India Gailey Album Release: to you through

 

Cellist, composer, improviser, and former Talent Trust scholarship recipient, India Gailey, is releasing a new solo cello album called to you through on Redshift Records on May 13. It features works by Fjóla Evans, Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, Yaz Lancaster, and Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti. 

The album can be pre-ordered here. 

And there is a release concert on May 13, 8pm at St. George's Round Church.  

Tickets for that are available here.

About India (from her website):

India Yeshe Gailey (she/they) is an American Canadian cellist, composer, and improviser currently based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Pinned as “a young musician to watch” (Scotia Festival), she draws from many eras and genres to craft poetic narratives of sound, most often performing in the realms of classical and experimental music. She frequently works with living composers, musicians outside of the Western Classical tradition, and the intersection of standard and obscure. She has toured across Canada, The United States, and Germany as a soloist, chamber musician, and collaborator. India is also a member of the award-winning environmental quartet New Hermitage, which recently released their fifth recording, Unearth, to critical acclaim. 

India recently completed her Master of Music degree at McGill’s Schulich School of Music under the tutelage of Matt Haimovitz. Since then, she has worked with several much-admired composers of our time, including Philip Glass, Yaz Lancaster, Amy Brandon, Michael Harrison, Anne Lanzilotti, Nicole Lizée, and Andrew Noseworthy. India’s most recent work has been presented by organizations such as the Canadian Music Centre (TO), Government House (NS), International Contemporary Ensemble (NY), Metropolis Ensemble (NY), and Upstream Music (NS). India released her debut album, Lucid, a collaboration with three other emerging Canadian composers, in 2017. 2022 will bring the release of her new solo cello album to you through on Redshift Records, a recording of Lizée’s “Bookburners,” ft. NYC-based turntablist DJ P-Love, as well as a series of commissioned works written especially for India by Canadian composers. 

India holds numerous honours, including awards from the Nova Scotia Talent Trust, the Canada Council for the Arts, Acadia University, and McGill University. In 2021, she was bestowed an “Emerging Artist Recognition Award” from Arts Nova Scotia. Venues at which she has performed or held residencies include the Canadian Music Centre, Domaine Forget, Garth Newel Music Center, Green Lake Festival, Halifax Jazz Festival, OBEY Convention, Open Waters Festival, Scotia Festival of Music, Tuckamore Festival, and other various halls, galleries, homes, bars, gardens, and castles. She can also be heard regularly on CBC and CKDU radio stations. 

India received her Bachelor of Music degree from Acadia University, where she studied with Norman Adams and Christoph Both. Over the years, she has played in masterclasses for renowned cellists such as Emmanuelle Bertrand, Colin Carr, Denise Djokic, Blair Lofgren, Antonio Lysy, Philippe Müller, and Shauna Rolston. Chamber music mentors include Denise Lupien, Ilya Poletaev, members of the Daedalus, Kronos, and Shanghai string quartets, Garth Newel Piano Quartet, Apple Hill Chamber Players, and Gryphon Trio. She studied improvisation with Jerry Granelli and Javanese Gamelan with Ken Shorley. 

As a composer, India is inspired by interdisciplinary interaction, and her compositions often explore environmentalism, magical realism, or minimalism. In addition to her musical studies, she has studied visual art at NSCAD University, and as a child studied ballet and contemporary dance, these other disciplines informing her compositional work. She has written music for Ear Camera, Keep Good (Theatre) Company, The Acadia Gamelan Ensemble, New Hermitage, and for various combos of musicians and dancers. She is currently working on a new body of work for solo cello. When not creating music, India enjoys making visual art, writing poetry, facilitating social meditation, and being with the trees, rocks, sky, and earth.

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Congratulations Shauntay Grant and India Gailey

Congratulations to former Talent Trust scholarship recipients Shauntay Grant and India Gailey for their recent Arts Nova Scotia Awards.

Shauntay was awarded the Black Artist Recognition Award and India the Emerging Artist Recognition Award.  

India was the winner of the Yue Lih and Marion Kuo Award in 2017 and the Raymond Simpson Award in 2020.

About Shauntay Grant

Shauntay Grant is a poet, playwright, author, and multimedia artist. She is a descendant of Black Loyalists, Jamaican Maroons, and Black Refugees who came to Canada during the 18th and 19th centuries. A multidisciplinary artist with professional degrees in creative writing, music, and journalism, she “creates artworks that are engaging and accessible, but also challenging, rigorous, and informed by deep research (The Royal Society of Canada).” Her honours include a Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts, a Robert Merritt Award for her stage play The Bridge, a Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award for Africville, and a Poet of Honour prize from the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. A member of The Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, she teaches creative writing at Dalhousie University, shares her blend of words and music internationally at festivals and events, and collaborates with visual artists and art galleries to create multidisciplinary artworks, installations, and exhibitions. She curated the exhibition Stitched Stories: The Family Quilts (Dalhousie Art Gallery, 2016), and the multimedia installation Grandmother, Teach Me (Art Gallery Of Ontario, 2017). Her literary work has been commissioned by Symphony Nova Scotia, Eastern Front Theatre, Against The Grain Theatre, and Obdisian Theatre among others. A former poet laureate for the City of Halifax, her poetry for children and adults has been published in educational resources, anthologies and literary journals. Her forthcoming poetic picture book My Fade Is Fresh will be published in 2022 by Penguin Books.

Website: www.shauntaygrant.com 

Social Media: https://www.facebook.com/shauntay.grant/

About India Gailey  

India Gailey (she/they) is a musician—cellist, composer, vocalist, and improviser––who crosses many eras and genres, most often performing the realms of classical and experimental music. Pinned as a “young musician to watch” (Scotia Festival), she has performed across Canada, the United States, and Germany as a soloist and collaborator. She has worked with numerous contemporary composers, including Yaz Lancaster, Philip Glass, Nicole Lizée, and Michael Harrison. India is the recipient of several honours, including awards from the Nova Scotia Talent Trust, the Canada Council for the Arts, and McGill University, where she earned her Master of Music in cello performance. Her most recent work has been presented by organizations such as the Canadian Music Centre, International Contemporary Ensemble, Metropolis Ensemble, and Government House of Nova Scotia. India is also member of the environmental quartet New Hermitage, which recently released their fifth album, Unearth, to critical acclaim. 2022 will bring the release of a new solo cello album, as well as a series of commissioned works written especially for India by Canadian composers. 

https://www.instagram.com/india.yeshe/

https://www.facebook.com/india.yeshe/

https://indiayeshe.com/

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'Don't expect applause': Reflections from cellist and composer India Gailey

India Gailey is a cellist and composer who draws from many eras and genres to craft poetic narratives of sound. Before lockdown, she'd finished her master’s degree at McGill and begun performing solo concerts of new music across the country. She is also a member of New Hermitage, an avant-jazz ensemble that improvises the soundtrack of a post-apocalyptic world. 

She is the recipient of five Nova Scotia Talent Trust Scholarships, including the Yuh Lih and Marion Kuo Award for Instrumental Excellence (2017). 

India recently shared reflections with us on her music, memories, challenges, practicing during a pandemic and more!

What are your earliest memories of music?

I remember living art from a very young age. My mom had started learning to play the cello while she was pregnant with me, and I remember watching her practice. I did a lot of drawing and painting, wrote a lot of stories, and was very into dance and ballet. My parents listened to a pretty diverse array of music, which was great for dancing. When I was three or four, I remember making up songs… I would go into a corner of the yard and sing about dolphins or flowers or sadness in the bushes. I think it was around this time that I started to really love Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and I wanted very much to play the violin so I could play “Spring”. When I was seven, I got to start learning to play a tiny fiddle. Before I began lessons, I remember playing my own very avant-garde version of Vivaldi. I finally arrived at the cello when I was ten. The student cello my mom had been using years earlier was still around, and it was taller than I was, but I wanted to play it. My childhood friend Owen was also learning to play on a giant cello, so he gave me some tips and we played fiddle tunes on our giant cellos together.

What has been your greatest challenge in relation to your music? Why?

Interacting with some of the toxic aspects of our society. Making a living.

I think I am a late bloomer in some ways. Our society likes early bloomers. For a while I was dampened by inadequacy, continuously internalizing the message that I should have already achieved grand impressiveness by the age when I was actually just beginning. After establishing some robust workaholism, I managed to overcome that particular doubt enough to realize that music was what I wanted to do and I could actually do it. Then there was the attitude of, if you want to play a classical instrument well, you have to fit into a particular mould, train in a very particular kind of virtuosity, play the Mendelssohn Scherzo excerpt the very best, play a Haydn Concerto the very best. There is value in that, but I have never been interested in wrapping myself purely in that genre. So was that ok, how would I navigate the world? Then, the rumours are true, it is super tough to make a living as a musician, at least in the young stage I’m at. But I don’t want to just make a living, I want to make art! I am supposed to solidify myself into a product for a world where artists are often expected to give away their work for free. And at the same time, art is so much more than monetary value, so I wish I could give it away for free. But the frustration of operating in a broken system is hard.

How have you managed practicing during the pandemic?

Inspiration has operated in waves much more extreme than in before times. Sometimes I’ve wanted to practice for hours, and other times I’ve played little ditty and called it a day. I have gone through periods of feeling so utterly lost in this realm devoid of live performance that it was like, well, I might as well just be a rock. Just sit here and hibernate while the blazing sun destroys my innards. But it has also been a luxury, to actually honour whatever honesty is arising about motivation or lack-thereof, and when I catch wind of a curiosity, to have the space to explore it. That’s what I’ve been doing, just following my curiosity. Sometimes that’s meant playing drones all afternoon, other times it’s been sight-reading willy-nilly through pieces I never learned, painting with watercolours, or sitting and listening to the birds. Right now I seem to be in a more energetic phase, wanting to compose, practicing the same piece for multiple consecutive days, and working to make projects real.

What quote best describes your commitment to music?

“Don’t expect applause.”

This is one of 59 slogans written by an Indian Buddhist named Atisha who lived about a thousand years ago. It has arisen in my mind a lot. I aspire to make music that touches people and cuts through to the essence of being human. Though, being in a delicate emerging stage of career, I’ve often looked for confirmation from other people. Accolades and recognition are certainly helpful and pleasant, but there were times when, no matter how much encouraging feedback I received, I couldn’t quite believe I was good enough or offering enough. Music is the path I’ve chosen, and I feel that choice is healthy when it is made out of love, not out of a bottomless need to prove my worth or usefulness, just pure love for the music and the world. So, I think “don’t expect applause” is to abandon seeking acknowledgement, which allows so much more appreciation to arise if acknowledgement does come. And of course, this slogan has gained new layers of meaning in the era of COVID. Since March, the only time I’ve heard live applause has been at Black Lives Matter demonstrations. It was magical.

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