“I believe music is a living language,

not frozen as it might appear to be when it’s presented in the black and white dots of standard music notation. From a young age, I was taught to put sounds together in the same manner as artists make a painting: I was given a music palette, one color at a time (i.e. the interval of a Perfect 5th, P4) and asked to create something of my own liking using this color. As a piano student at the Peabody Conservatory Preparatory Department in greater Baltimore, I had the privilege of taking music theory and musicianship classes in addition to private piano lessons. This led to an invitation to attend The Walden School Young Musician Program where music is taught holistically. (NB. Holism was first used by philosopher General Jan Smuts in 1926. He describes it as “the tendency of nature to form wholes—or organisms, and systems—from the ordered grouping of single units—molecules, atoms and subatomic particles.”) I first attended at the age of fourteen and it changed my life, not only as a musician but also as a young adult. At Walden there were caring adults who saw my potential and were interested enough to help me learn to speak my own language in music, find my own “painting” style.

I was influenced by a wide variety of music from my teachers, the new music of my friends, and of course, the music of well-known composers. We Walden teens would gather at night and put all our heads in the center as we lay on the floor to listen to records. Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Ravel Operas, and Vaughn Williams Symphonies. My heart opened as my listening expanded. And this is where I have lived, truly lived, since then.

My Opus One that summer of 1974 was the first time I wrote outside of my own instrument— I still remember the thrill of putting together a unique work for instruments I didn’t even play! Not only did I learn to construct music using basic sound materials, to notate with tedious detail (with a quill pen!), to listen with constructive criticism, but I learned to communicate with performers to understand the idiosyncrasies of their instrument. I continue to be highly collaborative in my approach to writing. I ask questions, test things out and follow the advice and preferences for whom I’m writing. I routinely send drafts out to my close colleagues for comment and critiques. To me, it’s more than a one-way communication, it’s an exchange.

My starting process is improvisatory, at the piano or fiddle, guided by an idea, an image, story, or problem. I follow the unknowable wisdom of my heart and from there I allow my head to form it into a solid construction. My guiding principle, given to me by Robert Morris, one of my doctoral advisors, is that elegant music is not only beautiful in sound but beautiful in structure.

As a composer I’ve always been fascinated by the smallest germination of musical ideas and how it forms whole statements and whole works—a holistic mindset. I’ve created works that explore how a musical particle—a cell, a motif, a musical gesture—can, through repetition and development, cause and combine into an entire musical composition. At the age of 18 I created, through improvisation, Piano Sonata built on a two-note theme, awarded a BMI Student Award in 1979. Some of my other works show how I break musical gestures down to their smallest component: A More Perfect Union, Rootstock, and Intersections. What drives me to write is the urge to illustrate the ordinary through a musical soundscape. I tell stories through music. (Beetle’s Journey describes a day in the life of a beetle, Cogitatio describes the exploratory touch of a rose, circling the strings of the violin as if one were gently tracing the petals of a blooming rose.) Sometimes I’m driven to address a specific issue: racial justice (A More Perfect Union where I use American and Immigrant folk songs to highlight injustice, conflict resolution and hope). I’ve spent many hours as a composer trying to understand birdsong and bird behavior (Singing Strength, Nightingale, Cover Us With Song). After learning through research how birdsong evolves, it was only a matter of time before I then wanted to understand my own musical lineage (Rootstock traces the music of my teacher, to his teacher, to her teacher, and on backwards). I live in an imaginary soundscape in my head and sometimes I just need to hear it out loud. It’s part of who I am, and I can’t help it. I’m grateful to all the people and ensembles who have asked me to write for them because it means that they want to hear it, too!

Every piece I write is like getting to know a new friend. With attentiveness and mutual respect, the inner beauty within each new musical idea offers an opportunity to create a new language, to uniquely color and stylize the world. I love doing research as part of the writing process and find it rewarding to rework something until it feels right. I always make my deadlines and finish what I start. Since I retired from my day job I have written sixteen works in fourteen years, yet ask me what my favorite piece is, and I’ll tell you it’s the one I’m writing.”

-Denise Ondishko