Conference Agenda

On a spring evening in 1989, a crowd on a narrow cobblestone street shuffled into Old Riga’s Wagner Hall. Opening the program, concertgoers read a letter from a Latvian woman deported to Siberia, followed by a gruesome personal account of starvation, murder, and ice in Soviet gulags. “This place of misery cannot be mine,” the anonymous woman writes in Latvian, “our land is in the hands of foreign thieves.” The fate of this woman could have become the fate of anyone entering the hall; several years earlier, the exile who set the “letter” to music was accused by the KGB of being part of an “anti-Soviet spy network.” Indeed, the entire concert series was funded in part by the pro-independence Latvian People’s Popular Front and the Government of Canada. Meanwhile, in a greenroom, a young man who had recently been appointed Artistic Director of the Latvian SSR State Philharmonic waited anxiously with four solo vocalists—mostly fresh graduates from Riga’s academy of music.

Focusing on the international reception of Latvian-Canadian composer Tālivaldis Ķeniņš (1919-2008), this paper reveals how private citizens and government officials across the Iron Curtain shaped Latvia’s national music culture and supported movements for independence during the final two decades of the Soviet Union. Although cultural diplomacy can promote a sense of mutual understanding, it can also help enlarge strategic movements for political opposition within a host nation. I show that Canadian diplomats and members of Latvian diasporic communities were well aware of their power to consolidate the anti-Soviet Latvian Popular Front within the Latvian SSR by fostering a transatlantic musical dialogue with citizens of Riga and Toronto. Through this case study, I explore the ambiguous and possibly shifting political convictions of Soviet government officials and public-facing cultural representatives within the Latvian SSR during the final years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost. I also examine how states, such as Canada, may exercise soft power by reinventing and exporting the culture of domestic refugee diasporic communities.

Indian-American Reena Esmail (born 1983; Chicago) ranks among the most widely-performed composers of her generation. Currently the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s Swan Family Artist-in-Residence, she was composer-in-residence for the Seattle Symphony and Street Symphony of Los Angeles. Most prominent among her many awards are the $50,000 United States Artist Fellow and the Grand Prize Winner of the S & R Foundation’s Washington Award. Esmail is artistic director of Shastra, a non-profit promoting cross-cultural music connecting traditions of India and the West.

A graduate of Juilliard and Yale who studied Hindustani music in India, Dr. Esmail strives to bring communities together by creating equitable musical spaces in her compositions. This is evident in most of her works, including Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz (My Sister’s Voice) (2018-19) for Hindustani singer, soprano, and orchestra or piano quintet. Among her common techniques for merging idioms are utilizing Hindustani raags, rhythmic cycles, and structures alongside Western modulations, orchestrations, and mirror-image phrases.

Leo Delibes’ “Flower Duet” from Lakmé (1881-82), a popular 19^th-century “orientalist” opera, served as inspiration for Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz. Esmail’s 20-minute piece (in Hindi and English) is about expanded sisterhood, when two women from different musical cultures allow each other’s voices to be heard. Esmail achieves this by allowing each singer to switch languages and solfege systems (Indian and Western) during their virtuosic jugalbandi (Hindustani musical competition).

This paper details Esmail’s numerous techniques in achieving this musical amalgamation. Extracts from the author’s interviews with Esmail and excerpts from live performances will be included.