Artist Statement
From early childhood, I was quiet. Words were difficult to produce and sometimes my voice would fail me entirely. I grew up with a nervous system that would sometimes go silent, words present in my mind but impossible to reach. I know now that I am autistic. At the piano, I found a voice. People stopped. People listened. And I could speak, not with words, but with my hands. At the same time that I discovered the piano, ideas of my own began to flow from my mind to the piano keys. I have always had music singing in my mind - it is always there. Creating music was like releasing a valve, allowing the sounds trapped inside me to breathe and speak out in real vibration. Though it would take years to name it, at eight years old, I had begun to compose.
By sixteen, I had split my life in two. What I now understand as masking* was my public-facing self - a false smile that betrayed nothing of what was inside. Most of my schoolmates had no idea I was composing, or even that I was musical. There was a whole world in my mind that had to remain silent. The price of exposing it was too high. Most autistic AFABs understand as early as four years old that we need to hide our autistic traits. By sixteen, I understood full well that who I really am would push me further to the outskirts of society than I already felt. And so I clung to the fragile threads of fabricated connection, smiling through the exhaustion of it every single day. Looking out as if through a tunnel, distant and unseen. What we late diagnosed autistics did to survive are the very things we will spend our lives trying to recover from - unearthing our real selves, relearning how to exist without fear of complete ostracization. Learning that who we are is good. Who we are is ok.
From the moment I began composing, it was never a choice. It was something I needed at every level of my being. At sixteen, knowing no other women composers, I resolved to persevere - with terror in my heart, and no alternative. Music was my survival. And I resolved that along every road I traveled, I would open every door I could for others like me.
I have spent decades doing exactly that - mentoring younger composers, championing the music of women who came before me, working to restore and record voices that history tried to erase. I understand what it means to need to hear yourself in the art you love, and to look and find nothing.
I had seen opera before. I enjoyed it without being particularly moved by it. Until the night I attended the world premiere of Harvey Milk by Stewart Wallace at the Houston Grand Opera. Until that evening, it had never occurred to me that opera could speak so honestly and immediately to our times - or that I, a living composer, would ever find a place in it. The stage was shaped like a triangle. Singers moved through doors along the triangle symbolizing the complicated webs of coming out and hiding that all queer people experience. And in the final scene, young Harvey Milk stood with his hands bound in chains, his mother behind him holding a candle. When she blew it out and he broke the chains, the lights went dark. I was undone.
Until that night, I had lived like someone wearing a corset too tightly bound - holding my breath, terrified to exhale. As a gender-queer composer, I had never seen myself on an opera stage. I had always been a passive observer, watching stories that did not include me. But that night, something shifted. The opera said: you are seen. You matter. You have power. For the first time, I felt the corset loosen. I could exhale.
I fell irrevocably in love with opera that night. And I understood, with sudden clarity, what I wanted to spend my life making.
When I was three years old, I fell in love with two things simultaneously: music and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I found myself in both. So when the opportunity arose to create my second full-length opera, ALICE was the first idea that came to mind. I have always felt like Alice - curious, disoriented, trying to make sense of a world that doesn't quite follow the rules everyone else seems to understand.
During the creation of ALICE, I was diagnosed as level 2 autistic at age 46. Suddenly, the question that had followed me my entire life - "Who are you?" - had the beginning of a framework for an answer. Until that diagnosis, I had felt utterly alone, completely misunderstood even by myself, unable to understand the hows and whys and whats of my own existence. And then, all at once, I could. The floodgate opened. The joy, the grief, the relief arrived simultaneously and more intensely than anything I had ever felt. Every day brought a new memory reframed. Every day answered another question. I had a therapist. I had my partner and librettist, Zane Corriher. And I had ALICE.
Everything I was experiencing poured into the opera. The opening Act II aria, "Lost and Alone," was my voice - released. The joy, the humor, the absurdity, the strangeness, all found their place. ALICE gave me somewhere to pour the contents of a lifetime of unanswered questions about who I am. Its creation saved my life.
And like all of my work, I resolved to create something anyone could walk into and find themselves. A place where the door is open to everyone - and where autistic children might see themselves on a stage, like I did in Houston. It is imperative to me that I provide that for my community in whatever ways I can. Autistic children are not truly seen in this world. As much as I wanted to answer the questions for myself, I wanted to offer it, especially, to those confused and lost autistic children. Or anyone who has ever felt this way, to be honest. Which is, if we’re all honest, all of us at some point in our lives.
I chose to pursue this life as a composer because I wanted some hand, however small, in creating music that might move someone the way music has moved me - that has saved me, and protected me, and given me a voice when I had none.
* Masking describes the conscious or unconscious suppression of natural neurodivergent behaviours, communication styles, and responses to appear neurotypical — a survival strategy that enables social acceptance whilst depleting cognitive and emotional resources through sustained effort. (https://neurodiversity.directory/glossary/masking-definition/)