Fahad Siadat
Los Angeles composer, performer and music entrepreneur Fahad Siadat is on a summer visit to his childhood home near Ashland, Oregon when we catch up with him. Fresh off the heels of the NEO Voice Festival, and in the midst of multiple projects as composer, performer and as director of his own music publishing company, See-A-Dot Music, he’s not the kind of guy to slow down — even on vacation.
“ I think all these separations between art and entertainment and concert music and popular music are very silly and arbitrary.”
Trained as a composer and performer, with his undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music and doctoral degree from CalArts, Siadat’s bona fides in traditional classical music and new music are evident.
As a choral music performer/composer and new music practitioner, he noticed a distinct gap between the two worlds. He and other performers and composers began to put together ensembles that could meld the two worlds, like C4 Ensemble and HEX. “I found similar places where the choirs were made up of composers who wanted to write … music that other groups wouldn’t touch,” he explains. “I think all these separations between art and entertainment and concert music and popular music are very silly and arbitrary … I am bothered by that division, so I am grateful for groups like Roomful of Teeth that are very popular in the choral music world, and that are bringing in these other composers like Caroline Shaw. That has now bridged the gap, which is a really exciting kind of thing.”
In working to bring the new music and choral music worlds together, Siadat found enormous opportunity to introduce singers to new choral music that might not cross their transoms in traditional choirs. “There’s something like 250,000 choirs in America,” he explains. “It's like 10% of the US population — that's over 50 million Americans — sing in a choir on a weekly basis … by contrast, there are 2,000 community and professional orchestras in in the US.”
“The opportunity there to bring people into this world is really big … 50 million people sing this music, which becomes their own audience, right? They're the ones that actually get to spend weeks and months with this new literature and will learn to love it because they've become so familiar with it, but they've also got huge audiences. There's a whole world there that isn't engaging with this new music … so I think by advocating for this particular kind of contemporary work, we can we can start to bridge that gap and show people what new music can look like, and I think there's a really big opportunity there.”
That’s what his publishing company, See-A-Dot Music specializes in — getting the music of new choral music composers into the hands (mouths?) of vocal performers around the world.
Siadat’s ambition to further integrate these music worlds is just one aspect of his cosmopolitan relationship to music — global, inclusive and progressive, both in artistic and social practice. His discussion of contemporary vocal composition encompasses artists ranging from Jocelyn Hagen and Edie Hill to Nico Muhly and Julia Wolfe. Whether he’s discussing American Minimalism, Indonesian Gamelan or South Korean Pansori, he’s informed by a deep understanding of music history and theory, and driven by a vision for what’s next.
He sees the voice as the instrument to take music to the next level of its progression. “When I put ‘violin’ at the beginning of a score, there is an understanding of what a violin is supposed to sound like,” he says. “It is designed to be played, and to have an ideal sound. But the voice is not designed. I mean, I guess we could we could have a theological debate about whether or not it’s designed, but if you look at the kinds of singing styles and the singing sounds from all over the world, it's very apparent that that there is not one way to use the voice, right? So with that in mind when I see ‘tenor voice’, yeah, it's frustrating and very Eurocentric to know that there is some idealized way of singing that I'm supposed to encapsulate.”
Also, like many performers and composers, he feels a deep spiritual connection with music and its ability to express what can’t be expressed with language. His passion is sparked in that friction point between the intellectual and the spiritual. “I started to realize that … if I allowed myself to go back to childhood play of sound to just explore my own voice — this is not new either. This is what Meredith Monk did. This is what Toby Twining did. This is what Joan La Barbara did … Embracing this part of my practice, getting into the physicality of the sound has allowed the experience to be everything that I want a spiritual practice to be — both external and expressive, but also internal and introspective. Paying attention to the physical sensations and experience of making these sounds.”
Ultimately, to open ourselves to the full benefits of the music the world has to offer, and will offer in the future, we have to reevaluate how we listen. “It just takes it takes examining our values as classical musicians and realizing that they aren't universal values,” Siadat explains. “Music is not a universal language that only white men from 150 years ago in Europe understood. Anyone who thinks that music is a universal language, all they need to do is listen to Beijing opera, and they'll realize that it doesn't speak to them at all. It’s a ridiculous notion — it’s vitally culturally informed. That doesn't take away its potency to speak to us. There are all these different ways that it can, if we are willing to let go of our values around what is ‘right’ and what is ‘good’ music … By looking and asking, ‘why am I having this experience’ we can start to really understand who we are and what we're listening to in a whole different way, and we get to actually our power.”
We as global citizens find ourselves in a uniquely challenging place, battered by pandemic, social unrest, systemic racism and climate change. Our conversations are increasingly strained — especially in election year America. For Siadat, an open-minded reevaluation of our experience of music is something we can apply to our interpersonal relationships in the weirdness of 2020.
“I think one of the things that I've been enjoying about this really dark political climate that we're in that’s so divisive — people are so not willing to listen in the way that we're talking about. ‘I hate this.’ ‘I'm done.’ Not being willing to listen to a contrary point of view is no different than saying, ‘I don't like this kind of music’ without ever giving it a shot.”
“When someone says something that I think is — my favorite word, ’offensive,’ right? Which I'm pretty sure is a word that means nothing … let’s just be specific. What is problematic? Is that offensive? Or, you know, [is it] perpetuating harmful stereotypes? Those are two very different things. One of them is the end of a conversation, and one of them is the beginning of a conversation.”
Learn more:
Fahad’s Website
In-Progress composition: Conference of the Birds
Also, if you’d like to witness all of pianist Kyle Shaw’s performance of John Cage’s 4:33 that we excerpt in the interview video, see it here)
