Season 6 Ep. 3 | The World of MICROVIDS 🎶 Composer, Stefania de Kenessey on Music, Poetry & Love

I would like to write music that is a signal of my love for humanity and for my audiences. So I try to write music that uplifts and educates, but also soothes people and makes them feel loved and makes them feel that the world is in fact going to be a better place than it sometimes seems. The way I try to describe my music, my shorthand for it is it's an act of love, an act of honor and respect and love for my audiences. I mean, I would just like to think that my music points a way forward for people, that I can bridge the gap between a more distant past and a future that speaks to, you know, generations to come.

Hello friends, and welcome back to Season 6 of The Piano Pod, our season of creativity and connection. I'm so excited about today's episode because my guest brings both of those ideas to life in such a powerful way. Composer Stefania Dechenesi has written music for just about every stage you can imagine, from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to international festivals. And she's also been a champion for women in music throughout her career. But at the heart of our conversation is her latest, and in many ways, her most personal project, Mikrovitz. What started as 19 tiny piano pieces during the pandemic has since grown into something so much bigger, a whole world of music, poetry, improvisation, orchestral color, even visuals. It's a project full of love, resilience, and collaboration, and it shows how something small can open up into something truly expansive. In our talk, Stefania shares the story of Microwits, what it taught her about writing in miniature, how collaboration shaped the project, and why supporting women composers has always been at the core of her work. Before we jump in, I just want to thank you for listening. Every time you like, rate, subscribe, or share an episode, you help this show keep going, and I am so grateful. So here it is, Season 6, Episode 3 of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song. The world of microbits, from miniature piano pieces to a boundless work of music, poetry, collaboration, and love. Please enjoy the show. You are listening to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they are bringing the piano into the future and thriving in a complex, ever-evolving world. Stefania, welcome to The Piano Pod, and thank you so much for being here.

Well, thank you for having me. I'm really and truly honored. And as I was saying, I'm doubly honored because although I play piano, I'm not really a pianist, I'm a composer. So it's really a thrill for me to be here and to talk to you.

And you compose wonderful piano pieces that I can't wait to talk about. That's why— that's the reason you're here. But we first met last spring through our mutual friend, the amazing, incredible Donna Wang Friedman, who is, you know, not only a powerhouse in the music, world, but also, you know, you guys collaborated together with this, you know, the album that we're about to talk about. But also she was the guest, past guest, on season 2. And then Donna and I were getting ready to perform this Four Hands piece at this event called the History of Movie Music event presented by Arts Rock in Nyack, New York, which is like like an hour, an hour and a half away from New York City. And then somehow you were, uh, you turned the page for us. And then to get there, the organizer sent us a driver, and then he mentioned that he also needed to pick up the main guest of the evening, and none other than the legendary conductor Leonard Slatkin. And so we were together squeezed into this van, oh, like 5, 6 of us.

Right, right. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, one of the great things about Donna Wang Friedman is that she's not only a great pianist, but she has great friends, and she does all sorts of really fun activities. So if anytime Donna says, hey, I'm thinking of doing X, want to come along? My response is invariably, if I'm in town, I'm coming along, sure. Yes, I get to meet fun people like you, for instance, you know. Yeah, and none of it is according to a grand plan, but these things happen, and they're always really happy events. In my life. So I'm always grateful to her for making these random connections that turn out to be absolutely joyous.

Yes, and absolutely memorable, you know.

Right.

So, yes, yes, yes. So anyway, and I remember sitting with you in the back and talking about your work and then your upcoming project and feeling immediately inspired by your vision and project. So I knew right away that I had to invite you to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. And so I'm really especially grateful that we are having this conversation today.

Oh, thank you.

So to begin, let me start with my signature opener. If you had to describe your mission or passion in just a few sentences, how would you put it?

I would like to write music that is a signal of my love for humanity and for my audiences. So I try to write music that uplifts and educates, but also soothes people and makes them feel loved and makes them feel that the world is in fact going to be a better place than it sometimes seems. So literally the way I try to describe my music, my shorthand for it is it's an act of love. So I try to write beautiful melodies, beautiful rhythms, things that people can remember. So my music tends to be a lot more tonal, a lot more audience-friendly than most contemporary music as a result, or I think it is, or I try to be. But for me, it really is an act of honor and respect and love for my audiences. That's the best way I can write it, and I mean, the best way I can describe it. And of course, I have music playing in my head all the time. It's a disease, an obsession, a gift, it's whatever you want to call it. But to get that out there and to make it as loving an act as possible would be the way I would describe it.

Beautifully said. And it's really that what you just said coming through your music. So let's talk about this microbeats you composed. So I've actually had the pleasure of visiting your beautiful home already twice. And then, in fact, you know, a couple weeks ago, you opened up your beautiful beautiful home and for your album release party. And I was invited, and I was struck by how much this new project reflects your artistic vision. And that brings me to what I love for us to focus on and dive into today. We're going to really talk about— focus on microbits. And it's such a fascinating concept because it feels both intimate and expansive at the same time. For our listeners who may be new to it, what is your— this new album, Mikrovitz?

So Mikrovitz, the album, is 3 versions of Mikrovitz. And the genesis of Mikrovitz actually goes back quite a ways to the pandemic when I was locked up in the apartment that you kindly visited for many months and feeling kind of depressed about my future because I thought, I'm a classical musician, I write almost exclusively concert music, concerts are not going to be happening. It's the end of, end of my life, you know. I have— so I, I was really quite, quite depressed for a while. And then I started to come out of it, and I thought of all the people, especially younger players, who are sitting at home locked up also. And I thought, wouldn't it be lovely to write them something that they could practice, that they could enjoy practicing and just have fun with? And I thought back on my own childhood, and I grew up on Bartók's Microcosmos, and I always loved those, but they're fairly naughty pieces, you know, they're not that easy to digest. And, you know, I went to music school and I come from a Hungarian background, so for me it was relatively easygoing, but I'm not sure they're that easy for young American audiences or pianists. So I thought, well, what if I did something like that for— with a more contemporary, more American, more loving flair, if that's the the right way to put it. Um, and so I wrote 19 miniatures, 19 short pieces that connect to one another but can also be played separately, that do form an arc from beginning to end, but also are a book from which you can extract exercises that go from relatively simple to relatively complex. So it mirrors the Bartók Microcosmos in that sense, except they're more tuneful, frankly, and more American-ish, if that's is the right adjective for it. And I just had a beautiful time writing them, and I felt my spirit soar, and I felt like I was giving something to the world again, and that felt very, very satisfying. So that was the initial impetus behind Mikrovits. The other thing that made it very satisfying for me, which is purely selfish and purely personal, is that with each piece I now write, now that I'm in my dotage, I've promised myself that I would do at least one thing that I've never done before. Just one thing, even if it's relatively small and even if only I know that I've never done it before, but something that expands my horizon and my repertoire. And I've never written miniatures before, ever. I tend to write large-scale forms, and for me, a short piece is, say, 4 to 6 minutes. A regular movement can be 8 to 10 to 12, and then there are several movements, but that whole, you know, methodology. And so this was the first time I wrote miniatures, and that was kind of a challenge but enormous fun also. So that's the personal part of it. When I finished these 19 miniatures in honor of COVID-19, I gave them to Donna Wang Friedman. I didn't know what to do with them. You know, I'm a typical composer. You get the music, you write it, you copy it over, you give it to a performer, and then you let go and you move on. But Donna said that these were the most fantastic things she had ever you know, heard, and she said she would love to play them and would I give her rights to play them. And when I went over to her apartment to hear the first rehearsal, you know, after our masks were off and it was safe to do so, she said, "Can you just sit down and don't interrupt me? I'm taking all sorts of liberties with what's actually on the written page. I don't know if you're gonna like it or hate it, but can I just play them for you?" And so I sat down and she started to play, and there was such an incredible performance of these 19 miniatures that I started to cry. It was that good. It was that brilliant, insightful, sensitive a performance. So from that moment on, Donna and I bonded musically over these 19 miniatures, and she just kind of took the ball and ran with it. And she's been kind of spearheading what I would call the, the microvids movement, the expansion of microvids, the second and third and fourth life of Mikrovits, and eventually this recording of Mikrovits. So to finish that story, she said, these are brilliant, I'm going to give them to students and we'll get them out there, but I think they need titles, you know, because I just gave them numbers because I, you know, I'm just a composer. So I thought, okay, what are some titles that would work? And then she said, you know, and they need short poems that enable people to focus in on the individual crystalline sentiment or emotion of each short miniature. And I thought, okay, I can give, you know, ask some of my poet friends to do something, but why don't I try my hand at it since I have some sense of what emotion each miniature kind of dives deeply but briefly into. So I wrote 19 couplets and gave them to Donna, and she said, these are brilliant. That's it, we're done. So now Microbits exists as 19 short poems That precedes 19 short piano miniatures.

Right. And these poems are spoken, not sung, right?

Yes, absolutely. No, they're spoken. And on the recording, we were blessed to get the recitation or narration by Crystal Joy Brown, who is a Broadway star in her own right, and she contributed her talents to it, and she reads them absolutely brilliantly. So, you know, It's a very different kind of approach to music, but it works, I think, I think brilliantly. Pure joy. Rippling reflections, sunlight-dappled white. Pure joy. Sweetly pleasured. Heaven's blue delight.

Then that evolved to—

well, so that was the beginning, and then Donna called me up and said, "I have another idea. Microbits could be expanded to have another instrument." And so we did— I first added a flute part, later I added a violin part. There are actually several duo versions of Mikrovits. And again, the thing that made this very unusual was both it exploited the potential richness of the musical material, right? So because they're miniatures and so much is so densely packed emotionally into each little piece, you can pull out some of that emotion and, you know, do it fruitfully in a way that you might not if the piece started out as a big piece for orchestra, for instance, right? Then you wouldn't want to double the orchestra or add a bassoon solo or whatever, right? So it works with these miniatures. The other part that made it, again, for me personally interesting is Donna said, and I agreed, that the piano part should remain as it is. So when I add new instruments to microbits, as I have done, I'm not orchestrating them. Orchestrating typically means you take the existing musical material and you divide it among new instruments. So for instance, you could give the melody to the oboe and the flute, and you could give the bass line to the cellos and the double, et cetera, et cetera. You can sort of finish that sentence. But that's not what I do in the versions of microbits that are piano plus an instrument. I actually create, imagine, and weave a new sonority, a new part around the existing piano music. And that's completely different an approach from normal orchestration or normal transformations of piano music. So that was enormous fun because again, it made me think, what is the essential emotional undertone of, say, this micro vid? And in the case of the fourth micro vid, which is very, very airy, it was to have, in this case, the violin, but some instrument in the absolute stratosphere just floating above it, like, you know, like a breath or a breath of fresh air.

Because the title is Reach for the Sky.

Yes, exactly. Right, right. It just made sense and it makes sense and it works like magic. So that was the second iteration of it for, for piano with a solo instrument, and this is not going in chronological order, but the next sort of logical part of it was we heard the incredible violinist Curtis Stewart perform, and he both performs existing repertoire and does improvisational material and connects with audiences, and we looked at one another And we said, we've got to work with Curtis. And Donna's idea was both to have Curtis record my violin part as part of, you know, a duo version of Mikrovits, but also to ask him to improvise on top of those violin parts or from those violin parts or on top of the piano, whichever way you wish to think of it. So he created, together with Donna, a version of Mikrovits, which is for piano with Donna playing. And violent improvisation, which Curtis Stewart is doing. And that again is very different for my composition traditional practice. So I'm going to keep going back to how these are things I've never done before, because I've always been a control freak, and I've always been brought up in sort of the Germanic tradition of music where you control all the parameters of your composition. You tell all the instrumentalists what to do, when and how to do it, etc., etc. Um, and here Curtis was just improvising away, and his improvisations are rooted in loosely in American blues, jazz, some country, you know, all sorts of influences, but very, very American-leaning, if I can put it that way, and very improvisational and totally brilliant because his technique is as good as anybody's technique in sort of Western European violinistic Paganini-like terms. So again, it's a really, really interesting combination of things. And that is actually the opening album on our— or opening disc on our current album, these improvisations that Curtis does on top of the piano part that Donna is playing. The third version— this never ends. The third version of Mikrovits, which is represented on the album that is being published or was just released, came at the behest of the New Jersey Youth Symphony and its music director, Helen Chapio. And again, it was through the intervention or through a connection created by Donna Wang Friedman. She thought that it would be really, really interesting since I originally wrote these pieces for, you know, young players to have an orchestra of young players accompanying the piano part, which again made perfect sense. So I created, again, an orchestral part which is woven around the piano music. So the piano part remains in all these iterations virtually identical. In one or two of the movements, there's a, you know, a bar at the beginning where she's not playing and, you know, there's a trumpet solo that comes in, or, you know, at the very end there may be an extension of one bar, but otherwise the piano part is 99.99% the same. The same in all these versions.

Oh, good to know.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's always the same, but there's an entire orchestral part around it, and it sounds like a completely different piece of music. It really does, because the emotions and the orchestration and the whole vibe of the piece is radically different. It's not that it's not recognizably the same, but it's, it's, it's different enough so it's not immediately apparent that you're dealing with the exact same basic material. There's so much new that's woven around it. And so, you know, that's the third important version of it. That's the third disc on our current album. And in part because I'm not born in this country, and in part because I think it's important always to have an international outlook, I thought it would be important not just to have the poetry recited in English as it is on the second track of the album, although Crystal Joy Brown does an absolutely brilliant job of it. So we asked for— we figured figured out a way to get a translation into Spanish from a young poet whom I haven't actually met but was highly recommended to me, Eloisa Amezcua, who's American but of Spanish descent and bilingual. And she created these beautiful translations of the couplets, which are then recited by an actress who also does an amazing job. And we found through Crystal Joy Brown her recommendation. Her name is Lola López Guardone, and she recites the poetry in Spanish, so that opens up a whole new world of listeners to whom we are reaching out.

Alcanzo el cielo.

Soñador, grácil, alto, diáfano. Agarro una nube Alcanzo el cielo. And I think it's important to, you know, we always say that music is a worldwide language and it is meant to be universal. And I think we kind of mean it, but we don't, you know, as with all good intentions, it's not always 100% realized in reality. So, I think it's very, very important that we have on this album both English and Spanish, which are major languages in the world still. Still represented. The ideal is for at some point, if micro:bits keeps going— I have no idea whether it will or where it can go— but my wish would be that it would be translated into multiple languages. And if there are performances, you know, elsewhere, that those performances, the recitation or the narration of the poems, take place in the languages that are pertinent to that country. Some of that seems to be happening. There's going to be a performance of Mikrovits with Donna at the, at The Piano Pod with the Virago Symphony Orchestra, which is an all-female orchestra based in Antwerp, Belgium, and the poetry recitation will be done by Esohe Waden. I think I'm pronouncing her last name correctly, but I'm not 100% sure. Who is the poet laureate of the city of Antwerp, and she's going to be reciting them probably in Dutch. This is still being discussed, but I would love for that to happen. And the other sort of international aspect of this, which is again not 100% realized yet but is, is one of my goals— I attended the United Nations International School when I came to this country, and I went back to them and I asked students there if they would be interested in taking a couplet or two and translating them into their own native language and then reciting them and being video and audio recorded, uh, with those, you know, in those languages. And they did. So we—

I saw the video.

Yes, yes, it's, it's wonderful. And the ages range from, I'm going to say, 8 to 18, although, you know, I could be— maybe it's 9 to 17, but something along those lines, you know. And the languages range from, you know, your standard European languages, which are, you know, French and Spanish, you know, and to Tamil and Hindu and, you know, other Asian languages. So I'm very, very happy with that as an indication of the kind of direction in which I would love for this piece to eventually go, because it should be universal. You know, grief and joy are universal emotions. And to the extent that language expresses those, those languages should be used that speak to listeners in their own context.

Wow, it's a lot to uncover here. But you know, the title starts with micro, and then as I was listening, every piece is like some of them are 30 seconds, some of them max maybe a minute and 10 seconds, somewhere around that realm. So they are really tiny little pieces. But what's the challenge? What was the challenge of composing them? You know, you mentioned you are so used to composing massive pieces, whether that is dance, you've written operas too, and so many others. Then here comes this microvits. So what was this challenge?

Well, the challenge is to find something that is pertinent to say that is really meaningful but doesn't require more than a sentence to say, right? So it's the equivalent, you have to have some idea, you can't just keep talking and cover your tracks and wait till you get a good idea. So the same thing with these miniatures. You can't have, say, a beautiful intro that then leads to, you know, eventually your, your beautiful melody or your beautiful idea. You've really got to think about what is it that you want to say? What is that emotion and what is its musical equivalent? And make it as compact as possible. And to some extent, to not be afraid of just focusing on that. You know, part of our Western musical tradition, or certainly my training, is to always be as complex and sophisticated as possible. And that's a very laudable goal in many ways, but it also means that you're already and almost always piling things upon things. So, you know, you're doing harmony and counterpoint and orchestration, and you're thinking of all these things. All the time. And that's certainly not— in fact, it's very, very wonderful. But you also have to be content in 30 seconds to just do one thing. So it's a little bit like being asked to create 19 appetizers. I'm not doing 19 main courses. So I'm not doing the pasta and the sauce and the salad. I just have to make the sauce, or I just have to make the the tomato salad. I don't, I don't know, these are terrible metaphors, but, but, but concision, really focusing in on a particular flavor and a particular thought and a particular emotion and not being afraid to just do that. And it has a kind of intensity to it that is also a little bit scary because there's no deflection. You know, you really have to delve into that emotion. Um, but it's also wonderful if you can sort of manage to pull it off.

Yeah, they're more like, I was thinking of haikus, you know.

Yes, that's a good metaphor. Yes, haikus. Yeah, that's much better than my cooking metaphor. Thank you.

No, no, no, no, but really, like, comes in bite-size and, you know, just to the point.

To the point, but with a kind of depth that allows and asks for revisiting, right? Because you don't want it to be so shallow that people don't want to come, right? So the same with haikus. You want, you you don't— you get them the first time but not 100%, so you reread them, right? You read them again and again, and each time you find something slightly different, slightly deeper in its meaning, in spite of its brevity. And that's not that easy to do, but, but it's a lot of fun.

So you have the gift of poetry, like, writing?

Well, I'm, I'm, uh, yeah.

Yeah, they were great.

I mean, in this case, I had the gift of poetry, and I think it was really— I don't think I'm much of a poet, frankly, but I think in this case I was so inspired by the idea of these 19 miniatures and the occasion and the purpose that it just all kind of fell into place simultaneously. I'm not sure if you asked me to sit down now and come up with a great poem in the next 24 hours that I could really do it. So I would like to excuse myself from being considered a poet, but I think in this case they actually do work. And I'm very happy with the little couplets that I wrote for each miniature. I think they balance the music well and they illuminate the emotional character of the music.

And each version is so different, as you mentioned, sounds so different, although you can— underneath you can hear the same melody. But yeah, that's amazing. Quite amazing. You thought of, you know, while you are writing the actual piano piece, you were thinking, oh, short pieces. But then did you imagine that short pieces become such a big, expansive thing?

Uh, well, I knew that I was going to, or I imagined from the first that I would write a book of them, so 19. So in some sense, I did know that I was aiming for, um, like I said, like a collection of them. Uh, what I didn't realize is that they would sort of grow one after the other. I didn't write them 100% in sequence, but more or less in sequence. So what I didn't count on was that they would develop a kind of narrative arc of their own. So even though they're technically independent, and like I said, they can be extracted and played separately and all of those things, there is a kind of, of growth to them from start to finish. And that makes them miniatures in one sense, but not miniatures or not just miniatures. Right, so there's a macro element to it too, in spite of the micro title.

Right, right. Yeah, makes sense. And so now I want I want to talk about this violin and piano version particularly. It's very fascinating that violinist Curtis Stewart, he is improvising. And so, but for, for example, if I want to work with a violinist and then I want to play the piano part, purchasing your score, how would that work? Do is there instruction on how the violinist would improvise, or?

So that's a brilliant question and a question to which I don't have an answer, in part because I've never done this. So it's an absolute first for me. And like I said, the album was just released, so all of this is very fresh stuff to me. But the second answer to that is I do have a version with my written violin part. So that can be used as a guidance. So my— as I'm thinking through it, and I'm just thinking out loud, is that I would, I would send that part and then say, use this as a template or as a springboard for the kinds of things that you might want to do as a violin improviser. And I don't know if that would work, in all honesty, but that's, that's kind of the way we did it, and it worked brilliantly. Now, Curtis is a brilliant a brilliant musician and a brilliant improviser. So I don't know if this method would work for everyone, you know, I really don't. That's why I said I'm not sure I have an answer for your question. It's a brilliant question and I'll try and think about it and maybe I should write some verbal instructions, but I don't know. Like I said, I try to expand my compositional practice with each piece and part of the fun part of that and part of the scary part of that is I don't always know 100% what I'm doing. Right? So I've never done improv involving pieces of my own before, so I'm going to have to figure it out, you know, and I haven't 100% yet figured it out, in part because Curtis made it so easy. He just did such a brilliant job that I could just sigh relief and it's done, you know. He did nothing wrong. He kind of elevated the piece and took it into realms that made perfect sense emotionally and musically. So he kind of saved me the trouble of having to think about how do I get other people to improvise on top of it. So that's why I don't quite have an answer for you yet.

Okay. Well, I can't wait to see where this— the piano-viol inversion would evolve and being accessible. Yeah. Who knows? Now, I love all the titles: Out of Place, Skipping Stones, Like a Rock, or Just Joking, Dream Away. So modern and, you know, relatable, almost like flipping through a photograph. Like, you know, every photograph has a specific place of memory, you know, that sort of idea. You know, it's different from taking phones, you know, pictures on your smartphone and flipping through. It's a little different. It's like a photograph, like a good old photograph.

Well, I'm old enough to remember photographs.

Yeah, same. So, you know, every single one has this— everybody is posing certain way. It's not just one of those random photos, but there's like a specific meaning to it. It just gave me that vibe. I don't know if I am right or wrong with my impression, but it's a brilliant simile or a brilliant description.

Really is. No, that's very insightful. You really got them. I mean, that's— I hadn't thought of that, but you were absolutely on target. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, you know, the moment you hold the photo and then just brings you a lot of feeling. Oh, I remember her, or I remember the place, that sort of thing.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's true, that's true. Um, so I hadn't thought of the photograph as, as a, you know, as a simile or a metaphor for it, but Donna Wang, who's kind of multi-talented and keeps astounding me with her range of talents, has taken a few of these miniatures and added videos to them, added visuals to them. The most recent one is— Shiachi is just released on YouTube. It's called A Silent Cry, and it takes one of the miniatures from Microvids and creates a little music video out of it. No text, no speaking, just the music and visuals. And the visuals are the video is about habitat loss and ecological sort of disaster as it relates to the Himalayan snow leopard. And it's a beautiful short little piece, very, very moving. And she's entered it in, I think, 15 or so festivals, film festivals, of that honor short, you know, music videos, and gotten 15 awards already. So it's So that idea of there being a visual component to these microvids is also something that we are exploring or that Donna has started to explore and, you know, as usual, has started to explore it brilliantly. So that's the sense in which microvids keeps having more and more life to it. And actually, my kids both a couple of days ago said, why don't you have videos of each of the 19? Miniatures, you know, that could be because it's, you know, it's a visual culture and these pieces are so colorful as it is, you know, they're so dense with emotion and dense with musical color. I don't even know what words to use, that it could actually work itself, you know, into a visual medium. And so, you know, I was Talking to Donna and she kind of agrees. So we're thinking about maybe if I can find funding or something to create 19 videos of these 19 microbits. So it may have a life over and beyond music. So it's going to be music and poetry and visuals and videos. And I don't know what else, but I'm having the time of my life with them because I thought I was just creating these tiny little nothings. You know, 19, you know, 30-second pieces of music and 1 minute. I mean, that's nothing in my, you know, in my vocabulary. And it turns out to be the richest things I've ever created. And that's an incredibly lovely surprise, really, really amazingly satisfying and wonderful and fulfilling. And I feel like more and more audiences are being reached by it. And like I said, you know, for me, these are acts of love. So, the idea that I can, you know, move more and more people with the music I've written, it just makes me happy. Even when they cry. You know, even if it's a sad piece, that I've moved them and that these pieces have meant something to them in their lives, I think is, especially in this day and age when everything is, you know, upside down and everything is turbulent and, everything feels uncertain and everything feels like it's shifting, you know, from under your feet, to have something that speaks to people and gives them joy and satisfaction and love is just very meaningful to me. Really is.

Yeah. Wow. In that sense, really from the bottom of my heart, congratulations.

Well, thank you.

Very sweet. Yeah. Yeah. It is.

I mean, it's, but it's been in part because I think I wrote these good pieces of music, but in part because I've worked with these magnificent collaborators, the first and foremost being Donna Wang Friedman, but the others as well. Curtis Stewart have lent his hand and Crystal Joy Brown, so Helen Cha-Pyo. I mean, it's been a real team effort at every level of the way. And that's the other thing that I was not brought up to appreciate, I think, sufficiently, the power and need for collaboration. Right? So I was brought up again with good reason to be a composer in my own right. That means taking charge, taking charge of your musical materials, taking charge of the conceptual space. And that's all fine, but it downplayed the importance of having collaborators, people with whom you work, who give you new ideas, who support you, who ask you, oh, well, I like it going in this direction, but what if it went if you went slightly in that direction, what would that feel like? And suddenly, you know, they give you an idea that you didn't actually have on your own, and that opens up new vistas. So I'm very big now on the importance of telling younger people, don't forget how important collaboration is. Maintain your own vision and be your own person. And goodness knows, as a female composer, you really have to stand your ground and be your own person and have your own vision. But that does not mean that you underplay the importance of having collaborators and being open to collaborative ideas and collaborative practices.

And so for— I mean, I'm going to talk more about this album, but for our listeners, if they— I would like for my listeners to listen to all 19 pieces. So can they listen to them on like streaming services?

Yes. No, the album has been released. It was officially launched on July 25th. And it's available on all the usual, you know, Spotify, Amazon, Apple, all the, you know, all the normal streaming services. And if you go to— Navona Records is the imprint, Parma is the record company that has Navona as its imprint. And if you go to either of those websites and type in, you know, Mikrovids or my name, it will pop up and then it takes you directly. To the streaming links. So, so it should be, it should be readily available.

Sure. Yes.

And of course, I'm the last one to listen to them because I've had so much microbits in my brain that I haven't actually listened to the piece since July 25th, since it was released. Because anyway, but yes, it is available there. Yeah.

And then I also listen to purely piano version too, right?

Yes.

So Yeah, yeah, that's cool. And then is the score available for—

Yes, I self-publish, but if anybody wants the score, I'm happy to, you know, I do respond and I can be reached easily at my email address. So it's dekennessy@gmail.com, very simple, no space, just dekennessy@gmail.com. And then, and then yes, and then I will, I will respond to you. And I, I self-publish, but, but I send out very nice looking scores. It's It's got a nice cover and everything. It looks very professional. And I think I've caught all the wrong notes, so it's pretty clean.

Wonderful. Wow. And so I know you already met— you may have already mentioned, but what do you hope listeners would feel after hearing my microbits?

So I, I mean, I hope that they would feel a sense of joy, a sense of how it's possible to have a full range of emotions that go from despair to utter joy and still be a functioning human being, right? So one of the things for me in this piece is that it does have moments that are really, really bitter and empty and forlorn, but the peace doesn't reside there. It doesn't just live there. It also has moments that are joyous. One of them is called pure joy. Um, so to, to, so for me, the, the real trick is just to be able to negotiate that terrain. So to enable people to both feel that yes, life is incredibly hard. And it's incredibly sad. And frankly, we all die at the end, right? So it really is, it really is sad. On the other hand, as we go through life, we also experience enormous satisfaction and joy from music and friends and whatever it is, right? So to both acknowledge both, so not to be Pollyanna-ish about the joy, about the beauty. It's not just beautiful, you know, satisfying music, but also to offer something more than just despair and emptiness, right? So to bridge that gap between the two, I hope gives people a sense of it being authentic and yet satisfying, you know. So in that sense, feel loved, you know, but in a genuine way, not just in a saccharine, oversweet way. That makes sense.

Yes, it does make sense.

In terms of the album, is just, you know, to try and get it as many places as possible and to try and get as many people to really enjoy it as possible.

Especially the orchestra version, it would be nice to have music teachers, educators to purchase the score and being able to perform that piece.

It would be a lot of fun. And again, I believe— I'm not an expert on this, and Donna could probably speak more eloquently to this, but I believe that both piano teachers and youth orchestras do not have that many materials of this sort, materials that are so classical in one sense but completely contemporary in another sense, right? Because the sonorities are not just, you know, Mozartian or anything like that. And with poems that are really about emotions and emotional vulnerabilities and joys rather than, say, animals, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, it doesn't— so these are skewed towards younger audiences, but not— it doesn't— it's not childish stuff. The themes are not childish, the music is not childish. I mean, I hope it has the freshness of youth, but that's very, very different. And if you think about the repertoire that's available, say, for youth orchestras, you know, there's the Britten, there's Peter and the Wolf. There are a couple of pieces, but not that many. It's not an infinitely large repertoire. So to get it into that repertoire would be a lot of fun. Donna keeps saying that this is the next Carnival of the Animals, only it's not about animals, it's about emotions, you know, emotions that came out during COVID I mean, how can you be more relevant than that? Right? And that again, you know, some younger listeners or players can relate to that, but goodness only knows teenagers can really relate to that. And in general, I get the feeling, and again, I'm not the expert, but I get the feeling that when we talk about music for children, we tend to skew to the younger ages. So there's music for people, you know, college age and in their 20s and 30s, young adults. And there's music or repertoire for young children, but not that much that really addresses tweens, as they're called, I believe, or, you know, teenagers. And this, I think these pieces are firmly in that camp. So I would be delighted if either piano teachers or, you know, youth orchestras had access to this. And I think their students would really, really enjoy them. Precisely because they hit that sweet spot between purely professional, you know, requirements, which, you know, teenagers don't quite have yet, and truly beginning students who are, you know, at the age of 5 or 6 can only manage so much technically and emotionally. So, um, so I think that would be, that would be one of my wishes, to get these versions out into those, those kinds of, of places.

If you are enjoying this conversation so far and you're inspired by Stefania's journey in creating MikroVids, I encourage you to check out the album. It brings together all three versions: the violin and piano collaboration with Curtis Stewart, the English narration by Broadway star Krystal Joy Brown with pianist Donna Wing Freeman, and the Spanish narration with piano and the New Jersey Youth Symphony under Helen Chapiao. You can also experience the award-winning films born from this project, including Silent Cry, now available on YouTube. Let's talk about your maybe artistic approach. And, uh, I've listened to your choral music, uh, some excerpts of opera that was available on YouTube, and then dance and film scores. Uh, so your music strikes me as melodic, feminine, and feminine as in— I'm not saying girly, but feminine, strong female, you know, quality. And it also folky, folk music, you know, I hear at times, and daring and experimental too, because I've listened to this one, um, several dance music. I don't remember the title, but because you collaborate with this dance company, it was electronic music. Yeah. So, but yet I feel like always find a way to your essence of your style, which is tonal, contemporary, but, you know, approachable because it's tonal and melodic. So maybe what makes your approach or what makes your style, in your opinion, unique, stand out from others?

Oh, you know, that's a difficult question. Talking about your own self is always—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It's horrendously difficult.

It's like describing what you look like, you know. I'm only 5'3". I never think of myself as small, right? And I know that's not truthful. So, so getting back to my music, you know, I had an education in Eastern Europe at a music school founded by Zoltán Kodály. So I was brought up on a lot of Bartók and by American standards on relatively dissonant contemporary stuff, a lot of Kabelewski, a lot of Bartók. I don't even remember the other ones. So for me, sort of crunchy, dissonant music never had the same appeal of novelty that it did for a lot of my peers who, you know, at age 18 would discover Stravinsky and they were like, oh my God, those dissonances are so much fun, right? So, I tend to write music that's frankly a lot more consonant than most of my peers. And in part also because of my upbringing, I also have always skewed towards music that has folk elements. Those were heavily emphasized in this school founded by Zoltán Kodály. We had a lot of Bartók folk songs and— My heritage is half Hungarian, half Bulgarian, which is neither here nor there for the purposes of microbits, except that Hungarian music and Bulgarian music are both rhythmically and tonally a little different from Western European music. So specifically, Hungarian music tends to be modal. It has, you know, flat 7s, and it tends to be what, you know, what we can call Dorian or Mixolydian, etc., etc. And Bulgarian rhythms also tend to have a lot of, you know, 3-3-2 or 2-2-3 or, you know, regular patterns but of irregular underlying beats, which I also sometimes use. So my heritage in some sense was filled with both very classical music, because that's what I grew up on, but also infused with folk music. So you're very right to pick up on that. And that has always been part of what I've tried to do. And frankly, one of the things that I realized as a composer is if you think about the development of music, even in Western Europe, it goes from modal scales to tonality, which is just a reduction of those scales to only two, major and minor. And then it becomes more and more chromatic and dissolves into 12-tone music. But one of the things that I thought would be interesting is to have it move back to a kind of modality that we haven't had. Since the Middle Ages or since the Renaissance. And that is the modality that is familiar to me from my childhood, from my Hungarian and Bulgarian roots. It also is the modality that is at the root of American folk, American contemporary music and pop music. You know, all blues and blues-derived rock and roll idioms, for instance, are modal the exact same way that medieval music and Hungarian and Bulgarian music tend to be. So there are a lot of sort of influence voices that kind of can converge in the contemporary moment, or that I try to use as a converging point in my own music. And I hope that that's enough to make it fresh and different so that my music doesn't actually sound like Brahms or Mozart, and it doesn't emulate them, except insofar as they have very clear structures and clear melodies. And, and, you know, and music that is fun and understandable on a first listening, but then invites return and return and return. You want to hear it again, both because it's fun and because there's something about it that's new each time. So, and that's not so easy to do, actually. They're tough competitors. Sometimes I hate those guys. I have total professional jealousy when it comes to those men, right?

Oh, we can talk more about that later, you know, but Wow. But also, I feel like what sets you apart is there's always like clear intention, or maybe, I don't know, you intend it that way or not, but message behind your music, whether that is about feminist or, you know, climate or political. Message. Is it?

I mean, I would say in the last 10 years that's certainly been the case. It was probably not so very early on in my career when I was just writing like a string quartet or a clarinet quintet or whatever. But yes, it's become more and more important to me to have some— not explicit meaning behind the music, but some larger purpose for it, you know. Um, and Goodness knows we have so many issues besetting us that to try and address those in ways that are not ideological and not simple-minded, you know, you don't want to be jingoistic or, or do something that is so obvious that, you know, there's no mystery to it or no illumination at the end of the day. So, um, but I have written, you know, numbers of pieces that are feminist in nature, meaning that, you know, they call for the possible equality of women, they call for the treatment of women in better ways. And those are, you know, goals that we have to keep setting for ourselves because they are far from having been met. I've seen some progress in my lifetime, in fact quite a lot, and I'm, you know, I'm very grateful for that, but it's important to keep going, you know. And back in the '90s, I founded the International Alliance for Women in Music, whose goal was to unite the then 3 composer groups that existed for female composers, and both to unite them to give a stronger voice, you know, because we're always stronger together than apart. And to also invite other performers and even men if they like to come and support. So it's the International Alliance for Women in Music, not just of women in music, right? So whoever wants— so that has always been important to me, like I said, because I've labored in a field that has been 99.9% male, you know, all my life. And in part because of the world around me, because it still hasn't— it's far, far from doing justice to to women and women's work and women's genius. And perhaps not coincidentally, I'm the composer, or I have been the composer in residence for 3 groups, one a dance company, one a chamber ensemble, and one a choral chorus, all of which are all female. And that's been great. It's really pleased me that they asked me to be. So I'm composer in residence for the Dal Sogno Ensemble, which is a sextet of 6 chamber musicians. I'm composer in residence for Ariel Rivka Dance, which is an all-female dance company led by a female choreographer, Ariel Grossman. And I'm composer in residence for the Accord Treble Choir, which is an all-female treble choir led by Liz Geyser-White, who's their director. So, it's been very, very sort of pleasing for me to do that work and to do that work and to work with companies that are excellent, not because they're all female, but because they're really excellent, right? So, it's been a lot of fun. It's been very, very pleasing at very sort of an emotional level, very, very gratifying for me.

I know you said 99% in the class was, or in your field, was men, male, and you are one, one of the very few, few in the group, a female as a composer, right? Has any of that changed?

Yes, I think it's slowly changed, but far more slowly than one might wish. Right. So yes, there are more women represented in conservatories and in, in music programs than before. And there are more women being programmed, say, in orchestral settings than before, but there is nothing like the 50-50 parity that one imagines should be the norm, nothing even close to that. So I'm not— I don't have my finger on the pulse of, of contemporary society well enough to be able to tell you why not, but certainly, you know, if things were egalitarian you know, there's nothing about composing music that takes physical brawn. And, you know, you don't have to be 6'2" and 250 pounds of muscle to write music. So there should be just as many women doing it as men, right? There should be no limitation. And yet it's nothing like 50/50. So I just think we have a ways to go. In general, I would say society and classical music circles still, um, tend to not allow or encourage women to be in positions of power, in positions of authority. So it is much, much more difficult for a woman to become a conductor, for instance, than to play in the orchestra, because the conductor tells the orchestra how to play. They're the boss. They tell you what to do. I'm, I'm being very, very graphic and, and, you know, very dirty about this. And the same thing is true for a composer. The composer tells the conductor what to do, and the conductor then tells the orchestra, right? So the closer you are, I think, to what I would call position of authority or being the boss, the less likely it is to be accepted if you are a woman doing that.

Because still, because still the one female to tell others what to do.

Yeah, I think it's just that simple. I mean, again, you know, I'm not speaking as a sociologist, I'm not an anthropologist, so this is just kind of conjectural stuff on my part as a composer. But I do think there is still quite a bit of resistance, sort of psychologically if nothing else, to having women be— to, you know, having them be the CEO, as it were. Of a company, of an orchestra, of a compositional setting, right? There is still resistance to that. And it's crumbling slowly but surely, but there's also reactions against it now. You can see the political sphere. So yes, it's always, you know, a couple of steps ahead and then maybe a couple of steps back. And you hope that there are more steps ahead than steps back. But, you know, there's a lot of work to be done. There really is a lot of work to be done.

Yeah. What can we do? I know you've created this international alliance. Women, like, as you mentioned, New York women composers, you know, you are at the board and—

I mean, I don't have an answer to that because there's so much work to be done that I, you know, I don't have like a grand or master plan. And honestly, I like to spend my time writing music rather than, you know, thinking about these things. But my philosophy also is everybody does just a little thing. If we can all move forward just 1 inch, if you move forward 1 inch and I do an inch and my friend does an inch, eventually there is real progress. So I content myself with thinking that so long as we all keep doing something, however little, it will add up in the end. And I think there's some truth to that. You know, um, it's slow, but I think progress is slow if you think about it. You know, the Enlightenment is the 18th century, and it's not until the 20th century that women are allowed to vote, right? You would think that that progression might have taken like 2 years, not 200, right? So I think we have to acknowledge that progress in all sorts of spheres of life is just a whole lot slower than we'd like to imagine. We're not quite as brilliant creatures as we think we are. But we have to keep going. We have to keep going, you know. We have to keep going. And if it— even, even if, like I said, you only progress 1 inch, you've done an inch. And you, you will take another inch or another 2, and then Donna will take another, you know what I mean? It's just, uh, um, I think it's a collaborative— again, a collaborative and cumulative effort, uh, to move forward. And, and so I'm not— I'm not— I don't despair. I'm not I wouldn't— I don't know if I'm an optimist, but I'm realistic. I actually think that things do get better over time. They just happen much, much more slowly and much more effortfully than we'd like to imagine.

Yeah. Right.

So sorry, I didn't mean to make you sigh like that.

No, no, no, no, no, no. But at the same time, I am encouraged to like as a female, you know, artist, and I'm not the only one who struggles, or, you know, as a female artist, I think we, us, have to stick together. Yes. And, you know, support each other.

And help each other and be realistic about the limitations and figure out a way to overcome them, you know, and work at overcoming them and work at overcoming them together.

Leading the miracle always same read of face tears Immaculate Heart leading— Leading the Miracle Always Same Read Of Face Tears They Are Not Killing Her!

Leading the Miracle Always Same Read Of Face Tears They Are Not Killing Her!

You're such a, also a wonderful teacher. I'm learning a lot. And so in July, while I was at your beautiful home, and it was, I met one, one of your former students while you were teaching at the New School. You were a composition teacher. And I don't know if she learned composition or not, but—

I think I was— I don't remember what classes she took. She was one of my first students, and I don't remember what class I taught, but I actually always try to combine courses or to create courses that combine different kinds of subdisciplines in music because If composition class just means having your students bring me— bring you sketches and then critiquing them, I just don't find that that's very helpful or very interesting. Once or twice, of course, you— one does that. But I also believe that in order to become a composer, you have to teach them ideas and techniques. And the techniques come from emulating other composers, you know, because that's— that's the way you learn your craft. So to speak. And, uh, honestly, I can't teach anybody how to be a composer in some real sense, because I cannot teach you how to be you. Right. That's, that's, that's your own soul, your own abilities, your own vision, your own whatever. And I can't, you know, I'm me and you're you. And I don't see how I teach you to be you. What I can do is I can teach you how to write a Bach fugue or a medieval motet or a Chopin nocturne. Right? Because that brings to the foreground a set of skills that can be adjudicated. And, you know, it either does sound like Chopin or doesn't sound like Chopin. And if it doesn't, figure out why not. What is it that you're doing wrong, right? So I've always tried to give courses where I teach a lot of repertoire in analytic terms, and analytic terms not in ways that make theoretical mincemeat out of the pieces. I don't, care for theory on its own, for its own sake, but that illuminate what makes that Chopin nocturne so beautiful, what makes that particular turn to that particular tonality so amazing, right? Um, so that you can sort of steal and copy, right?

Sure.

And, um, and the other part of, of, of teaching composition is kind of an aesthetic sensibility, you know, so you have some intellectual sense of What is it in Machaut's world that, that is beauty in music in the 14th century? How would you define the beautiful in the 14th century versus how would you define the beautiful for Bach or the beautiful for, for Dvořák, right? And the answers are quite different. And if you start to think about those, then you again think, I believe, in compositionally really interesting terms. So most of the courses that I've taught, I try to bridge the gap between what I would call music history, music theory, composition, and aesthetics, or intellectual history. So, you know, and one of the great virtues of having been at The New School, and I'm very grateful to the institution for this, um, they allowed me my entire career to design my own courses. So I was never given a textbook and told what to teach and how to teach it. Which it was a great, great freedom. Now there's also a burden because you have to think of these things, you know, but I've taught courses on opera, I've taught courses on Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. I've taught courses, you know, that are, you know, uh, the human voice through the ages, for instance. That was one of my favorite ones where you look at what is it that the human voice does, both in terms of vocal technique but also in terms of approach to text and subject matter. From Gregorian chant to Milton Babbitt, my own teacher at Princeton, right? So, so it would, you know, so the courses have always been a hybrid. Technically, they're composition classes, but not just, or not really, or not the way that they are typically taught in either conservatories or typical music majors. And that was a lot of fun and kept it interesting. And it also meant that I never had to repeat the same course twice. So even if the course had the same title, I could inside the class, you know, choose different pieces to demonstrate different ideas or different developments historically or aesthetically or compositionally. So that was a lot of fun. It kept me on my toes and it enabled me to keep learning myself. It kept it alive.

Oh, wow. That sounds so fascinating. I wish I were, I don't know, a composition student and learn from you, Bing. Yeah, that sounds so, so fun. So you mentioned about your teacher, Mr. Babbitt, Milton Babbitt, right?

Yes.

And he's a very famous composer, and I've interviewed a few composers throughout 5, 6 years of this podcast, and then there were several who studied with him. So he seems like a really influential and big huge figure in the composition.

He was, I mean, he was, he was, uh, he was a short man, but he was really a giant in his field. He really was. Um, and he was one of the most brilliant, uh, intellectuals and speakers that I've ever met. I mean, I've met a lot of smart cookies in my life, and Milton was really, really, really smart. Uh, so it was just a privilege to be in a room with him and to have conversations with him. Um, although aesthetically our approaches couldn't have been more different from the get-go. And one of the great things about Milton was that he never, among all my teachers, he never ever, not even once, asked me to set aside what I was doing, which even back then was writing tonal pieces, and write something along the lines of what he writes or was writing, which was 12-tone music. And he never, never asked me that. He always took my pieces when I went in for my composition lessons. On their own terms. We'd sit down with, say, a piano trio, and he'd look at the development section. He'd say, hmm, so the transition from the first, the, you know, section, the main theme, to the second theme, do you think that transition is too long, or too, you know, is it too short, or does it go through too many keys, or too few keys? In other words, he worked on the material on its own terms, and that was, that was really, really wonderful. And very few in my experience at least, relatively few composition teachers would do that because most of them do by example. They teach by example. This is what I do. This is how I do it. Why don't you, young person, try and do it? And then I can tell you if you do it well or not well. And Milton didn't do that to me because I was not interested ever in writing 12-tone music.

Hmm.

And he knew that from the time I went for my interview., you know, for the PhD program.

So I know we talked about your teacher and you being an educator. So what qualities do you think these modern musicians and composers should or must have besides musical skills?

Oh my goodness, what qualities? Well, um, or skills, I mean life skills. Um, I think, I mean, I think for me there are two aspects to it. One, you need to have a really good sense of craft. And I think young— I'm going to generalize, so forgive me for doing that, but I think the younger generation is getting a lot of craft in techniques that are contemporary, that have to do with electronic music, with sampling, and et cetera, et cetera. But I think they're getting very little grounding in what I would call time-honored or older Western European techniques. And I think that's a loss. And I don't think they're getting enough of that. I think they need more harmony and counterpoint and all that sound— seemingly dry-sounding, old-fashioned stuff. But I think if you can have that under your belt, it will really do you in good stead in the long term. So I think they need craft. The other thing that I think— and I think this has been always true of composers, contemporary and the older generation like me, is they need to have a sense of context. So to be a composer, of course, you need the tools with which to say something. You need the craft, the techniques, but you also have to have something to say. And if you haven't read novels, and if, or if you haven't traveled, or if you haven't studied math or Chinese, I don't even care what, but if there's no bigger context there, then I don't see how you have anything to say. And if the only thing you have to say is this chord moving to that chord or this sample, you know, being torn apart into those samples, then I'm just not sure what the point is, right? So that's— so for me, what I would argue is to have a general education, you know, a real education and a real sense of intellectual curiosity about the world and not just the contemporary world, but the ancient world, because The ancient world has a lot to teach us also, and it is full of surprises and full of innovations that, you know, get sidelined or get forgotten about. So I would say both, you know, both more technique but also more general education. And I wouldn't want to prescribe to anyone what that means, but, you know, everybody should take their own path. But if you're, you know, if you're interested in China, learn Chinese and go there and do Chinese history and go on some excavations and, you know, right? So do archaeology. I mean, right? So I can imagine all sorts of ways in which you have what I would call a fertile, uh, imaginative context, which then, then gets expressed in music. And then you of course need the skill set with which to, you know, make that happen. Um, but the skill set I think is easier to conquer than this, um, the sense of general curiosity and a general ability to understand the world, which is increasingly complicated and increasingly difficult to scope out. But if you want to have something to say to people, you need to, you need to have an understanding of the world. I don't claim to have any, you know, synoptic overarching understanding, but something that, that you can give that other people don't quite see yet, that you can translate into music.

And life experience too.

And life experience also. Yes, absolutely. All of those things. Yeah.

So now what's next for you?

Well, the very next thing is August 30th. Donna Wang Friedman and the Dalsonia Ensemble is going to create— to perform another version of Microbit.

Yes, it just keeps evolving. That's great.

And this is for piano sextet, and it's going to be the opening concert at Barge Music. Of their Here and Now Labor Day weekend festival. And I'm very much looking forward to that, in part because they're brilliant musicians and this is yet another iteration of Mikrovitz. So I just want to see how, you know, how it works. And in part because Barge Music is no longer on a barge itself. So I will no longer get seasick when I go.

Oh, really?

Yes. Yeah. They've moved onto land. So close to the original barge. But it's on land and the last couple of times I went, I, you know, I get seasick really, really easily. So this sounds very, very silly, but I'm very happy that it's going to be in a regular house or it's in the boathouse, very close to the original venue.

Barge music used to be like, literally it was a boat, on the boat or in the boat. So I remember going there to my colleagues' concerts or whatever, and all of a sudden the background is moving.

So yes, and the first time I went there a couple of years ago, I heard Donna perform something. I don't even remember what, but I went up to her to try and congratulate her afterwards, and she said, "You look green." And that's how I felt, very green.

Yeah, it was a beautiful concept and beautiful venue. But it is, it is.

But when the waves come in crashing on the boat, it can be. Anyway, so that's, that's the next thing actually, August 30th. So if people are interested, if you Google Barge Music, it's, it's there, 2 o'clock.

Yeah. I'll be there. And so what do you hope your artistic legacy to be?

I mean, I would just like to think that my music points a way forward for people, uh, because what I've tried to do is reach back to the past, which I think was abandoned during the course of the 20th century with atonality and 12-tone music. A lot of what I find the most beautiful and compelling about the Western musical tradition was just kind of thrown out the window deliberately and, you know, purposefully, not because it was forgotten, but because people were against it. And I reached back to that, but I've tried to reach back to some of it without just duplicating the past. You know, my metaphor for that is I don't want to be put back in a corset. That's the last thing I want, right? So I don't want to return to the past, but there are things about the past that I find compelling— its sense of beauty, its sense of melody and rhythmic clarity, you know, all of those things that I think can and should be preserved. But I've tried to bring those forward into the present day using means that are more contemporary. So I'm kind of hoping that I can bridge the gap between a more distant past and a future that speaks to, to, you know, generations to come. I mean, that's a big— that's a big goal, and I have no idea, honestly. You know, no one can see their position in, in sort of music history, um, in a compelling or safe way, but that's That's kind of what I've tried to do, certainly.

What you provided us today is a masterclass. And so I really appreciate you for being here and sharing your expertise. And once again, congratulations on so many successes, but especially for micro:bits. Beautiful, beautiful work. Yeah.

Thank you. And thank you for having me. This has been so much fun. The time has passed like it took 3 minutes, it feels like.

Oh yeah, same. I feel the same way. So for our listeners, please go to stefaniadekennessy.com to learn more about her work and start listening to her latest and delightful album, micro:bits. Before I let you go, we have one more thing to do. It's the rapid-fire questions. Now, we take this segment very seriously. You've shared stories and expertise today, but these questions, next questions, carefully curated by our team, which is me, will give our listeners a glimpse into who you truly are. So let's do this. I want you to answer each question with the shortest response possible. No explanation is necessary. So, level, level 1. What is your comfort food?

I don't have one.

Oh, okay. How, how do you like your coffee in the morning?

Um, with a little milk.

Cats or dogs?

Cats, definitely.

Yeah, I've met your cat. Sunrise or sunset?

Sunset. I hate mornings.

Summer or winter?

Uh, summer.

Level 2. What skill have you always wanted to learn but haven't had a chance to?

Drawing.

Hmm. Good one. What is your word or words to live by?

My word or words to live by?

Yeah. Yeah.

Kindness.

Hmm. What is the most important quality you look for in other people? Kindness. Name a composer you wish more people knew about.

Monteverdi.

Now, level 3. Name one piece in your current playlist.

I don't listen to music. Oh. I write music.

Oh, yes. So, yeah, that's right. And then you mentioned that your music is always in your head. Yeah. Yeah. So, silence is the best. All right, fill in the blank: music is blank.

My life.

Beautiful. Ding ding, that's it. So Stefania, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your artistry and journey and innovative spirit with such openness and creativity and connection. So for our audience, if you'd like to explore more of Stefania's extensive work, please visit stefaniadekennessy.com and subscribe to her YouTube channel at @dekennessy, and Instagram. Follow her on Instagram @dekennessy as well. Of course, I encourage you to start listening to her latest album, Microbits, on any streaming services. All links will be in the show notes. And of course, a huge thank you to all of you, our faithful fans and listeners, for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give a thumbs up and subscribe to The Piano Pod on YouTube. Share and review this episode on your favorite social media platform and tag The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. It's one of the best ways to help our community grow, and we love hearing your feedback. For the latest updates, guest views, stories, spark creativity and connection, follow The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song on Substack, TikTok, and LinkedIn. I will see you in the next episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. Thank you again, Stefania.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been pure joy. It really has.

Thank you. Oh, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much.