Song Catching: a guest post by composer and Native Flutist Ron Warren
To listen to a place and to the creatures who inhabit it. To sit still, dropping into the rhythm and breath of each moment. To wait until the gift of a song has been given. This way of composing music sits in direct contrast to the cerebral manipulation of tones and silences that is the foundation of so much classical composing. Composer and Native Flutist Ron Warren is a rare musician who creates music by combining both approaches. Learning how to play the Native Flute taught him how to be a “song catcher”; a doctorate in musical composition taught him how to translate the songs he’s given into classical form. The result is music that marries head and heart, as well as place and transcendence.
Warren has appeared on No Dead Guys before in an interview that focused on his gorgeous piano solo, Distances Between. I spoke of his most recent piano work, The Way of Mountains and Desert, in a more recent article. It was in an email exchange that Warren mentioned “song catching.” I was intrigued enough to beg him to write a guest post about this, never guessing that he would write so poetically about his compositional process.
The formation of The Way of Mountains and Desert forms the basis of this post. Warren also offers in-depth videos on his YouTube channel on how this music found him and how he and pianist Paul Barnes worked together to bring it to life. Best of all? Pianists can purchase this work and Distances Between on his website. It is an honor to feature Warren’s words and music on this site.
A guest post by Ron Warren
“Now go sit in the woods for three days and listen.”
This advice was given to me by the kind Anishinaabe musician who was helping me on my flute journey—a musician who promised me that this is the best way to learn how to play Native Flute. It is also how the “creative process” begins. A Native Flute player can be thought of as a “Song Catcher.” We are not clever geniuses who create songs. All of the songs already exist. Our flutes help us to catch the ones that need to be shared on any given day.
In this understanding, music making is not about self-expression or technical display. It’s not about finding sound metaphors for what we are feeling. It’s more about being in right relationship with a particular place, listening to all the Beings in that place and perhaps receiving a gift of song that can be shared with the community. The musician is more a facilitator than a “creator” or “performer.” Given that orientation, it is probably not surprising that flexibility and improvisation are important aspects of our flute playing traditions.
I like to make myself available to receive sounds by actively engaging with a particular place, either in real time or through memory. Songs, song fragments, sound gestures of some kind will begin to emerge, usually through improvisation on my flutes. Occasionally, music arrives in dreams. When I dream music and am aware I am dreaming, I know to pay special attention because something important is being shared.
By the time I started playing Native Flutes, I already had a doctorate in music composition. Formal music training in this country has been (and, for the most part, remains) firmly Eurocentric. Some of that music is important to me, especially early polyphony. While I am grateful to all of my mentors, by the end of that academic experience, I felt a strong need to return to a more intuitive and culturally connected music path. The Native flute became the vehicle. I am an enrolled citizen of Echota Cherokee Nation of Alabama, so I am interested in older Cherokee music (sadly, much of it irretrievably lost) and Indigenous musical traditions in general.
I’ve worked with excellent musicians from many different traditions and styles of music making. Musicians “borrow” from each other constantly. Done with respect and the deepest possible understanding, vibrant and fresh new music can result. Too often, borrowing is code for extraction and appropriation, resulting in little more than superficial exoticism. So again, we are back to being in right relationship and listening deeply.
In my recent collaborations with pianist Paul Barnes, song catching translated to the piano, especially with my most recent piano piece, The Way of Mountains & Desert. Paul and I met over a performance of Philip Glass’ Second Piano Concerto, which was commissioned and premiered by Paul. The second movement has an extensive part for Native Flute, originally written for R. C. Nakai. Paul and I quickly became solid friends and colleagues. He invited me to compose a large-scale piano piece for him to play during the 2022-23 season (funded by the Hixson-Lied Foundation). As usual I wanted to start from a sense of place, hopefully one that had meaning for both of us. Paul, who is also a fine Greek Orthodox cantor, was getting ready to attend a retreat at a monastery in what is now thought of as the desert southwest of the U.S. Since I have spent a fair amount of time in that part of the country and even considered moving there at one point, this seemed like a good fit. Paul gave me a target of approximately 20 minutes for the work.
Serving as a “song catcher” for The Way of Mountains and Deserts asked me to spend lots of time remembering my experiences in places like Bryce Canyon, Santa Fe and the surrounding pueblos—memories such as playing flute into a canyon while Raven road a thermal nearby, memories of sunlight reflected from a stream dancing on a cliff wall, and a memory of sharing phrases back and forth with an unseen singer several hills away. I reread some of my favorite Indigenous poets from the region - Ofelia Zepeda, Simon J Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Tommy Pico. In this way I mentally returned to sitting in the desert for several days (weeks, actually), listening. I tried to remain connected to memorable experiences in specific places. To be attentive. To hear what was being offered accurately. Eventually, I began to catch song fragments with my flute. These slowly grew into a solo flute song, Love Song for This Earth. This song provided the essential material for all four Parts of The Way of Mountains & Desert.
“Part 1 - To Water” and “Part 4 - To the Land” are both fully written out in standard classical piano notation. For these parts, if you imagine drums and/or shakers keeping steady time and play the notated rhythms, the pacing will take care of itself. In other words, the continual fussing with the pulse that is considered “expressive” in classical piano playing doesn’t really help here. Part 1 is loosely modeled after dance song forms often heard at Intertribal powwows, with push-ups (varied repetitions) of a passage set apart by moments that function as “honor beats”. Several pitches from the flute song become a ground in Part 4. I’m fond of William Byrd’s keyboard music. His “Second Ground” is important for this part. Framing the work with a more indigenous structure on one end and a more Euro-Classical structure on the other seemed appropriate for our shared project. For me, what these structures share is an opportunity for organic growth by varied repetition.
“Part 2 - Songs of Gratitude for Desert Beings” and “Part 3 - Love Song for This Earth” are both less specific in notation and structure. They can morph considerably from one performance to the next. Part 3 is essentially a piano version of the original flute song in a free rhythmic notation to reflect the parlando feel of the song. Part 2 is the most open and flexible. It offers 17 brief “Songs of Gratitude for Desert Beings”, some more fixed, some more open. Performers are invited to construct the movement fresh for each performance by selecting several and playing them in any order. A graphically notated structured improvisation, “Song for Turtle”, can be chosen to conclude Part 2.
My partner, who is a fine flute player, improviser and song catcher once wisely suggested that some songs are just visiting for the day. Other songs come back and morph each time they visit. But some songs come back and gradually begin to “crystallize” into a more fixed form. I love that idea. It’s a good way to visualize music existing at many places on a continuum from free improvisation to fixed composition. It’s the songs that decide where they want to be on the continuum.
I think my Anishinaabe friend would agree that our work is not about forcing music to be what we think it should be. It is about tuning into the surrounding beauty and listening for the music waiting to be shared through us. To be attentive. To hear what is being offered accurately. To catch the song and share it.
Ron Warren (Echota Cherokee) is an innovative Native American flute player as well as an accomplished song writer, composer/arranger and music/cultural educator.
Honored with numerous Native American Music Award nominations, Ron’s work has also been supported by the National Museum of the American Indian, the Music Omi Foundation, the First Nations Composers Initiative, and has been featured on NPR, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Pacifica Radio, and many other media outlets. His music has been used in several documentary films including a series on Native Repatriation issues produced by the Smithsonian Institute.
Ron's current projects include Lunas y Agua, a set of thirteen structured improvisations, notated as graphic scores, that celebrates events and encounters during each of the Lunar Months of a full year near his home in Florida.
Click HERE for a music video of Lunas y Agua #3, "Gator" at YouTube.
His large scale solo piano piece, The Way of Mountains and Desert, commissioned by concert pianist Paul Barnes, was performed throughout the country and abroad during the 2022-23 season. Ron & Paul performed together on the Cutting Edge concert series in NYC in May of 2023.
Click HERE to see a brief intro to that project on YouTube.
This coming season, Ron will be providing Live Stream performances for the Spirit First online meditation group and online workshops for various groups. He also will be presenting workshops at the University of Salisbury and the Delmarva Discovery Museum and performing at the Marva Theater, all on Maryland's beautiful Eastern Shore.