[ad_1]
Most performers insist that the audience be quiet during their performance, but classical pianist Melissa Evans Tierra listens to tradition.
She urges concert-goers to shout out at her free concert tonight at 5 p.m. at Miramar’s Green Music Recital Hall.
It’s all part of taking her listeners on a musical journey from hurt to healing and hope, starting with songs filled with anger and emotion by Jacob Adams and moving on to music that inspires meditative moods. .
Tierra explains that this is a way for the audience to release pent-up tension and negative emotions.
“It’s very risky and vulnerable,” says another classical pianist, Brendan Nguyen, co-founder of the project. [Blank] concert series.
Nguyen’s longtime colleague and friend, Tierra, performed the song at a series of his concerts in January and invited attendees to join in when she shouted.
“I knew everything that was going to happen, but it still shocked me,” says Nguyen. “She’s such a great performer. …She knocked it out of the park and was able to pull it off.”
Tierra explains that two years ago, when she was going through a period of frustration and stifling creativity, she acted on the advice of a friend who attended a Primal Therapy workshop in Costa Rica.
At her friend’s suggestion, she screamed into her pillow for 10 minutes straight once a day for seven days.
“After the screaming is over,” she wrote in her concert program notes. She then realized that she gravitated towards playing the piano and that her music uniquely amplified this experience. ”
She shares her inspiration with listeners and enhances it with theatrical lighting that enhances the mood of her work.
While scream therapy is not a formal psychotherapy for mental disorders or trauma, screaming is part of meditation therapy and is believed to relieve tension and mental blocks.
At Uppsala University in Sweden, students have a decades-old tradition of opening their dorm windows at 10 p.m.
From October 2020 to January 21, 2021, New York elementary school teacher Chris Gollmar launched a hotline called “Just Scream!” He encouraged callers to yell for as long as possible to relieve stress. Over 150,000 recordings have survived.
In 2021, The New York Times will publish a multimedia series about overburdened parents, Primal Screamline, inviting mothers who need to vent, yell, and cry because of the stress of the pandemic. deployed. I’m getting some closure.
A classically trained avant-garde musician, Tierra only performs and publishes works by living composers. One of them is her husband, Chetan Tierra, who is also a pianist and composer.
Several of the seven musical works on tonight’s program are world premieres. Four of her songs were written especially for her by musician friends. Two were by Italian composers. The third was contained in a 2010 Voice note of hers, which she discovered while she was sorting through old phone messages while on vacation.
It came from a colleague, the Texas composer Jo Verdis, while they were studying together at the Music and Dance Conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium.
“When I pressed play, beautiful, fun music played and I couldn’t stop. So she called Verdis to ask for the rest of her work, but her friend told her it wasn’t finished yet.
With Tierra’s encouragement, Verdis completed the song within a month, and Tierra will be able to perform it at tonight’s concert. It is called “Gaudium” which means “joy” in Latin.
The daughter of musician parents, Tierra began playing the piano at the age of six in her hometown of Commerce, Texas. “The piano was my vehicle for emotional expression,” she says. “I don’t know myself without the piano. We have become one.”
After majoring in music at Baylor College, he earned a master’s degree at the Cleveland Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Cliburn Contest winner Antonio Pompa Baldi. There she met her classmate and future husband Chetan Tierra.
The couple moved to San Diego on a fluke in 2010. They turned away from classical music and indulged themselves in their passion for rock music, forming two rock bands, Mosaic Quartet and Skyterra, and were named Best New Artist in 2017. ” won the San Diego Music Awards.
The couple chose to relocate to San Diego because one of the band members split his work time between Boston and San Diego, so Tierra, who lived in Cleveland, chose San Diego and found a home in Claremont. “We fell in love with San Diego,” says Tierra.
They co-founded the San Diego Piano Academy in 2017 and have since expanded to 164 students and 9 instructors.
These days, Tierra occasionally uses scream therapy only when she feels the need to release her frustration. “I drive down the street and scream in my car. Our dog was so worried when I was doing it at home.”
But she stands by it along with meditation. Because the past three years have tested us as humans.
“We are all here with resentment, anger, frustration, sadness and grief,” she says. “Behind the scenes, we’re all struggling, but what are we doing about our own well-being?”
The intention of her concerts is to actively promote healing and hope through her music selections.
[ad_2]
Source link