Celebrating Identity Through Music: an interview with pianist Naomi Niskala
Lullabies have been sung in every human civilization since before recorded time. Folk songs exist in every culture. Children’s songs are common to us all. Perhaps this is why pianist Naomi Niskala and her cellist duo partner An-Lin Bardin chose these musical forms as the basis of their ongoing commissioning project. Their timelessness speaks to us all and humanizes people across racial and cultural divides.
Naomi and An-Lin never planned to create this project. It grew came into being in the midst of the pandemic as a response to the anti-Asian hatred that erupted during that time. They found funding, commissioned their first piece, and when they performed it, the overwhelmingly positive response led them raise funds to commission more music. Now, with 18 commissions, they’ve expanded their concert work to include videos of the composers talking about their lives and their music, and future plans continue to unfold.
How do you address racial strife or social injustice without closing listeners’ minds? In the hands of Naomi and An-Lin, it’s done through the universal language of music. There, in the shared memories of lullabies, children’s songs, and folk music, we encounter people, not faceless “others” and we access the humanity that connects us to ourselves and other people. It is an honor to feature Naomi Niskala and this project on No Dead Guys.
I understand that you began studying the piano at the age of three. What drew you to the instrument, especially at such a young age?
I’m not so sure I was drawn to the instrument at that early age…it was more my mother’s idea. She grew up in wartime Japan and had always wanted to play the piano but couldn’t due to lack of resources during that time. So, before I was born, she decided I would be a pianist (the radio was tuned to the classical music station 24/7 in my crib from day 1 so I would develop perfect pitch). One of the jazz bars my parents liked to hang out at closed shortly after they married, and they brought the piano from the bar home. One of my mother’s friends noticed I had good finger dexterity as a toddler, so she suggested I start lessons earlier than my mother had planned. Thankfully I had a really wonderful first teacher who had this awesome big dog that would sit on the piano bench with me. And she started me with the Music Tree series, so musicianship was emphasized, and I learned to read music well!
When did you decide to make music your career and who or what influenced you to do so?
Very late!! I had never wanted to make music my career; I always wanted to become a veterinarian. We went to live in Tokyo, Japan for five years through my father’s work when l was in 8th grade, so I graduated high school there. For college I was deciding between Cornell and Tufts Universities and chose Tufts as it was in a bigger city. In late spring of my high school senior year, I learned Tufts had a double-degree program with the New England Conservatory, so I sent a tape and got accepted. I figured I would stay in the five-year program for a couple years, essentially get lessons for free, and then leave NEC and finish up just at Tufts. However, during Christmas break of my sophomore year, I went home and told my parents I was leaving Tufts and the double-degree program and would just continue at NEC. (My mother was elated as she had always wanted me to go into music.) The person who changed me (and my plans) was Patricia Zander (“PZ” as we called her), my teacher at NEC. For the first time in my life, I was playing for myself (and not my mother or my previous teachers), and she also rekindled something I had lost while in Japan: I remember during my first few weeks of lessons with her I’d play, and she’d just smile and say “I’m not convinced – come back next week” and I’d leave the lesson after 15 minutes. In Japan I had been told to go listen to such and such recording to hear how something should be interpreted and played – not very inspiring. Things also always came easily for me (I hated to practice and it was a constant battle with my mother when I was younger), and so for the first 3 semesters of college I would practice 45 minutes to an hour on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays, as my lesson was on Tuesday (I’m not sure PZ ever knew this!). I came back to campus after winter break my sophomore year and my practicing jumped to 4 to 6 hours a day. Then, starting my senior year, I got to spend two summers at Tanglewood (where I met Gil Kalish, my MM and DMA teacher) and then two summers at Ravinia’s Steans Institute (where I met Claude Frank, my AD teacher), and found I absolutely loved chamber music.
Congratulations on your successful international career as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, and university professor. How do you feel each aspect of your work enriches the others?
I think they all go hand-in-hand – you can’t teach lessons without continuing to perform and learn yourself (if we ask our students to perform we have to too, right?); if you perform and learn repertoire you are constantly problem solving, which is teaching. And I always feel we learn as much (if not more) from our students as they learn from us – it’s very much a two-way street. And there’s so much piano and chamber rep – we can’t play it all – so teaching lets us “learn” additional pieces. And then I also feel you can’t just play solo, or just play chamber – well, I guess you could but you’d be missing out on a lot. Playing solo takes a certain discipline and you must be so exact in your interpretive decisions, which sometimes work and sometimes don’t, but you also have freedom. Playing chamber music is a little more relaxing (if you like your partners) – you get to make interpretive decisions with your partners (versus solely on your own) and have a conversation on stage. For both, performing must be spontaneous – while it’s easier to be spontaneous by yourself in solo music, it can sometimes be terrifying. It’s sometimes harder to be spontaneous in a chamber group as it really relies on trust between everyone on stage, but it can be so much more rewarding and exciting when it happens.
Congratulations on your two disc recording of the music of American composer Robert Helps which was met with high acclaim, especially the first volume which was declared one of the ten “2007 Best of the Year” discs by ClassicsToday. How did you discover Helps’ music and why did you choose his works for your debut album?
I found out about Helps from my first full-time job, which was at the university he taught at before he died (I actually ended up with his office). I had been given a small amount of funds to use on a “research project” as a new hire and decided to use the funds towards a recording. I heard a recording of Helps playing his 3 Hommages and decided to record his piano works – there was something very genuine and honest in his playing. Then began the process of digging around – some of his scores were published, others were in manuscript, others’ existence were yet unknown. When Helps died, the university took all his belongings (from his office, home, and car) and just dumped them into boxes and carted them over to the university library. There were some 70 boxes, and I went through each of them, finding scores, manuscripts, letters, audio tape recordings, interviews, writings/musings about his works and other composers’ works, etc. I’m terrible at making decisions, so when I figured out there was roughly 140 minutes of music, I felt it would be easier to just record it all instead of choose half of it for one CD. I think I was also drawn to Helps because he, as a performer, really gravitated towards the Romantic composers (Chopin, Godowsky, Rachmaninov), and it shows in his compositions. I gravitate more towards Classical and early Romantic composers (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert), so I had to go out of my comfort zone to learn Helps’s music, and it made me overall a more expressive player. It was a really rewarding project, and it also opened a lot more doors for me, as Helps himself had an almost “cult-like” following in various corners of the world. These recordings took me to Berlin to play with Spectrum Concerts for almost a decade, and to Honolulu and Maui of all places.
I discovered your work through the commissioning project you and cellist An-Lin Bardin created. When did you form the Bardin-Niskala Duo and why?
An-Lin and I formed the Bardin-Niskala Duo in January 2021, which was still deep in the pandemic. That was the time when everything was still shuttered: public performances meant porch concerts or streaming to who knows who from your living room, etc. My mom is Japanese, and An-Lin’s mom is Chinese, and we were both horrified by the anti-Asian violence and rhetoric that skyrocketed with the “Asian” covid virus. We wanted to find a way to address this through music, and it was over a 3am WhatsApp phone call that we decided on commissioning a composer. I thought we should ask an Asian composer to write a work for us that was inspired by a children’s song or folk song, as this would be something almost anyone could identify with, and it might make the commission more “approachable” to audience members. We reached out to Yiheng Yvonne Wu, who had been an undergrad piano student of mine when I was doing my Artist Diploma at the Yale School of Music. She had since gone on to complete her PhD in Composition at UCSD and was doing really well as a composer. Both of us liked her music, and she’s also an amazing person. Yvonne agreed to write a piece for us, and in November 2021 we received her commission – a 3 movement work entitled “Three Adaptations” – the first movement is based on a Northeast Chinese lullaby, the second movement on a Taiwanese children’s song, and the third movement on a Japanese folk song that I love. We hoped that by performing and sharing this piece with audiences, we would break down stereotypes, show how individual different Asian cultures are (I don’t know how many times we were hearing people call Asia a “country”), humanize and personalize each culture, and therefore lower ignorance and fear, the fuels for racial hatred and violence. When funding came in for more composers, we were able to expand our commission project to ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab and Native American) and other under-represented composers. The only thing we ask of the composer is to base their commissioned work on a folk song, children’s song, or social song of their heritage, culture, or community.
Commissioning works can be expensive. How did you find funding for your project and what was the initial response?
Well – we had originally planned to just commission Yvonne and raise enough funds to cover the commission and perform it a few times. We had a budget we hoped to reach in 3 or 4 months, but in our first 3 weeks we had already received triple the funding we had hoped for. An-Lin’s mother went on a huge fundraising campaign for us in California and Taiwan, and it was the right topic at the right moment. And thankfully, we loved the piece Yvonne wrote for us (it continues to be one of our favorites), so we were eager to commission more composers! Even now, the majority of our funding comes from private donors – many of whom are repeat donors. We became a 501c3 charitable arts non-profit in Fall 2023, which has opened the door to more grant possibilities. However, as we all know, grant funding for the arts has dropped with the current government, and so we are even more grateful for our tremendously supportive private donors.
How many pieces have you commissioned and how many more are you planning to commission?
We have just commissioned our 18th composer! We have 13 pieces in hand; 4 more are arriving this Fall and Winter – so we’ll have a lot of learning to do! I don’t think we have a final number of commissions we’d like to do – we have the funds right now to keep commissioning, and we’re always looking and listening for new composers to commission.
You and An-Lin have been performing your commissioned pieces in concert nationally and internationally. How have audiences from different cultural backgrounds responded to your program?
I think audience response has been one of the main things that keeps us going. Performing these pieces is HARD, mentally. It’s sometimes completely draining. More than half of our commissions address social and racial injustices, and these are difficult subjects to process and think about. In early 2022, when we were performing at my university to a mostly zoomed-in audience as part of my university’s MLK celebration, I thought it would be good to ask some of our commissioned composers to record short videos to share with the audience to keep them more engaged. Some composers spoke about the song their work (or work-to-be) was based on, others spoke about their cultural heritage, race, or what “community” or “identity” meant to them. These videos made a real impact on the audience, and since then, we have always shown the composer’s video before we perform their piece. This personalizes them, their music, and their race or culture; it humanizes the social or racial injustice their people incurred – even if it was over a century ago. Audience members often approach us in tears afterwards, especially if they’re a minority or immigrant and have experienced racism or challenges in this country. Others comment on how they were shocked to learn about something they knew little to nothing about, or something that was “glossed over” in school (the forced imprisonment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans by the U.S. government in WWII; the U.S. colonization and takeover of the Hawaiian Kingdom and their lands; hearing the voices of young Venezuelan children who have made the dangerous journey to the U.S. border). Several audience members have taken the time to write us, or one of our composers, thanking the Duo and the composer for representing their culture or their story, which they feel is often unheard or unsaid.
On your website you write that you’re “Celebrating Identity Through Music.” How do you feel this is best done through the wordless language of music?
I think our idea of folksong, children’s song, and lullaby weave a common thread through our commissioned pieces. Hearing the personal stories from the composers in the videos and then hearing these stories and emotions spoken and retold through the music is a powerful experience. Audience members who don’t attend classical music concerts, and audience members who don’t like “modern music” are often just as moved (if not more) than audience members who listen to a lot of classical music. I think this shows that, if given the tools (what to listen for – whether the actual song or the “sound” of an emotion or feeling), music can speak to almost anyone.
How can all musicians help to raise empathy and compassion towards others through their music—regardless of what repertoire they play?
I think the key is to find a good balance to the repertoire we play. I truly love my Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart. But these are not the only composers out there. Be responsible (and curious) and find good music to play by composers who are not household names – help promote this music and get others wanting to hear more. Perform all the good music by living composers, by women, and by those who are under-represented. It will take some digging to find these composers, but it’s worth it, and it’s our responsibility. And when you play music, play with respect – learn the composer’s language and how to interpret it in the way they meant it to be interpreted, take the time to learn it well so your performance is convincing and meaningful, play with honesty and integrity. Tell your audience about the composer, especially if they’re not a household name – talk to them from the stage or write about it in your program notes. If you’re performing a work that was composed as a reaction or response to something (a personal difficulty the composer experienced, a political or social event) or performing a work or composer that has ethical issues, educate your audience.
What current and future plans are you most excited about?
In early September we will record a good number of our commissioned works for CD release. Our first release will be of the works that address social or racial injustices. We get to work with recording engineer and producer Judith Sherman, which we are so excited about. And then we have two big future plans which are still in the beginning stages. I think they will be immense projects (not only in terms of time and energy involved, but also for funding), so it’s a bit scary! One is to create a series of short documentary films addressing some of the social and racial injustices our commissioned composers write about in their pieces. Each film would include performances of two composers’ works, each addressing the same injustice, interviews with the composers, and a scholar or survivor recounting the event.The other project is to publish an anthology of our commissioned works, with extensive written foreword before each piece (to take the place of the videos we include in our performances). One of our main goals as a nonprofit is to promote the composers and their commissioned works, and it would be wonderful to see these works published in an anthology. Almost every time we perform in an academic setting (a university or high school), eager cello and piano students and their teachers ask us how to get the scores of some of the works we play. If anyone knows of an interested publisher, please let us know!
What advice can you offer other musicians who are interested in finding funding for their own commissioning projects?
Don’t be afraid to ask for support. And support and help will sometimes come from places and people you would have never thought of. Talk about your project to anyone who will listen. Also talk with your composers – they will often know about grants and additional funding sources that you can apply for, often together with the composer.
The Bardin-Niskala Duo (cello and piano) is a non-profit ensemble that uses music to explore notions of identity, belonging, and community to fight racism, promote cultural awareness, and celebrate humanity. The Duo commissions ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American) and other under-represented composers to write pieces that are based around folksongs and children's songs of their particular cultures and countries.
Through these commissions and the performances of these works the Duo promotes these composers and opens dialogue with and amongst audience members on the notions of homeland, community, and belonging, on the complexity and uniqueness of various cultures, and on the challenges of navigating life in this country as a bi-cultural, multi-cultural, or minority person. Each commissioned work is preceded by a personal video message from the composer, where they discuss their own journey towards identity and a sense of belonging, their community, and the historical or personal significance of the folk or children’s song they chose as an inspiration for their work.
Formed in early 2021, the Duo has performed across the United States from Mississippi to Minnesota and Hawai’i to New York. They have presented at regional and national conferences and have been awarded four residencies at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute. Their performances are offered in concert halls, schools, universities, and community centers, and range from traditional concerts to more informal performances mingled with open dialogue between the Duo and audience members. Active educators, the Bardin-Niskala Duo works with students of all ages in master classes and workshops and also co-directs the Winterhaven Chamber Music Retreat, an adult amateur chamber music festival held in January in New Hampshire.
An-Lin Bardin, cellist
Described as “stunning,” by the New York Times, cellist An-Lin Bardin currently freelances and teaches both music and math in the greater NYC area. As the cellist of the Vinca Quartet, she performed extensively throughout Europe and the US, including Carnegie’s Weill Hall, Aspen, and Vilar Performing Arts Center. Bardin’s performances have been broadcast on Deutschlandradio and WNYC. She is a laureate of several international quartet competitions, including the Paolo Borciani Quartet Competitions in Reggio Emilia, Italy, and the Fischoff, the Plowman, the Yellow Springs, Chesapeake, and the International Chamber Music Ensemble Competitions in the United States. A recipient of a DAAD fellowship which enabled her to work with the Vogler String Quartet in Stuttgart, Germany, Bardin also studied extensively with Gunter Pichler and Valentin Erben of the Alban Berg Quartet, Walter Levine, Heime Mueller, and the Artemis String Quartet under the auspices of the ProQuartet program in Paris, France, and with the Emerson String Quartet through the Carnegie Hall Chamber Music Workshops. She was a graduate assistant to the Takacs Quartet at the University of Colorado at Boulder for two years as part of the graduate quartet residency program. A strong proponent of music education, Bardin was a founding member of Music Haven, an intensive mentorship program serving youth from low-income neighborhoods in New Haven, Connecticut. She also founded two ongoing music educational programs in rural Washington State through the Gorgeous Sounds Residency Program. Raised in California by two nuclear physicists, Bardin began her cello studies at the age of eight with Irene Sharp. She holds a B.S. from Yale University in Geology and Geophysics, and an M.M. from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Aldo Parisot and was a member of the Grammy-Award-winning Yale Cellos.
Naomi Niskala, pianist
A soloist and chamber musician who has appeared in Europe, North America, Russia, Israel, Thailand, and Japan, pianist Naomi Niskala's performances have been broadcast on BBC Radio, Deutschlandradio, RTV Germany, and NPR’s Performance Today. Niskala performs regularly with Spectrum Concerts Berlin, one of Germany’s leading chamber organizations, and has also recorded two discs with them. Recent performance highlights include the San Francisco Symphony Chamber Series at Davies Symphony Hall, soloist with the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic of Russia, and solo and chamber performances with Spectrum Concerts Berlin in the Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal of Berlin, Carnegie’s Weill Hall, in Thailand, and in Kosovo. Her release of the only complete recordings of American composer Robert Helps’s solo piano works on two discs with Albany Records in 2007 was met with high acclaim, and she has also recorded piano chamber works of Robert Helps and Ursula Mamlok with Spectrum Concerts Berlin for two discs on Naxos, as well as the world premiere of Mamlok’s 2015 quintet “Breezes” for Bridge Records. Niskala is featured in the 2013 German rbb television documentary entitled “Sehnsucht Musik” (Searching for Music), documenting the work of four members of Spectrum Concerts Berlintowards improving the harsh conditions for young musicians at a music school located in Prizren, Kosovo. Born to Japanese/Finnish-American parents, she began studying piano at the age of three, raised in Rochester, New York and then later in Tokyo, Japan. Niskala holds degrees from the Yale School of Music, Stony Brook University, and the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Claude Frank, Gilbert Kalish, and Patricia Zander. She also worked with pianists Leon Fleisher, Menahem Pressler, Peter Serkin, and Maria Louisa Faini, and violinists Louis Krasner and Eugene Lehner. Niskala is currently Professor of Music at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, where she teaches piano and theory, and leads a summer chamber music exchange program to Japan. She also teaches at the Interlochen Arts Camp (MI) during the summers.