LISTENING SETTING: Find a comfortable place in which you can sit with closed eyes while listening. Focus on your breath. Be conscious of breathing air in and releasing it. Think about the animacy of air and how we share it with many living things. As possible, after listening to this piece go outside (if you are not already) into an environment with as little human made noise as possible and listen.

    DESCRIPTION: Braiding is a work for oboe, electronics and natural sounds. Premiered in Tucson in 2017, the work was inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Dr. Kimmerer is professor of environmental and forest biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She is a plant ecologist, mother, storyteller, environmentalist, and leader in the field of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). One of the most potent ideas in Braiding Sweetgrass is the “grammar of animacy,” the notion that our perceptions of animate and inanimate beings are shaped and reinforced by language itself. In the Native American Potawatomi language, grammatical differences charge even inanimate beings with an essential animacy. Kimmerer suggests that this “grammar of animacy” can reorient us toward a fundamentally new way of living in the world. Within our musical piece, Braiding: Lessons from Braiding Sweetgrass, we give thanks to the Dalbergia Nation, the trees who give us the hardwoods used to make most oboes (Grenadilla, cocobolo, rosewood, violetwood, and kingwood are all species of the genus Dalbergia). Srinivasan provides the following program note for Braiding: Lessons from Braiding Sweetgrass, which also serves as a formal outline of the piece:

    Lesson 1: Gratitude... for gifts from the earth; reciprocity... through attention and care for the gift-givers.

    Lesson 2: Listening, paying attention... to our fellow Earth dwellers, the birds, insects, animals, trees, wind, water... a democracy of species.

    Lesson 3: Animacy... of the wind, asserted by wind chimes... “to be the wind.”

    In Braiding: Lessons from Braiding Sweetgrass, the solo oboe voice is interwoven with spoken text, electronics, and other sonic elements. Within this rich soundscape, Srinivasan has artfully mixed an array of recorded and composed tones: the crackle and thud of a falling tree; the rhythm of a crosscut saw; crickets, buzzing insects and birds. The player’s own breath, as blown through the body of the oboe, animates collections of wind chimes to become a true sonification of Kimmerer’s idea: “animating the inanimate.”

    You can learn more in this lovely conversation between Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer & Dr. Asha Srinivasan: www.sarafraker.com/songs-of-plants

    Inspired by Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions, 2013). Text used with permission.

- from the album BOTANICA: music for oboe & English horn (MSR Classics, 2019)
- Recorded and mastered by Wiley Ross in Tucson, Arizona
- Commissioned by Sara Fraker, with generous support from the Arizona Commission on the Arts

  © 2017 Sara Fraker and Asha Srinivasan. All rights reserved