Hyeyung Sol Yoon
Anjna Swaminathan's Anandham: A Homecoming for vocalizing solo violinist 2020
Originally presented and live-streamed by Roulette Intermedium on
November 16th, 2020 - https://roulette.org/event/anjna-swaminathan-rivers-above-floods-below/
Anandham: A Homecoming was commissioned by Gabriela Lena Frank's Creative Academy of Music and premiered at Roulette Intermedium by violinist Hyeyung Sol Yoon.
“The borders of bioregions are not only impossible to define; they are permeable. […] I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but that there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind.” — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
Odell’s words offer a reflection on the meteorological phenomenon of “atmospheric rivers,” large bodies of water which collect in the atmosphere above the tropics and later rain down in a different place entirely. Anjna Swaminathan’s Anandham: A Homecoming considers the possibility that much like these bodies of celestial water, our homes, too, are not stationary, but exist in the very possibility of our migration. Our global collective relies on a memory of homelands that have been colonized, spliced, and severed time and time again, but while we are so often nostalgic for a home that is broken, we more easily find community in new lands that don’t feel beholden to the same burdens of conflict and status quo. Much like the rivers brewing and creating movements above, Swaminathan considers the massive rivers of protestors who have flooded the streets against injustice in recent months. What if this, too, is a deluge of cosmic importance? Musically, Anandham: A Homecoming holds these mass movements in the body of a solo violinist. We journey with the violin through its own story of immigration, colonization, and subversion. Informed by Swaminathan’s training in western classical, Carnatic and Hindustani violin, her guru M. S. Gopalakrishnan’s uncanny ability to mold into and in between all three, as well as the historic effects of British colonization on the oral traditions of India, this work expresses the shared migration story of musics, communities, waters, activists, the violinist, and the composer herself.