Music with a message
MINOT, N.D. — Director of Choral Activities and Assistant Professor of Music Emerson Eads uses two motives behind his musical compositions: practicality and making an impact.
Originally from Alaska, Eads earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and moved to Indiana to earn his Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Notre Dame. Minot State was his first full-time faculty position.
“It was extremely lonely being away from all of my grad school friends, my family in Alaska,” he said. “Being here, everyone was very polite and very kind, but it was difficult to get friends immediately or to get in with a group because people are kind of sussing you out, you know, ‘who is this guy?’”
Nevertheless, the Division of Performing Arts, as well as other musical members of the greater Minot community, welcomed Eads when he arrived, hosting him for improvisational music nights and biking with him at local nature reserves.
Finding a connection to a community is a large inspiration in his work, too, with Eads regularly connecting his compositions and concerts to today’s needs.
“A lot of the time it’s very practical,” he said. “We needed a piece for the last concert we did. The choir was down in numbers, and most people in that group were not vocal majors, so we needed something to fit them. Often it’s just out of the necessity of having to write something that the group can do and pull off.”
A piece he is particularly proud of, his “Mass for the Oppressed,” demonstrates the other side of his composing and connects his work to a larger social cause: the Fairbanks Four.
In 1999, four Indigenous Alaskan men were wrongfully convicted of murder. Sentences ranging from 33 to 97 years, third-party organizations held fundraisers, rallies, events, and investigations in support of the Fairbanks Four. The men were imprisoned for 18 years until, according to the State of Alaska Department of Law, “if the defendants were retried today it is not clear under the current state of the evidence that they would be convicted.” The men were released on Dec. 17, 2015.
“While I was getting my doctorate, I wrote that Mass (a piece of music whose lyrics are liturgy from a Catholic mass), and it was premiered by the summer arts festival in Fairbanks, my hometown, with the four present,” he said. “It was crazy emotional. The conductor was the assistant conductor of the Houston Symphony, and he conducted the premiere, and then I conducted the Notre Dame premiere, and that’s what we recorded it. Then the Anchorage Concert Choirs and Symphony did it as well, and then it was performed in Tucson.
“It is definitely one of my pieces that’s the closest to my heart. It really is music that was born from just a legitimate expression. I didn’t have to work myself up on a froth about it. I knew the story, so I didn’t have to do a lot of research to connect myself with the topic.”
Part of Eads’ composing process is to find inspiration from a text. For his “Mass,” his first textual inspiration was created out of an almost visceral emotional experience.
“I’m also, you know, a singer. I’m very word-bound, so I usually start off with text of some fashion. I take it and I paste it around my office at home or where my keyboard is,” he said. “I just live around the text, and whenever I’m noodling at the keyboard, something will come.
“When I heard they were released from prison, it was close to New Year’s Eve, and I was alone without my family. All of my friends had gone back to their families, and I got this news that they had been released, and I was so overcome with joy — at first. It started blowing up on Facebook, and then I thought, ‘What do you do?’ After 18 years of being behind bars, and people still think you’re guilty, what do you do?” Eads added. “So, I sat down and wrote the ‘Agnus Dei’ (a prayer said in a Catholic mass, typically set to music). It seemed like the right thing to write, I don’t even know why. I just did it. ‘Lamb of God, it takes away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us and grant us peace.’ And then in January, in one of my first classes back, I went to see my conducting teacher, Carmen Téllez, and I showed her the ‘Agnus Dei’ that I had written for choir and for orchestra. I told her the story, and she said, ‘Oh, Emerson, this is too important to just be an Agnus. There must be a whole mass.’”
Other textual inspirations he had for his “Mass” were the phrases “Is there no help for the widow’s son?” from the biblical story of Hiram Abiff as well as an early seminarian text written by Pope Francis.
Eads’ “Mass for the Oppressed” was recorded onto CD, and all of the proceeds from its sales have been donated to the Alaska Innocence Project, a non-profit that provides legal, educational, and charitable services to identify and exonerate individuals who have been wrongfully convicted in his home state.
The real-life connections in his music have been inspired by Eads’ work with University of Alaska, Fairbanks professor and composer John Luther Adams.
“I was influenced by him with the idea that music has to speak to our time. It has to have roots in who we are and what we are in order to have legs,” he said. “Working with him got me cognizant of how music should resonate with our surroundings.”
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Minot State University is a public university dedicated to excellence in education, scholarship, and community engagement achieved through
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| Published: 08/12/22 |
