology,” he said. “And I didn’t have any of that. I didn’t want to be on a podium; I didn’t want to be a maestro.”
He also didn’t want to be typecast. Long had been mentored by Louis Ballard, the longtime dean of Native American composers, and participated in some of the rare programs that brought together the handful of Native artists working in the Western classical sphere. But he feared being seen as a diversity hire.
“I was always hesitant about using being Indian for my career,” he said. “I saw people doing that, and I was disgusted by it. Then I got invited to do ‘Missing’ in Canada.”
“Missing,” an opera with music by Brian Current and a libretto by Marie Clements, is based on the stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The premiere production, which played in Vancouver and Victoria, featured a cast that was half Indigenous, and a rehearsal process that incorporated tribal elders who assisted the performers with learning Gitxsan, an Indigenous language that was part of the text. There were events for the families of victims.
“At first I thought, OK, it’s a gig,” Long said. “But then you start hearing sobbing from the audience in the first seconds that doesn’t stop until the end of performance. This was 2016, very late in my life, that I realized how fortunate I was. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of responsibility about being Native.”
“At that point,” he added, “I really started speaking out about things. I started gearing my focus toward Native people.”
With this new focus, he was ready when people were “freaking out” and looking for songs. “There is no repertoire like this in existence,” he said, “and I’m in a place where I can effect change. Why don’t I try to create a legacy, or start a movement of people writing pieces?”
He had already persuaded his father-in-law, Randy Plimpton, to sponsor a scholarship for young singers from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, where Long’s friend Barbara McAlister had started a voice program. Long and Plimpton were relaxing over Scotch late one night during the pandemic, and Long started sketching out the idea for the songbook.
“I was blown away,” Plimpton said. He told Long, “Whatever you need to make this happen, I will finance it for you.”
They created a nonprofit organization, the Plimpton Foundation, to bring in donations from others, too, and National Sawdust, the adventurous performance space in Brooklyn, offered to be a partner in presenting the fruits of the project.
“This just fits so well with our mission, in terms of creating new works representing marginalized communities,” said Ana De Archuleta, National Sawdust’s managing director.
The first round of commissions — the fees are modest, just a couple of thousand dollars — went to artists Long knew or had worked with in what is still a small community of Native composers. Chacon’s piece ended up being almost like performance art, as is much of his work; with a text by the poet Manny Loley in the Diné Navajo language, it has no set meter, and the singer can even take liberties with the pitches.
But some of the other songs have more in common with standard piano-vocal recital fare. Charles Shadle’s is in a thorny contemporary idiom. The eminent flutist R. Carlos Nakai’s contribution pairs voice with either modern or Indian flute; Martha Redbone’s embraces funk.
By the end of next year, there will be 19 commissioned songs; Long said that the project “will most likely live in a digital format where people can easily buy it.” Important to his vision is that the pieces can and should be performed by anyone, not just Native artists.
“It can go overboard with the fear of appropriation,” he said. “These can be performed by anyone without fear of disrespect.”
Part of that, of course, comes out of necessity: “It’s going to have to be for everybody,” Chacon said, “because there’s not so many of us in this field.”
For Long, the project has brought another less familiar role: composer. Inspired by a series of deaths of those close to him over the past few years, he has been writing a song whose working title is “The Luminous Loss.”
“All the songs are done, except I’m still finishing mine,” he said a few weeks before the National Sawdust concert. “Just pondering the words fills me with emotion. I almost don’t want it to end, at the same time as not wanting to get back to it.”
“What comes out when I improvise is pop songs,” he added. “I’m thinking of this as like a little more complex musical theater. I’m not trying to make a statement. I’m not trying to come off as smart. I just want to be honest.”
The post The Musician Building the Great Native American Songbook appeared first on New York Times.
