2. A Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon - Ky Nam Nguyen

{A Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon, Intro voice}
Republic of Vietnam
Saigon, July 17th , 1972
To: President of the United States
Subject: Plea to investigate the mortal shooting of student Nguyen Thai Binh on July 2, 1972
aboard a Pan American B-747.
Honorable President,
I, the undersigned Mrs. Le Thi Anh, 50 years old, identification No. 02082927…

[Aaron} Hello and welcome to the second episode of the Theorist-Composer Collaboration, a podcast interview series meant to highlight modern composers and their compositions, alongside music theorists. My name is Aaron D'Zurilla, and I'm a graduate music theory student at Florida State University, and I will be your host for today. The music that you were just listening to was an excerpt from a piece titled, A Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon, composed by Ky Nam Nguyen and performed by the Polymorphia FSU New Music Ensemble. Both this piece and its composer will be the subject of today's episode, and that leads me to say that I am very excited to welcome the composer herself to the program, Ky Nam Nguyen. How are you doing?

[Ky Nam] I'm doing so good. Thank you, Aaron.

[Aaron] Of course. I'm very excited to have you here. To get this started, go ahead and tell the audience about yourself, your background personally, professionally, educationally, whatever you want to share.

[Ky Nam] So, my name is Ky Nam Nguyen, and I was born and raised in Vietnam. None of my parents are musicians or have a strong music background, but my upbringing was, like, I guess, infused with a love for the art. My mother, who is a writer, let me have piano lessons since I was four, and then a few years later, I got admitted into a rigorous nine-year classical piano program at the Conservatory of Music in Ho Chi Minh City. Then I came to North Park University in Chicago for my bachelor's degree in piano performance. And though I had started composing since high school, it wasn't until my junior year of college that I started having composition lessons. And since then, I just realized how much I love composing, so I went to Texas Tech University for my master's in music composition, and now I'm studying composition at Florida State University.

[Aaron] You have really been around the place, haven't you?

[Ky Nam] Yes.

[Aaron] On yourself as a composer and your music, how would you describe yourself as a composer or your music, however you want to talk about that?

[Ky Nam] Yeah, I think I'd like to think of myself as a versatile composer, because my composition process is pretty fluid as I adapt to the unique characteristics or themes of each piece. However, in general, I tend to be inspired by Vietnamese music, classical poetry, and stories of my people. And then I try to incorporate these influences into my compositions, while combining them with the Western compositional techniques that I've learned in the US. So I think I'm usually melody oriented, but I also like to explore a variety of sounds and extended techniques that provide the right colors for a particular composition. And moreover, while I'm not an expert in Vietnamese traditional music, I deeply love the folk songs and melodies that have resonated with me since my childhood in Vietnam. So overall, my music is like a bridge between the different cultures that shape my identity at the moment.

[Aaron] That makes sense. And I have to say to the listeners, Ky Nam and I have had a fair amount of classes together here at Florida State. And I have to say, Ky Nam, any time that you present in class, whether it's been on our atonal class that we had last semester or in our popular music class, I love your incorporation of Vietnamese culture into almost everything that you do and present. I've learned so many things. I think everyone else in class and the professors have learned an incredible amount from what you've shared and the different subgenres and genres of music.

[Ky Nam] Oh, thank you so much. I hope that I bring some values, I guess, into the classrooms.

[Aaron] Oh, you bring so much. You bring so much value. We missed you in atonal 2 this semester.

[Ky Nam] Thank you. I missed you guys too.

[Aaron] Thank you. You spoke to how you would describe your inspiration and so on. There a lot of composers like to compare themselves, their sound, to previous composers. Is there anyone in particular that if someone just said, what does your music sound like? You know, or who would you cite as someone significant to you?

[Ky Nam] Yeah, you know, I think usually when I got this kind of question, it's so hard for me to pinpoint because usually I like to just to learn and absorb all kinds of soft styles that I come across. In general, I love to write music that tells stories and not only stories, but also some kind of image of feelings or sensations. So I think I resonate a lot with the impressionistic composers like Debussy and then for more contemporary people. Lately, I think I really love the music of Kate Soper. She has a lot of good vocal works in which she incorporates long and challenging texts with music. And I think that pretty much inspired the piece that we're going to talk about today. But other than that, I love a lot of different styles. I think I focus more if I focus on an image, a poem, a character or a story. But I do care about the inherent beauty of sound. So to me, I find it interesting or even gratifying if the listener enjoys my music just for the music itself without connecting it to a specific narrative or imagery, even though I use them to compose during my compositional process.

[Aaron] I love that answer. Yeah. Being able to enjoy a singular piece of music both on its context and just the pure sound is many times, it can be difficult sometimes to have both. So we're going to move on to talking about a Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon. And to make clear to everyone, that is in reference to President Richard Nixon, who was president at the tail end of the Vietnam War. Now, when we were discussing or how when I was thinking about how to best convey to the listeners, the story, the background of this piece, because the context is incredibly important, I realized there was not much of a better way than just the program notes that you wrote yourself. So we talked about this previously. Right now I'm just going to read through the program notes that Ky Nam wrote for a Vietnamese mother's letter to Nixon, to give you the proper background.

{Program notes for A Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon read by Aaron]

To many people, he is a hero. Others label him a plane hijacker, but to his family and friends, he is forever a fervent advocate of peace who died for his cause. His name is Nguyen Thai Binh, which means peace. When he was born, Vietnam was still in war, so his parents named him Peace, with a hope that the war would end soon. The boy grew up to be an excellent South Vietnamese student who earned a scholarship to study at the University of Washington. During his time in the United States, he learned more about the war's devastation on his homeland, and this harsh reality transformed him into a prominent leader of the anti-war movement in Seattle, Washington. The 1960s and early 70s witnessed the rise of American student activism that spread the anti-war sentiments to the public. However, the lack of authentic voices from Vietnam within these movements underscores the significance of Nguyen Thai Binh's legacy. As his activism gained momentum, Nguyen Thai Binh was deported after having graduated as an honor student from the University of Washington in 1972. On his fateful flight back to Vietnam, he was killed with five bullets in the chest while allegedly attempting to hijack a Pan-American flight. During flight, it was later discovered that the bombs he held were nothing more than lemons wrapped in tin foil. His tragic death ignited a blazing fire of anguish among many peace lovers in Vietnam and the United States, yet none is more heartbroken than his grieving mother. Imagine sending your promising child to a nation known as the leader of the free world, only to have him come back as a lifeless body tossed out of an airplane. Not long after his death, his mother, Le Thai Anh, wrote a letter to President Nixon to plea for further investigation of her son's death. Regrettably, her letter remained unanswered. However, the power of a mother's heart and the deafening silence resonated far beyond the confines of history, and now they have found a new voice within my musical composition, a Vietnamese mother's letter to Nixon. The texts in this work are the entirety of Le Thai Anh's letter, and I have woven various sounds to capture the raw pain of a mother's loss and her unwavering pursuit of truth and justice.

[Aaron] It's a very impactful and powerful story and beautiful program notes.

[Ky Nam] Thank you.

[Aaron] I really didn't think I could put it any better, and now I did not read the final paragraph of the program notes because I wanted you to talk about it, and that is what this story, everything behind it, what this music means to you.

[Ky Nam] Yeah, so I think I've been wanting to write, to compose an opera, so I guess this is like my first step, like a stepping stone to what's fulfilling that ambition, I could say. And in my vision, this opera would pay tribute to the life and legacy of Nguyen Thai Binh because he's like a symbol of Vietnamese and Asian students, pro-peace activism in the United States during the Vietnam War era. And to me, it's a dedication to those who risked their lives for the cause of peace, both in the past and in the in our current time. So of course I understand that it is quite a huge challenge, mostly because opera is a huge collaborative process, and people want to invest in a topic that resonates with a broad audience. And to be so honest with you, the topic of the Vietnam War is still a really challenging topic in the US, and even Vietnamese American people have a lot of conflicting opinions about the war. I think Nguyen Thai Binh is like a special character to me because he's not associated with any political party in the US and Vietnam. He's just like a peace lover, and we need more peace lovers in this world right now more than ever. So I just hope that Vietnamese Mothers Letter to Nixon could demonstrate my, I guess, readiness to undertake the huge task of bringing Nguyen Thai Binh's story to the operatic stage, as long as I can find collaborators and fundings and things like that.

[Aaron] I hope you do. That would be quite the project, as you said.

[Ky Nam] Thank you. 

[Aaron] I have to say, personally, I would consider myself mostly an American history buff for at least quite a fan, and especially for the latter half of the 20th century and political history as well. But I have to say I was rather shocked, and I'm going to be honest a bit embarrassed. I had never heard of this story before, and not a single bit of it, the incident of his murder, or the unanswered letter to the president. And I don't, of course, I'm not a scholar on these things, but I've even read entire books on the conflict, and I've never heard about it. Now, that's probably because what I consumed has a pro-American gaze and bias. How did you come across this story? Or if you were already familiar, why did you, you talked about your own ambitions of promoting peace, but what led you to adapting the letter?

[Ky Nam] Yes, so actually I heard about Nguyen Thai Binh since I was a child in Vietnam. He's a big name in Vietnam. But it wasn't until my parents started working on their documentary and book about his life that I became more personally motivated by his story. And I've been helping my parents as a translator and interpreter because they speak limited English. So I think everything begins when my mother received Nguyen Thai Binh's diary from his family. And he wrote that diary when he was studying at UW, and his family gave it to my mom because they hoped that she could write about him. Because sadly, even though he's like, he's a big name in Vietnam, we don't have a lot of books or scholarly work about him right now. So then Michael Dedrick, an American author and Vietnam War veteran, introduced my parents to Dr. Judith Henchy, head of Southeast Asia section at UW. And Dr. Henchy gladly shared with us the digital and physical Nguyen Thai Binh collection at UW. In the summer of 2023, we visited the Library of UW and saw his class notes and articles and pictures and a lot of other precious objects. And I found this letter from the mother in their digital collection on their website. And yeah, while I see all of that, both the digital and the physical object in the collection, I find him so relatable in many ways. He wasn't just an anti-war activist. He's a typical college student with a lot of dreams and hope. He studied really hard for his classes, and he played sports and he wrote songs and he had a lot of good friends. Like just a typical college student. And all of that makes that even more tragic. And I think that makes him more relatable to me because I was once a college kid and I'm teaching a bunch of college kids right now as a TA in music theory and composition. So like, I feel like I can see him, or like, at least feel him in a lot of ways in my daily life.

[Aaron] That is very admirable. I can see where you find that connection. And that is just so cool to me that your parents were to have such direct primary sources in that. Do you have links to your parents' work, their documentary books, so on that I can add to?

[Ky Nam] Yes, I do. But most of them are in Vietnamese, so I'm not sure if you like. I mean, I can send them to you. For now, I can send you like some kind of YouTube link. And actually, I'm going to present my parents' screen, my dad's documentary about him at UW this April, like around April 23rd or something, or 24th. So yeah, I think I'm trying to put the English subtitles in that documentary and then I'll send it to you and maybe people who are interested in that story.

[Aaron] Of course, I would love to help platform and spread your parents' work.

[Ky Nam] Thank you.

[Aaron] So this piece, the instrumentation, is for amplified mezzo-soprano, a chamber ensemble of strings, woodwinds, percussion alongside fixed electronics. Can you share what about this ensemble and its sound drew you to it and how it helped illustrate your vision?

[Ky Nam] Yeah, so as you might have noticed when we talked earlier, my instrumentation is quite similar to the Pierrot chamber, which is named after the Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. And I really love the expressiveness and intimacy and like the versatility of the Pierrot ensemble, because it could effectively convey many emotions and complexity, I guess. So in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, he has one flute, one clarinet, one violin, one cello, and one piano. In my work, instead of a flute, I use an oboe because I think it's darker and more piercing. The piercing timbre resonates well with the mother's anguish, and I choose the mezzo-soprano because usually this voice type is associated with women's maturity and motherhood in the operatic world. I choose to amplify and live process the mezzo-soprano's voice for both artistic and logistical reasons. So, like musically speaking, I want to amplify the voice of the mother with the electronic device and the voices of all the performers who sing and speak with her at various points. And I also want to give her voice more power and resonance with effects like echo and chorus. And of course, these effects have to complement rather than obscure the clarity of the text. Logistically speaking, in the premier performance, which you can hear in the recording, we were pretty much confined in a small stage, so it really limited our ability to achieve optimal balance and projection for the voice without amplification. For example, we couldn't put the instruments further back or spread them out or put them in a pit, so everyone just has to be in that pretty not-so-big stage. So the amplification system helps the voice project more. And in the score, I provided more information about my electronic settings in the premier performance. However, the settings that I wrote in the score are just guidelines, and they can be adapted flexibly based on the acoustic space and the artistic preferences of the performers.

[Aaron] Oh yes, I have to tell you listeners, the score details and the instructions or suggestions, as Ky Nam just said, are some of the most detailed I've seen in a composer I've met. You know, it's a level of detail of something you study in a composition class, I have to say. So going to the music itself, I would say one of the most attention grabbing and coolest things about this piece is the typewriter, and the like auto-tune, not auto-tune, the purposely distorted voice to make it sound like a news broadcaster that's recanting the beginning of the letter.

[A Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon Intro voice] Republic of Vietnam, Saigon, July 17th, 1972, to President of the United States.

[Aaron] And I wanted to ask, how does it fit into the storytelling that you have that male voice saying it while it's being typed or dictated on a typewriter, but then you have it switch to the operatic mezzo-soprano voice, I understand symbolizing the mother. And then it resets to the start of the letter. What were you thinking about how does that introduction with that monotone radio voice fit into the narrative?

[Ky Nam] Yeah, so I really appreciate that you bring that up because I really love that tape. And by the way, I sent the performance name to you and one of our good friends, Nico Gutierrez, I believe you know him too. Yeah. So actually, as I mentioned before, in my vision, this piece could be part of a larger dramatic work like an opera or something like that. So therefore I want it to be as dramatic as possible. So you can imagine like you're watching a movie where a character is typing the email or message but that email or message is narrated by another character. And then they have a transition where they transition from the receiver to the sender, something like that. And we can do that kind of effect in the theater too, I believe. So I think the introduction with a cold bureaucratic male voice represents the indifference of the receiver, be it an officer or less likely Nixon himself.

[Aaron] I really like the word bureaucratic to describe it. That's a very good word to describe it.
 
[Ky Nam] Yes. And I try to make it sound like you know the recording tapes that we usually hear in the 70s or 60s. And then I use the sound of the old fashioned typewriter, because I think the original letter must have been typed with that typewriter based on the text forms and historical context in general, and then as the tape plays, the piano plays the first sound, and that strong cluster signal everyone to join in. And then as the instrument and voice start to emerge, the tape becomes less audible. And yeah, so I think that kind of crossfade effect could go well with a transition scene of a movie or theater, and then the messiah soprano repeats the start, I think, with the first phrase of the letter, honorable president, so she doesn't have to read the like formal, Saigon date and time, and things like that. So she just goes straight into the emotional part.

[Aaron] Yes, certainly, certainly dramatic. I cannot wait because, oh, when I cut this episode together. I'm going to leave the first 30 seconds 45 seconds intact at the very beginning of the episode so that's the first thing people are going to hear, and I'm excited for reactions to that. When I was first listening to it, it, it seated me in place, certainly. One motif that seems relatively consistent in the melody is the appearance of the tritone over and over again, especially when the text addresses President Nixon, or the United States or anything concerning the modern world. And also throughout the instrumentation in motifs and fragments in a previous conversation that we had you had a really fascinating reasoning for the choice of the tritone as an interval of focus. Can you share that?

[Ky Nam] Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you're right that I use a lot of tritone and maybe semitones in this piece. I think one of the reasons that tritones and semitones are like the most listening intervals when we talk about intervals in the 12 tone system, right. And also, symbolically, when we look at a tritone in a 12 tone clock face, they are the furthest apart. Like whenever you put them they are always the furthest apart in the clock face. And I think that kind of symbolizes how distant we are in the world because we are in the world, right. And also in terms of geography, because if you look at the globe of the world, and you can see Vietnam and the US are pretty much in the position of a tritone in the clock face. So I like to play with little symbolical things like that. And I think in terms of music styles, it makes sense to really enhance the anguish of the model.

[Aaron] It certainly does. And I just, I love that reason comparing it to the clock face, you know. My next question is how you generally generated the pitch material. When I was analyzing it, I realized that one of the best ways for me visually and orally to organize it was into set classes, and I really saw especially trichords. And at certain points in the piano measure 22, I wrote down, you have a consistent recurrence of the 014 trichord, and it's different transpositions and different normal forms and I also saw 016s and 015s. Were you thinking about, you brought up Pierre Luner earlier in Schoenberg, also the pure chaos of dissonance. How were you generating the pitch material?

[Ky Nam] Yeah, so I think when I, when I start composing this piece, I work with a text, right, and it's a huge text, it's really challenging because of all the emotional complexity. It has like all the pain and anguish but also a very diplomatic facade, things like that. So I just try to find the best sound that to me, sound to me that best portray the emotional aspect of the piece. So I work, I start by singing the text and try to improvise the notes on the piano. And then, after improvising some fragments of the text, I find the sonority that I like, then I use set class theory to basically group them together. So for example, the small sets will be grouped into bigger super sets and the big sets will be grouped into, divided into smaller subsets, things like that. And I play around with that. And texts that have the same ideas, like death or gunshot, things like that, gonna be in the same kind of set class. And some sets are actually from Vietnamese traditional music. I think I used one particular mode, which you can hear in the cello as it first come in. And then some sets just have symbolic meanings like I say, the Vietnam and the US, whenever Vietnam and the US happen, I have that kind of dry tone and semitone things. And I keep moving back and forth between improvisation and then set classes and improvisation and set classes. And then after everything, I kind of want to forget about all of the sets and focus more on the musical tones and gestures and color of the voice and the instrument.

[Aaron] Beautiful, beautiful. I love the rationalization that you had and how you explored it. So I have a handful of observations, but for brevity, I want to go to one of the most striking sections, which is about the middle of the letter. And that's where it switches mostly to spoken word. And the listeners will be hearing a large excerpt of that in this segment, but it's detailing exactly what happened, or the mother is recounting what happened and then questioning it.

[A Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon, Operatic voice, various voices] My son was murdered,
shot 5 times by pilot Vaughn and a U.S. passenger on the B.747 before landing at Tan Son Nhut
airport, Saigon. According to the pilot and the Vietnamese police my son was killed because he
attempted to force the airplane to Hanoi! I cannot imagine such a thing. To steal an airplane with
a pocketknife and a bomb is even more unbelievable. If he held a bomb in his hand, why when
pilot Vaughn grabbed my son by the neck, did my son not explode the bomb but instead allow
the American passenger (a former FBI agent) shoot him five times in the chest! It seems to me that the shooting of my son by the pilot was a very dangerous act if, in fact, he really carried a
bomb for such an explosion would have killed many passengers immediately on the airplane.
Furthermore, when my son had been overtaken, why didn’t the pilot hand him over to the
Vietnamese Police to kill? An arrest and investigation into who might be the instigator of a plot
to hijack a plane or what the motive might be is needed more than killing. I think the murder of
my son was planned in advance, perhaps an assassination. For what other reason did Mr. Hills
bring a gun on the plane? Honorable President.

[Aaron] Why did you switch to spoken word? And also, you incorporated some other voices. It's the only time in the vocals that there are other voices. Can you tell me about that section?

[Ky Nam] Yes, I think I know what you mean. At that point, I feel like she's building up to a very climatic point. So I want to switch into speaking so that I have more space to build up later into the climax. And also, the reason I like to have the other instrumental players to join in with her is that I kind of make them feel like they have to follow the text too. And it really forced them out of their comfort zone because I know that I'm an instrumental player myself. I play the piano, so I know that most instrumental players are not really comfortable speaking or singing on stage. So yeah, it kind of pushed them out of their comfort zone and really kind of made everyone feel like they have to be a part of it. Like now the anger, the anguish, the pain of the murder is now spread to a community instead of just her individual pain. So that's how I think about it. And also, not just speaking, but sometimes the mother sings and everyone sings together like a choir. Now everyone becomes a small chamber choir together. For example, for the piano, they can play and sing at the same time, much less for woodwind players. But yeah, I kind of try to take advantage of instruments that can be played and sung at the same time.

[Aaron] Yes, I can say as a classically trained violinist, I would feel uncomfortable if the composer I was working with asked for that.

[Ky Nam] Yes, I know. I feel like all the performers of that premiere performance is so phenomenal. You know, because when we had the first few rehearsals, the score was not finished, like finished, finished. So I kept changing things along the way. And they just accompanied me without any complaints, maybe with a lot of feedback. But yeah, not like, oh, you are too mean to us. So I am so thankful that this piece was prepared by such phenomenal musicians.

[Aaron] Yes, and of course in the description of wherever you're hearing this and the promotional posts on social media will be credit to the performers as well. Yes. And before we get to the closing, I also want to mention and encourage people that the letter sent to President Nixon, that is the text is featured in this piece. And I'm going to be posting wherever you're hearing this, a link to the Library of Congress page where I highly encourage you to take a look at it, read it, especially with the excerpts that are in this episode. Ky Nam, we are almost at the end of our time here, but I want to give you an opportunity to talk philosophically about what music, music theory, composition, what does this all mean to you? How does this, other than a career and it taking up most of the daylight hours and probably midnight hours. What does this all mean to you? Theory, composition, all of it.

[Ky Nam] Yes. So I think it's very interesting that at FSU here, we have a really, really rigorous composition theory program. So that's why I feel like for us, theorists and composers meet each other and we see each other in class every day and all of that. And I think it's cool to see how people like different people think about composition and theory. I really love that. I feel like at the end of the day, it's more about people trying to communicate a part of themselves like they want to put like composers like me, whenever we compose music, whether we want to admit it or not. We want people to listen to it and appreciate part of our soul, something like that. And then the theorists come in, they ask us questions, critical questions and we'll be like, wow, we really, I mean, we really, really appreciate like people like you who notice the small details that I put in and maybe without that kind of really meticulous looking at the music, it's easier to just look over that all of those small details that composers really take a lot of effort and time to put in in the score. So it's more like people trying to communicate and people, the composers trying to communicate their soul and people analyzing the music trying to understand that soul through maybe a more scholarly language, but still, at the end of the day, it's about the souls finding each other. I think that's how I interpret it.

[Aaron] I love that interpretation. Real quickly, what would be the best way for people to reach out to you?

[Ky Nam] Yeah, so I think I'm pretty active on Facebook and Gmail, so I'm going to give you the information so that you can put them in your website. Yeah, I think that's it. I think, other than that I have Instagram, but I am pretty lazy on checking my Instagram account. 

[Aaron] Of course, of course. And thank you very much for coming on to this program, sharing your insights, your experience, and your expertise. It was quite an honor to be able to interview you about a Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon. It was a fantastic piece. Thank you for coming on to the TCC.

[Ky Nam] Thank you so much. It's my honor to be here too.

[Aaron] Hello, this is Aaron again, and I want to thank you for listening to this episode of the Theorist-Composer Collaboration. Another big thank you to Ky Nam Nguyen for joining the program, alongside her masterful composition of Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon. In the description of this episode, regardless of the platform you are on, there will be links to Ky Nam's website, email, and social media, and I would really appreciate it if you could show her support. Her information will also be readily compiled on our contributors page on our host's website as well. She is, after all, aspiring for operatic work, and I hope that this podcast episode will contribute some additional awareness for her professional aspirations and development. As well as a platform to spread the story of Nguyen Thai Binh to a new audience. In the description of this episode, there are additional links for your convenience for more background on some of the mentioned topics, but I highly, highly encourage everyone to seek out the link to Le Thai Ahn's original letter to President Nixon. It is a powerful and important historical document, and I think that everyone should read it. A small correction, however, as in the episode I credited the archiving to the Library of Congress, but this link is actually to the University of Washington's digital library database, the university that Nguyen Thai Binh graduated from. After the initial recording, I discussed with Ky Nam about putting links to her parents' published and developing work on the Vietnam War and the story of Nguyen Thai Binh, but it was preferred by Ky Nam to wait until the works are fully published and subsequently translated into English for accessibility purposes. This episode and our website will be updated with the appropriate links once said work is publicly available, and listeners will be notified through social media posts and our weekly blog when it becomes available. Thank you again to the composer, Ky Nam Nguyen, for joining the TCC, bringing her expertise and an artful representation of a powerfully devastating story in the form of a Vietnamese Mother's Letter to Nixon. For further updates and notifications on the Theorist Composer collaboration, make sure to subscribe to our email listing on the homepage of our host website and follow our Instagram and Facebook pages. Relevant links are in the description. You can also listen to future episodes through our host website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube, so make sure you subscribe to the platform of your choosing. Again, all relevant links are in the description. TCC episodes are posted weekly on Mondays, and don't miss our weekly blog posts, which will go live a few days after a new episode is added. I'm also excited to promote that our next featured composer is Will Davenport, with his composition, Reed Quintet Number One, being featured as well. You won't want to miss it, but until then, this is Aaron, and thank you for joining the TCC.