Tina Davidson is a distinguished classical composer and writer with a career spanning 45 years. Her journey is marked by unique life experiences, including travels to various countries and encounters with notable figures like Ernest Hemingway during her childhood. Despite childhood traumas, such as being adopted by her birth mother without knowledge of her true identity, Tina bravely shares her story in her memoir. She delves into years of struggle with depression and dissociation, ultimately finding solace and self-discovery through therapy and spiritual practices.
Alongside her personal challenges, Tina fulfills the role of a dedicated single parent while actively composing and collaborating with renowned ensembles and orchestras. Her works have resonated with audiences worldwide, as evidenced by performances with esteemed groups like The Philadelphia Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, and Cassatt Quartet. Furthermore, Tina’s compositions have been recorded by prestigious labels such as Albany Music and Deutsche Grammophon, featuring interpretations by Grammy-winning violinist Hilary Hahn.
In the realm of contemporary classical music, Tina Davidson’s artistry shines brightly. Known for infusing her compositions with emotional depth and lyrical elegance, she has garnered praise for her distinctive musical voice. The New York Times aptly commended her “vivid ear for harmony and colors,” highlighting her mastery in creating captivating musical landscapes.
Recently, in 2023, Tina’s compelling narrative as a composer and mother was beautifully encapsulated in the book Let Your Heart Be Broken: Life and Music of a Classical Composer, published by Boyle & Dalton. This captivating work intricately weaves together memories, journal entries, reflections on ongoing compositions, and profound insights into the multifaceted life of an artist. Maria Popova from The Marginalian lauded the book as a poignant exploration of love, forgiveness, creativity, and the transformative journey from inner darkness to a luminous existence – ultimately emphasizing that our legacy is measured by the love we impart.
https://www.amazon.com/Let-Your-Heart-Broken-Classical/dp/1633376974
Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: All our hearts are broken. It’s just a part of life. It’s going to happen. You don’t know when it’s going to happen or how it’s going to happen. And the idea for me was that by meeting that brokenness or that trauma or going through it rather than burying it in your backyard, that what I found that sort of magically your heart breaks open and what you see is that there’s this beautiful, rich earth inside your heart.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Welcome to supernormalize, the podcast, where we challenge the conventional break boundaries and normalize the seemingly supernatural. Join me, CJ, as we explore less uncharted realms of existence and unravel the mysteries of life. Experience. My treasured listeners, if you have a life story or healing modality or unique knowledge that you’d love to share, reach out to me at supernormalized. That’s supernormalized with a z at Proton me. Let’s together embrace acceptance of the supernatural and unusual as what it really is. Completely normal.
[00:01:52] Speaker C: Today on supernormalized we have Tina Davidson. She’s a classical composer and writer now for 45 years and has had a unique life. At a very young age, she was adopted out by her birth mother and not told her true identity, and that actually shaped her and changed her in certain ways, which actually helped to be expressed and recovered through her composing and her love of music. So I’m sure you’ll enjoy today’s episode. I did, too.
Welcome to supernormalize, Tina Davidson. Tina, you’re a classical composer and writer for 45 years, and you’d like to talk about your life experiences that you’ve had traveling the world as well, and how that’s actually informed you and changed your life and helped you escape depression and disassociation and helped you to reclaim yourself.
Can you talk about that for us today?
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Yes, I can. Thank you so much for having me. I just so appreciate it.
So I am a classical composer, and for your listeners who might not know the finer distinctions, it means that I compose out of a sort of Beethoven Bach tradition, although you wouldn’t say that my music sounded at all like that. But so I don’t write popular music. So I write music for orchestras and ensembles and choruses, and I have quite a few recordings out. I’ve written operas.
But about ten years ago, I decided I really wanted to put language to my experience of composing music and also write about my kind of strange life that I’ve had. I lived in many different countries. I was actually born in Sweden, lived in Turkey for three years, Germany and Israel, and also was a single parent for a long time and had some unusual experiences. So I wanted to write about that, and I also just really wanted to write about my composing process so that other people. I think sometimes in the music world, there is this sense that if you’re a composer, if you’re, like Mozart, then you must be a genius, or normal people wouldn’t understand.
I’m always. I think if there was a word that maybe not describe me, but that I would be always aspiring to would be inclusion. So lots of different kinds of inclusions, and one of them is to sort of demystify the process of composing. I do a lot of teaching in public schools, especially in poorer neighborhoods, and I just find that humans are just abundantly creative. And I love to be in a position where I say, yes, you’re creative. Yes, actually, I love to teach in a way that I can say, yes, that’s a real pleasure for me. So my book is called let your heart be broken life and music of a classical composer. And it is about some of the traumas I had as a child, how I decided to really do therapy or any kind of work on those traumas, and found out that in conjunction with that, that writing music, or the artistic process, self expression is another way of doing kind of a therapy to try to speak of your life in another language, in other words. So whether it’s dance or an art or you’re a writer or you’re a composer, for me, although I don’t think that’s true for all artists, I tend to be writing about where I am in my life, and I’ve always found that to be very helpful and holistic.
[00:06:20] Speaker C: Yeah, right.
So these traumas informed you in certain different ways. And you have mentioned that in our contact before, that you had been adopted at birth and you didn’t know. And I actually had that, too. I actually was adopted at 28 days, and I didn’t know my parents were not my parents, but I had a really strong suspicion because they were very weird in comparison to me, as far as I could tell, until I was seven. And then my mother told me, and I was like, I knew all this time.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: So what did you know? What did you find out?
[00:07:01] Speaker C: Well.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: That you were adopted.
[00:07:05] Speaker C: Yeah, that I was adopted. So I actually had a long time where I suspected something was amiss, because my parents just seemed so odd in their behavior.
You’ve expressed that as trauma in certain ways. I think maybe that might have been what I experienced as well.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Well, I had a slightly different kind of experience. But I do know that I think that children are very receptive.
I don’t think that feeling in a family that you don’t belong is something that only adopted children feel. I think that others feel it, too. So I was born in Sweden, and I was put into a foster home, a swedish foster home. And I lived there for three and a half years. So I was a swedish girl. My brothers. There were three older brothers, one of whom was only a couple of months older than I was. And so we were sort of brought up as twins. We slept in the same room. We were potty trained together.
It turned out that I was more of the ringleader than he was. But then one day, this beautiful american woman came, and she was around the family for about a month, and she adopted me and brought me to America and then married. And then I became ultimately the oldest of five. Right. And it was very clear that nobody treated me differently. My stepfather did, I think, because he really felt very close to his biological children.
I was five when my mother and stepfather got married.
But I did feel.
I don’t know if you had this experience, like, they’d talk about the relatives, oh, your grandfather did this and this and this. And I go, oh, that’s so cool. I wish it were my grandfather.
So I always had a sense of being disconnected, like a little alien, a welcomed alien. And then when I was 21, I went back to Sweden, and I decided to go to the agency and find out. And when I got there, she had a letter, and she said, yes, I have information about your birth mother. And I have this letter here, and she’s asking me all these questions about my life in America. And then she said, your adopted mother is your birth mother.
You were adopted by your birth mother.
[00:09:59] Speaker C: No. Really?
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Yes, really.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: Wow, that’s really cool and weird.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: It is.
Sometimes not cool, sometimes not cool at all.
[00:10:14] Speaker C: Look, I say that because my mother tried to get me back. She actually wrote, got some lawyers together, and went to the state and attempted to get me back. And then they just said, nah, sorry, he’s been placed.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. That could not have felt good.
[00:10:31] Speaker C: Well, I think it gave me a suspicion of the state.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: Well, however you wanted to. So it took me a long time to process it. I understood intellectually that my mother, in the 1950s, having an illegitimate child was. And being a professor, and that this was not necessarily a positive thing for her.
So this was actually a great kind of ruse.
However, she really took it to heart.
And I think that secret made her feel more and more paranoid that something bad would happen to her instead of the years going by. And you’re saying, oh, well, times have changed now.
It’s not so bad. I think that having kept that secret so long, it made her feel more like it was the truth.
And she became more and more. She was a professor, mother of five.
She had told no one. She had not told her her husband. She had not told her mother.
And I think in retrospect now, it teaches me a lot about the damage that secrets can do. Everyone’s entitled to privacy. Of course, you’re always entitled to not tell everybody or anybody your private stuff. But when that privacy is a secret about someone else, I think it can be really damaging.
And I think that sometimes secrets can start to control you rather than you control the secret.
So when I finally decided to really do some therapy, and really because I was pretty angry in my 30s, my early thirty s, I had my daughter, and that’s when I really realized that I needed to address these issues, or I was going to hand them to her.
I’d put them in a box and wrap them up really nicely, but it still would be my stuff.
And of course, all of us children have inherited stuff from our parents. That’s inevitable. You just can’t really avoid that. But I think parents try to clean themselves up as much as they can, take care of their own business as much as they can.
So that was a great encouragement to me to do therapy, and I had always journaled, so part of my composing process was to write a half an hour every day. That was just something that I really felt was important, sort of. If I really believe that I am the template or the palette for my work, that my work is really a discovery of who I am at that place, then writing every day in my journal was a really important part. I didn’t write about the things that I did necessarily, as much as what I was thinking about, what I was working on, what did I think about what I was working on, what problems were coming up, how did I solve them, et cetera. And actually, when I sat down to write the book, I had all these journals, which was really very helpful. And actually, the way the book is written, it’s a short story about my life, like the story I just told you now and then. It’s a year of 20 pages of a journal of a year in my 30s.
Most of it is as I’m looking back and starting to understand it better. And writing music, not that I intentionally wrote about it, but, boy, it really started to come out. I have a cello quartet called dark Child Sings. And it’s that dark child in me who wants voice, who wants to be heard.
I have another saxophone piece called transparent victims, so that there are so many children that walk around, and you can’t even see that they’ve been harmed in some sort of way, that victimhood is transparent to our eyes.
And then, I think being able to process it and compose about it.
After the first ten years of my composing life, I sort of didn’t know what I was writing about. Then I started doing some work on myself, and that next ten years was really about the trauma and different ways that I was learning to express myself. But in that third decade, I think I was free enough to start wanting to have a relationship with things outside of me, like the earth or spirituality or nature or whatever you want to call God. I don’t know, the higher power, the wind.
So I started writing a lot of music about my connection or my growing connection to things outside of myself, bigger things, which I thought was really kind of interesting. And now, sort of in the fifth decade of composing, I think it’s coming back in, not in a sort of self motive way, but just kind of gently coming in. So I’m writing pieces. I have a piece that was just recorded called Hum h u m. And it’s about how when I grew up, people used to do their chores and hummed or they whistled or they made music, and there was that sense of, I don’t know, just walking around, making your own music.
So it feels more personal that I’m writing about. I have another piece called barefoot, and it was the winter, and I really just wanted to take off my shoes and be in the summer and have my feet in the earth. And then I was thinking of Moses and the burning bush, and he comes up to the burning bush. Of course, God is in the burning bush, and God says, take off your shoes. So that, in a funny way, you have to be barefooted to be in the presence of something that’s larger than you.
So that piece is called barefoot.
[00:17:53] Speaker C: Interesting. It sounds like, over time, you’re finding different ways to ground out all of your experiences and maybe even the tension that you had experienced in the disassociation from not really having a full connection to your life because of your mother’s situation.
So when you were describing before the story about how secrets poison you, can you go into more around that?
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Well, this is my observation of my mother. She became very wedded to this secret and very afraid that people would judge her.
So she really, you know, and she was a feminist. I mean, she was such a large person. It was just kind of that fear, compared to who she was, was kind of ridiculous. I mean, you couldn’t really say, wait a minute, your fear doesn’t really describe who you are.
And there are different kinds of honesty that you can have. There is honesty about things, but I think there’s also emotional honesty, like if you’ve made a faux pa or something, and then you go, oh, I’m so embarrassed about this. But then you say it to somebody, you’re willing to say, I felt embarrassed about this. Of course, we’re all human, and friends can say, oh, don’t be ridiculous. But I do think that there are different levels of honesty. When you recognize something in yourself and are willing to change that, it’s a kind of an honesty about yourself. And I don’t want to say scrutiny because that sounds kind of intense, like I’m scrutinizing myself, but a kind of a flexible interest, curiosity about yourself, willingness to say, oh, that didn’t work out so well. Oh, I’ll give you a story. So I teach piano. I teach composition. I teach some cello, and I have a variety of students. I have some older students who are really wonderful. I teach some college students from the local university here.
I teach them composition. But I have a couple of young students. And this one student is, I think, somewhat on the spectrum. I’m not really sure, but he’s just a lovely kid. And he was preparing for a concert, and he had done really well. And I created a chart for him so he could see how well he’s doing on all these pieces as he’s getting ready for the concert. And I said something like, I don’t know. I don’t know. He was leaving. I wasn’t thinking. And I said something sarcastic, like, I don’t even know what I said something about how he played.
He burst into tears.
And his dad, I always make sure that the parents are there because I always feel that parents should be present when there is a one on one relationship with an adult and to see if you’re getting your money’s worth and because you’re also the practice buddy at home. And he was hugging him and he said, my son just doesn’t do sarcasm. And I thought, how could I have done that? How could I have been sarcastic to this little kid? It just popped out of my mouth. So I thought, oh, I’m just not going to do that again. So a couple of days later, I had an older student, she’s a 13 or 14. And I said something, oh, did you practice much? Because I knew she hadn’t practiced. And she said, oh, is that sarcasm?
I always get confused at sarcasm. And I thought, here I did it again. So now I have a note on the piano. It says, no sarcasm. Because the truth is, when you want to change something in yourself that you’ve done for a long time, it’s really hard.
It’s really hard. And I need postit notes.
Yeah, well, I think that that’s a kind of an example of emotional honesty. Like, oh, darn. It’s not like you beat yourself up. It’s just like, didn’t want to do this. Made this mistake again. I want to change this now. What? How do I do it? So I have a postit note, no sarcasm. And I read it.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: Well, I mean, no sarcasm. Sarcasm would probably be put into a framework in nonviolent communication as jacket language.
[00:23:00] Speaker A: Because it can be probably microaggressions, right?
[00:23:05] Speaker C: Yeah, that’s right. It’s just not helpful.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: It’s not helpful.
[00:23:09] Speaker C: But we’ve been in the past, probably previously been motivated by that sort of thing ourselves. We think it can be work, so we use it just off the cuff. It’s like, I’ll just say it, and you say it, and then you realize.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: And you have a little kid who cries.
[00:23:31] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: So getting back to that question of honesty, I don’t think that honesty has to beat yourself. You don’t have to beat yourself up. But that willingness to look at yourself and say, would like to do that better, I’ve noticed, I think is very helpful to me because basically what I want is that people love my field, which is music, that they feel engaged, that they feel that they can write music, that they can participate, that it belongs to them, that it’s not an exclusive club of some sort.
[00:24:17] Speaker C: Got a question for you around your music now that once you knew that your mother was your mother, did you discover that there was other people that were right into music through your genetic family?
[00:24:32] Speaker A: That was.
[00:24:33] Speaker C: What did you find? Other musicians were in your genetic family?
[00:24:41] Speaker A: I see what you mean.
Well, what’s interesting is that my foster mother, who, and let me just avoid the question for a minute, and since I brought her up, but she played the harmonica. Okay, so she was musical. And my mother was an amateur violinist. My grandmother was almost a concert pianist. And my biological father’s mother, I have her piano. So I do think sometimes there is an interest in the family, and finally there’s somebody in a generation, that sort of answers that call, who becomes a professional of that? And certainly my interest in music was inspired by my mother. She loved music. Loved. And my grandmother.
My grandmother always filled the house with music when she was a child. My mother made all of us play instruments. I was perhaps the most dutiful. Well, my sister, my next sister was pretty dutiful, too. The rest of them managed to dodge a little bit.
So, yes, there was a lot of music in the family, and I think that I just happened to be the one who got caught, caught up in it. But also, I think one of the things that music is, is because it’s nonverbal. It is a wonderful sort of secretive way to talk about your life.
You can write a piece of music and people can’t really say, oh, did you have problems with your mother?
[00:26:32] Speaker C: Unless they’re like, this. Sounds like mother problems, this music.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So it has a kind of anonymity about it, which is wonderful.
[00:26:43] Speaker C: Oh, so are you hiding a little bit by doing that?
[00:26:45] Speaker A: Oh, I think so. I think certainly that was the. No. When I first started to compose, it was so urgent. I just felt I just wanted to do it and had to do it. And I’ve always wondered if it was the ability to talk about things that I didn’t understand.
[00:27:06] Speaker C: It might have been also a bit of an escape valve for all that tension that was being held inside.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: Yes.
So many different reasons.
I do want to say one other thing about my foster mother. Solve.
One of the things that I uncovered, one of the traumas I uncovered is that I was three and a half when I left that family. They were my family. That was my mother, that was my father, those were my brothers. That was my home, my country, my language.
And when I left it without any explanation, I think it was as if that whole family had blown up in a car bomb.
They died for me. And what I found when I started doing therapy was that there was a huge amount of grief, unexpressed grief, that I think had maybe led to some of my childhood depressions.
And we’re so much better now talking to our children. But in those days, they didn’t think about it. And certainly if you had a secret about it, you wouldn’t want to talk about it anyway.
I continue to feel that foster parents are some of the big unsung heroes in our lives for children that they ground care for and then have to graciously let them go.
I think for solveg, she really didn’t think my mother, after three and a half years. She really didn’t think my mother was going to return, and it was a heartbreak for her as well.
[00:29:00] Speaker C: Wow. There would have been a lot of tension amongst all of those stories for you as you were living them.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: Yes.
Or unknown or bad dreams, something I don’t think you would have ever.
Children are great. They’re very resilient. And I certainly just put. It was when I left Sweden, it was dark. When I came to America, it was light. I didn’t remember anything about Sweden. It was as if I didn’t exist before three and a half. And I think that’s the way sometimes the mind copes with things.
[00:29:44] Speaker C: Yeah. Compartmentalizes it so that it can cope with the situations.
[00:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:51] Speaker C: So what was it like being a single parent and working as a composer at the same time?
[00:29:58] Speaker A: It was hard.
[00:30:00] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: I think that’s something that women artists now really have to deal with.
How do you make time for your work and how do you be a parent? And the complexity is that the work is really about yourself. I mean, you can’t get away if it’s artistic work, it’s about your creative process, your interest. It’s you.
And taking care of a child is about them.
They’re very different experiences. So sometimes somebody had said to me, who got the more attention?
It’s sort of like, who won, your daughter or your work? And I would say that there were compromises all the time for both of them. There were times when she was in extended daycare because I needed to work and I needed to earn money. That’s how I made a living, was writing music.
So it was complicated. I think that every working parent’s worst nightmare is a snow day when the kids suddenly don’t have school, and then your best laid plans are all sixes and sevens.
So it wasn’t easy, I guess. Yeah.
[00:31:42] Speaker C: Okay, so tell us more about your book. I mean, what do you cover in your book, and how do you think that’s going to help people out there?
[00:31:56] Speaker A: My book is called let your heart be broken, and that comes from a little tiny story I tell in the beginning of the book where I was at a conference. The speaker was Stephen Levine, who did a lot of work in the. With the AIDS community during the AIDS pandemic. And it was really geared at the caregivers for people with AIDS and how much loss they had gone through.
He had worked with Kubler Ross, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, on death and dying. He was a poet and a was.
Had read a lot of his books. As it turned out, I had had a heart condition for about nine years and had congestive heart failure and had a hole in my heart, and I had decided to wait to have it repaired, because at that point, you would just basically have had to have the valve cut out and a replacement put in. And that replacement, at such a young age, I was in my 30s, so I had gotten sick when I was 29. And at such a young age, it would have meant that I would have had several replacement. They don’t last, and you have to take medicine, and people live with them, but you’re always on blood thinners, and they don’t last.
At the age of 30, I might have had two more open heart surgeries.
So I decided to wait and had gotten pretty sick. But suddenly they came up with this new surgery where they were going in and just sewing, repairing the valve rather than replacing it, which was amazing.
So I had done a lot of reading on sort of the idea of death and dying, or when you’re really sick, how do you handle being sick and live your fullest? By also taking care of your body. So I had gone to this conference of his, and by the way, I had the surgery, and after nine years of being ill, I was actually cured, which was a miracle, just a miracle.
So I had gone to this conference, and he was asked, what is the meaning of life? And he kind of laughed, and he said, you know, I’m asked that all the time, and I don’t really know, but if I had to guess, it was, let your heart be broken.
And I thought, what could that possibly mean, let your heart be broken.
So the book is about that idea that all our hearts are broken. It’s just a part of life. It’s going to happen. You don’t know when it’s going to happen or how it’s going to happen. And the idea for me was that by meeting that brokenness or that trauma or going through it rather than burying it in your backyard, that what I found, that sort of magically your heart breaks open. And what you see is that there’s this beautiful, rich earth inside your heart, ready for a new life, that suffering that we all have, it can really be nurturing as well. It can show you new directions and new strength. You may never get over that sadness completely. It’s not like you’re going to be transformed, but you can go on.
Every time I’ve had some hardship, I’m always amazed at how much strength or resilience or deepening of understanding that I have. So that’s really what the book is about is let your heart be broken.
[00:36:22] Speaker C: That’s a good message, definitely.
Well, Tina, we’re coming to the end of the show, and I wanted to ask you, how can people find you in your book?
[00:36:33] Speaker A: Well, of course. My name is Tina Davidson and you can always go to tinadavidson.com and you can write to me from there or you can see know, you can go and find out where you can get my book. My book is available on Amazon, and my music and recordings are available wherever you download music. So on.
You know, you can also buy the actual recordings, the CDs on Amazon. I have a recording coming out in July, and I just had a release in December and that was not, we didn’t print anything, was just a digital release. But this one will be with CDs.
I don’t know if anybody’s going to buy them, but do people know what they are anymore?
Exactly.
Radio stations still like CDs and reviewers still like CDs. So you just print a very small amount.
[00:37:36] Speaker C: Yeah, right. For sure. For sure. I’ll look you up on Kyobo’s, which is the streaming app that I like to hear some of your work.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Yes, Hilary Hahn has recorded one of my pieces, and she actually has two recordings of it and just a beautiful recording.
[00:37:52] Speaker C: Excellent. Well, I look forward to hearing that as well.
Thank you, Tina, for coming onto the show and sharing your life experience. And, yeah, the unusual stories that led you to where you are now and how that shaped you and changed you, it’s appreciated. Your time is appreciated. Thank you.
[00:38:10] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much. And thank you to you and all the podcasters out there. I so appreciate this interest of creating content and distributing it. That’s wonderful.
[00:38:24] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:38:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:25] Speaker C: All right, I’ll say goodbye to the listeners.
That was a nice talk with Tina, and I resonate with her experiences because I was adopted out at a very young age as well.
As you heard in the episode, the way she expresses that, she found her way back through her trauma of those experiences and allowing her heart to be broken and then letting that recover itself over time. She literally had her heart broken as a part of it as well. So that’s very interesting. And then to actually recover and then have a miracle recovery, that just says volumes to me. If you’ve enjoyed today’s show and you think somebody else would like it as well, please send this episode to them as well. And if you’re on YouTube right now, like, and subscribe, as people say, and if you’re on a podcast app and you wish to give me five stars and write a little nice note to me, I’d really appreciate it because then other people can find show as well. And if you’ve really liked today’s show, and I’d love you to come back. So come back to the next episode very soon. And in that case, bye for now.
Close.
