Graham Reynolds:  Borders are such strange, artificial places, and they're so arbitrary. You go next to the Rio Grande, you can throw a stone across and that's Mexico with this entirely different cultural world, different legal world, different rights, different everything. You cross the border from El Paso to Juarez, radical changes. 

Alex Chambers:  Musical borders too. Throw a rock from opera and you can end up in rock or pop or conjunto. And composer Graham Reynolds isn't afraid to throw those rocks, to really stretch the metaphor. In other words, he crosses a lot of musical borders. Today on Inner States, Graham and I talk about border-crossing opera, scoring films and how his music teachers encouraged his non-traditional path. Then, we have Ross Gay being delighted by fungal hyphae. That's all coming up right after this. 

Alex Chambers:  On the face of it, seeing people acting out a story maybe singing, all backed up by intense, sweeping, emotionally charged music you'd think that would be an irresistible combination, right? But, you know, opera is not that many people's cup of tea. 

Kayte Young:  No. 

Alex Chambers:  So I brought in Kayte Young, host of Earth Eats, here at the WFIU. Kayte is an artistically sensitive and thoughtful person, but she's not a classical music nerd. So, I thought she'd have a good civilian's perspective. Would you go if you had free tickets to La Traviata? 

Kayte Young:  No. 

Alex Chambers:  What if the opera featured three famous tenors? 

Kayte Young:  No. 

Alex Chambers:  What if the opera had an electric guitar? 

Kayte Young:  No. 

Alex Chambers:  Guitar and drum set? 

Kayte Young:  No. 

Alex Chambers:  What if it was a rock opera set on the Texas / Mexico border, featuring a live band on stage, with the composer leading the band at the keyboards, and it also incorporated video and a bunch of different music styles from the Texas / Mexico area? 

Kayte Young:  Yeah, maybe. Sure. 

Alex Chambers:  Well, you missed that one, so you're out of luck. Thanks, I think I've got to get back to my show now. 

Kayte Young:  Okay. 

Alex Chambers:  The show being Inner States from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. I'm Alex Chambers. Alright, chances are you know someone who feels similarly to Kayte. I think it's safe to say opera doesn't occupy a huge place in the American popular imagination. But the movies, that's an art-form most of us can get behind, and that's probably where the most popular orchestral music lives these days. Think of Darth Vader's march. Both the mysterious and yet also heroic music that surrounds Hogwarts. Or the grand sweep of the Jurassic Park theme. And that's just music by John Williams. The movies are one of the main ways most of us encounter composed music these days, it just seems too esoteric otherwise. But I think that might be changing. 

Alex Chambers:  Composers in the 21st century are experimenting not just with new sounds – that never stopped – but with making music that's more visceral and less abstract, that's actually interested in connecting with an audience. It's less confined, less defined. Maybe you'd call it classical, maybe it's rock or punk or funk or something else. One of those composers who wants to connect with audiences, put on a good show, but also make film scores and yes, operas, is Graham Reynolds. Graham is based in Austin, Texas. He's a band leader and improviser but he's also interested in composed music. He's scored films for Richard Linklater and others. He's written music for ballets and theater. He's written symphonies, string quartets and that opera that I mentioned to Kayte. It's called "Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance" and he brought it to Bloomington at the end of March. 

Alex Chambers:  I have to admit I felt a bit like Kayte about the prospect of going to see it, but once I sat down, I started to warm up to it. The stage was set with keyboards in the center and a desk on the other side. That's where the two singers ended up. In the back there was a drum set and a tuba, and chairs for a few other musicians. As we waited for the show to start there is music piped in, there is a screen at the back of the stage that showed images of a young man playing with a dog, digging in the dirt, and looking off into the distance. 

Alex Chambers:  Eventually the musicians started to wander onto the stage. Violinist, cellist, electric guitarist, Graham, the two singers, one or two others. The mezzo-soprano, Liz Cass, wore a period dress with full skirts and a long dress coat. The tenor, Paul Sanchez, was in a suit and cowboy hat. The opera is a pastiche of songs about Pancho Villa's life. As you will hear from Graham, it's not chronological and dives into the legend as much as the biography of the Mexican Revolutionary General. It really leaves Pancho Villa's life open to interpretation. 

Alex Chambers:  It came about because an organization called Ballroom Marfa had asked Graham to write an opera. Marfa, Texas is deep in the Chihuahuan Desert. It's only about 2,000 people, but if you've heard of it it's because it's a huge arts town. Ballroom Marfa is one of the arts organizations and they had told Graham they would like an opera. 

Graham Reynolds:  So Shawn, my partner, and the director of the opera and I drove around West Texas looking for an operatic figure. Opera can mean a lot of things, but we knew we wanted at least parts of it to have that Western opera voice, that big, huge sound. So we were looking for a big, huge character, and West Texas has a lot of big, huge characters but we hadn't found the story yet. We were in El Paso, staying in the hotel that Pancho Villa had lived in at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution and had his headquarters there. The Revolutionary Newspaper was there, the Government in exile was there, and right across the river is Juarez, and the Battle of Juarez was there. That's when we thought, ah, this is our West Texas figure that's larger than life. 

Graham Reynolds:  When you read his giant biography it deals right away with legend and myth. Facts about Pancho Villa are all a mess. Nobody really knows what is true and what is not true. Unlike most revolutionaries who had not come from the intellectual class or privileged class, he came from a very working-class background and was an unusual figure in all sorts of way. So, we asked Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, a theater company in Mexico City, if they would do the libretto and we went on a trip through Chihuahua with them. So there was the Chihuahuan Desert and there's the State of Chihuahua where a lot of Pancho Villa's activities took place. He was from Durango, and we explored that whole area with them, tried to figure out what the piece was going to be and we decided on a collage approach, taking pieces of his life and sewing them together. Not in a straight narrative and it is certainly not in a sequential order. It doesn't start with his birth and go to his death or anything like that. 

Graham Reynolds:  They then wrote the libretto and we went back and forth where I would give them sketches and music and we would get their thoughts on music. Then they would send bits of texts until we had an opera. 

Alex Chambers:  The dress rehearsal for this opera that takes place on both sides of the Texas / Mexico border was on the night of Donald Trump's election. The show premiered two days later. 

Graham Reynolds:  We were an hour north of the border in Marfa. The piece has a lot to do with the Mexico / Texas, Mexico / America border, and when we started Trump was not in the race, but by that time the border was a very hot topic in politics and a vehicle for hatred, and we were trying to build these bridges instead. 

Alex Chambers:  I was going to ask if Trump's ascendancy changed your relationship to the piece. 

Graham Reynolds:  The piece itself did not change hugely because there so many of those issues existed prior, but I think the reception of it and the context of it changed radically and it became so immediately became so much more relevant, with the border wall and all of that. So we've continued that conversation and we have MXTX, which is another project we've been working on, another Texas/ Mexico collaboration. The conversation felt vital enough that we tried to continue it. 

Alex Chambers:  Tell me about MXTX musically. 

Graham Reynolds:  So I'm a white composer and I've been in Texas for over thirty years, but I am from the Northeast. We knew from the beginning we had to be careful about cultural appropriation and so that was Lara Ties coming on, Adrian Quesada coming on, Paul Sanchez coming on and various collaborators being involved in the project. We tried to be very open about that fact and my background and where I was coming from, and that goes into the title "Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance". From that hotel in El Paso where he lived and where we stayed, you can see Juarez right across the river. There are bullet holes from the Battle of Juarez in the walls. There's a famous picture of people dressed up in fancy outfits watching the Battle across the river from the safety of the American side. And so we're drawing parallel with ourselves there. We can study Pancho Villa, who was a very complex figure but also a very violent figure, from this historically safe distance. 

Graham Reynolds:  So that acknowledgment of my background is supposed to be wrapped right into the title, but at the same time I did study Mexican music quite a bit and didn't want to deny that vocabulary in the music about this legendary Mexican figure. We are four hours from the border, Texas used to be part of Mexico. It would be strange not to acknowledge where we are geographically and culturally, and to be in conversation with Mexican-American and Mexican artists who are such a large part of the culture there, and I can't pretend that I haven't heard that music or that it is not part of the fabric of culture there. 

Alex Chambers:  Where there tensions that ended up coming up around that over the course of the process? 

Graham Reynolds:  If they did, no-one told me, as far as I know. I am trying to remember if we had any arguments about this. The closest to tension was me being interested in a couple of different styles of Mexican music that were not geographically relevant to the Chihuahuan Desert area, and having to understand that that style does not have a role in this music here. So there was some learning going on about how geographically specific some music vocabulary is. 

Graham Reynolds:  Borders are such strange, artificial places, and they're so arbitrary. You go and you're next to the Rio Grande, you can throw a stone across and that's Mexico with this entirely different cultural world, different legal world, different rights, different everything. You cross the border from El Paso to Juarez, radical changes. But it is all so arbitrary and it becomes such a huge national conversation, and being in a State that is on the border with Mexico and part of that conversation in social justice being such a big part of art making right now, that felt like the conversation that we were best positioned to be part of. 

Graham Reynolds:  But then personally I have been interested in Mexico since I was a little kid and so it is also indulging myself in pursuing and researching, and getting involved with music, culture and history in a way which is a pleasure as well. It is serving a broader social need, hopefully, but also just personally satisfying and exciting. 

Alex Chambers:  That, ladies and gentlemen, was "Pancho Villa From a Safe Distance". We are going to take a quick break. When we come back we will hear how Graham got started as a musician. It had to do with his mom being cool. Stick around. 

Alex Chambers:  Welcome back to Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers. I'm talking with composer, Graham Reynolds. He's a band leader, he has written scores for films, composed string quartets. He is also the artistic director of a non-profit called Golden Hornet that helps bring new music into the world. He started playing because of his mom, but not because he looked up to her as a musician, well not exactly. 

Graham Reynolds:  I was around five and she was taking piano lessons. I thought my mom was cool so I asked to take piano lessons too, and then my brother who was about a year younger, he thought my mom was cool and he wanted to come with us when we went, so he asked for piano lessons. A year or two later she quit, and we kept going all the way through school. What we didn't know until decades later was that the reason she was quit was not because she got sick of it, but because we couldn't afford all three of us. She quit so we could play. 

Alex Chambers:  It's not as if he was totally on board from the beginning. 

Graham Reynolds:  More years than not we were way into it, but it would come in waves where we'd want to quit so we would only be required to play fifteen minutes a day and we would usually do it before school. So it was part of the morning routine with the idea that if a year after doing that we still wanted to quit, we could quit. But we always made it through that year and then the wave was rising again, we were into it. So usually we'd play far more than fifteen minutes. 

Alex Chambers:  At what point did you realize you wanted to start taking it seriously? 

Graham Reynolds:  So whoever my best teacher was at the time, that is what I wanted to do with my life. In grade school and in particular high school, both those had extraordinary music teachers. So the most constant through the whole thing was great music teachers, so that is the thing that stuck. I think if I had more great science teachers then I might be a scientist instead. 

Alex Chambers:  Was there a particular moment when you were like, "Okay, this is actually what I'm going to do"? 

Graham Reynolds:  I knew by high school I was not really questioning anymore. I wasn't switching depending on who the teacher was. And the only discussion in the family was whether I would go to a music school that only did music or whether I'd go to a large school and major in music. The argument of a broader education won. But then in college I quit my music department after a year so I ended up studying history and focusing on Latin-America anyway. So in a way I was glad. Music schools and the way I approach things were not in sync. 

Alex Chambers:  You do so many different kinds of music and I'm curious, were you a record junkie just collecting all over the place and listening to everything? I feel like high school is the formative years in some ways of our taste, so tell me about how you were discovering things in high school. 

Graham Reynolds:  Record-wise, yes, the record stores had dollar record bins and one record store had a whole room of dollar records. I was very precious with my money because every dollar was a whole record, so I would hesitate to buy fries or something because I could get fries or I could have a whole album. So, yes, I ended up collecting thousands of records and my freshman year roommate was distraught because I'd filled up the room with records. I learned not to bring the whole collection after that. And so my listening was just more and more and more, as many different things as I could listen to. High contrast was the way I liked to listen, so something super heavy followed by something super delicate, followed by something very poppy, followed by something very intellectual, or something like that. So there wasn't really a hierarchy so much as interest in contrast and new territory. 

Alex Chambers:  By the time he was listening to all kinds of records, Graham and his brother had already been exploring new territory in music for years. 

Graham Reynolds:  We started making up our own music in late elementary school, I guess. Maybe before that, but it became very overt by then, and we started doing our own music at piano recitals. Instead of playing Chopin at the classical piano recital we'd play our own music. So, our classical teacher, Mrs Gadritis, eventually talked to our mom and said, "Your sons are going in a different direction and I don't have the tools to teach them." So she suggested that we go to a jazz teacher, not because we were playing jazz but because we were choosing our own notes and making up our own music, and doing a combination of composing and improvising, and jazz teachers know how to handle that. 

Graham Reynolds:  So, we switched to a Hungarian immigrant who was playing jazz around town, he had no other students, and we still keep in contact a little bit. We would go to see his shows, he had a fusion band with his wife, and he really shaped his teaching to what we did and so did my high school music director, which is not what college did, you know? The way that people make music, starting in the 20th century was so wide-ranging. Music evolved so quickly in the 20th century, as opposed to if you were in England 400 years ago, you had a very specific range of music that you had access to. Then, if you were in Beijing, you had a very specific amount of music you had access to, and that changed dramatically with recording technology. It then made another leap with the Internet. 

Graham Reynolds:  So music education generally hasn't caught up to that change, but my high school teachers understood that for them, at least, the best way to adapt to that was to adapt to each student and accommodate their different directions. So our music theory class had metal-head kids and band kids and me. So a wide range of kids from very different backgrounds, and the teachers were understanding of those different aesthetics and those different approaches to music. 

Alex Chambers:  The fact that you had a music theory class in high school at all, I think is also impressive. 

Graham Reynolds:  Yeah, it was a public school but it was a great school. We had the regular stuff, the marching band, the concert band, the jazz band but we also had concerts throughout the year that I think were relatively traditional but they would evolve. Solo and ensemble concert or a pop concert and this and that. And typically in solo and ensemble the cellist would be play a Bach suite, the piano player would play, you know, Chopin or something. But in these I would play my own music, people would play in their bands. But by the end we'd brought the metal-heads into the circle bit and they were doing metal guitar solos as part of their solo ensemble concert. 

Graham Reynolds:  So I started my first year as all classical and by the end was metal and jazz, and classical all meshed up. And so we got to develop our personal music through school functions which was, I think, pretty exceptional. 

Graham Reynolds:  When I went to college, and they didn't understand, they didn't have that approach at all. We got stuck on ii-V-Is, which I didn't want to practice and I had other things I wanted to learn. My teacher would not go to the next subject until my ii-V-Is were really solid. It's a certain chord progression used in jazz a lot and classic American songs, Great American Song Book kind of things. I could play them in certain keys, but I wasn't good at playing them in all the keys, and I decided pretty early on that since I was making up my own music I didn't need to play in all the keys. But I could practice for one hour in say C Major and another hour in C Sharp and another hour in D, or I could spend three hours playing in C and be three times as good at C. 

Graham Reynolds:  But that approach didn't work with school. If you're a studio player and the singer says they want to do it a step down, you have to be able to do it a step down. And so it wasn't like there wasn't a rationale to the facility of playing in all the keys and all the keys do sound different, there is value in them. But we just got stuck in this place and so for the first time in my life I had to quit piano lessons, I quit the music department and stayed with the teachers that I was being inspired by instead. 

Alex Chambers:  You said that it was partly a conversation with your family, too, about what to focus on in school, and you ended up focusing on Latin-American history. 

Graham Reynolds:  It does tie back to when I was young and my dad had been teaching high school history, and basically it paid so little and it was so challenging that he ended up quitting that moving over to a corporate job. He took the tiny bit of retirement money he had saved up from the high school teaching and we went to Mexico City for a couple of weeks. I was eight or nine, something like that. 

Graham Reynolds:  It was just transformative, a radical sort of realignment of my thinking and exposure to a totally different culture, immersion in another language in a way that I'd never experienced. That interest in Mexico lasted, and so when I got to college, like I'd always gravitated towards the teachers I was most inspired by, I started taking some Latin-American history courses and had a couple of great professors. One in particular that became my advisor and I just studied whatever class he was teaching. Every semester I just stayed there. That, for me, was more valuable than any specific music technique. 

Alex Chambers:  Even though you were still thinking about music, you still had music in the back of your head as a goal? 

Graham Reynolds:  Yeah, I never really expected to become a historian. I mean you're majoring in it, so you're thinking about it a little bit. I had gotten a drum set in high school and brought that into college and told all the bands, like, "Hey, if you need a drummer, I'll play whatever." And so, instead of composing my own music on piano like I had been, I spent college mostly learning how to play drums and playing in every which kind of band and doing all that stuff. 

Alex Chambers:  You majored in Latin-American history, you're playing drums in all kinds of bands all over the place, and then you finish. Is that when you moved to Austin? 

Graham Reynolds:  So, when I graduated college I played piano, I played drums. These are large and difficult to move instruments. My town was about two hours east of New York and so during college and a bit during high school, you play shows in New York. I spent a lot of time in New York. I felt like I needed to see a different part of the country, and I'd been through Austin on one road trip and it was a music town and you could rent a house instead of an apartment. I didn't want to rent a rehearsal space across town and get on the subway and go to practice, I wanted to live with the instruments and be able to rehearse in the house. So, Austin became a practical place that would work for what I was trying to do. I threw all my stuff in my car and drove down to Texas. 

Alex Chambers:  Through the nineties he led bands in Austin, but he and a friend were also talking about writing string quartets. 

Graham Reynolds:  Which we really hadn't done, but we were imagining doing. So, we just decided to have a concert and we hired a string quartet and wrote a concert's worth of music. Both of us independently writing music, but producing the concert together. It wasn't a non-profit at that point, it was just us getting our music done. This other composer, Peter Stopschinski, he had a more formal music education. He knew how to do this stuff much more than I did. But then we put together an orchestral concert, a percussion ensemble concert, a brass quintet. We sort of went through all the families of western orchestral instruments and did concerts with each of them, and that became my education in orchestration and writing for these instruments. 

Graham Reynolds:  Eventually, we expanded and instead of just it being about our music, invited other composers to participate and then gradually that turned into a non-profit. Peter doesn't like meetings and non-profits have a lot of meetings, so Peter still participates but is not an active part anymore. 

Alex Chambers:  Graham apparently doesn't mind the meetings though because he's still the artistic director of the Golden Hornet, which he describes as... 

Graham Reynolds:  A little non-profit. 

Alex Chambers:  ...whose goal is to make a space in the 21st century for new composed music. 

Graham Reynolds:  And so now the vast majority of the music is other composers. We have a young composers program, an emerging composers annual concert and then we do these group commissions and then an occasional commission of my stuff as well. 

Alex Chambers:  So why did that feel like a necessary organization? 

Graham Reynolds:  All my friends who major in music, they would write a lot of notes for an orchestra, and then maybe the school orchestra would play a short piece. But when you write notes, you hope that someone will someday play them. 

Graham Reynolds:  I was never interested in spending time on something that was not going to happen. So it was a much more direct route, and then once I had that opportunity to have my music played regularly I wanted to share that with other people. We're trying to provide that and fill a hole that we saw, at least in the Austin music scene. 

Alex Chambers:  I feel like there's something here too about styles of music, that there tended to be this bifurcation of classical art music, notated scores versus rock music and so on and so forth. Is Golden Hornet also an attempt at bridging those two things? 

Graham Reynolds:  Exactly. When we first started with string quartet, it was all notated with some improv built in, but not a lot. And so, because it was strings, people called it classical. Basically, if I'd had a saxophone in my group someone would call it classical but they would call it jazz; if I had violin they would it classical. So, classical still ends up being a word that people use about Golden Hornet a lot. But because we were running it, we didn't have to be restricted by what people meant by that. So, if I wanted to write, you know, country big band music I could do that and it doesn't thwart the mission or anything like that. We needed to make something that was as versatile as our interests were in music. 

Alex Chambers:  It's time for a short break. If you're just joining us, we're talking with composer, Graham Reynolds. When we come back, Graham explains why classical music got super abstract in the middle of the 20th century. Hint: It has to do with technology. 

Alex Chambers:  Welcome back to Inner States, I'm Alex Chambers. We're talking this week with Austin-based composer, band leader and impresario-- Can I say "impresario"? Is that like calling someone a diva? I mean it in a good way. Anyway, we're talking with Graham Reynolds, he's got a band called the Golden Arm Trio. It's rarely a trio. He runs a non-profit for contemporary composers, that's the Golden Hornet. He has scored ballets, theater, a number of Richard Linklater's films among many other things.

Alex Chambers:  One thing about Graham's music is how fun it is, including his quote, unquote, classical music. I played a lot of classical music in the nineties and I don't remember it being as fun as what I've been seeing in the past couple of decades. I asked Graham what changed. 

Graham Reynolds:  It's a big, long answer in a way. But trying to use super broad strokes: recording happens, music becomes hyper-specialized, and splinters dramatically, and more and more and more, as time goes on. 

Alex Chambers:  And this is in the 20th century? 

Graham Reynolds:  Yes. Late 1800s recording technology happens. By the early 20th century its part of the cultural fabric. Prior to recording, all the composers, all the major composers, were performers. Beethoven all the way up to Prokofiev, so early 20th century. So they had a direct relationship to the audience. By mid-20th century very few composers were performers as well. The music was so complex and so intellectual that it took a specialist to compose and it took a specialist to perform. And so the relationship with the audience was not seen as important. There was a famous essay called, "Who Cares If You Listen?" which was making the argument, which I don't necessarily disagree with, but a place in the world for music the way an advanced physicist might be. They can't have a regular conversation about their stuff with an ordinary person because the science is too advanced, and it doesn't make sense to a layperson. 

Graham Reynolds:  So there were composers and musicians working in similar spaces, with music which was just not relevant to the general audience. And that really took hold in a powerful way, especially in composition programs. Recording also democratized access to the documentation of music. So, prior to recording, the only documented music was notated music. Post recording, anything was documented. So that exclusivity that composed music had no longer existed. Therefore music evolved at a rapidly different rate, while music schools do not. And by the 21st century, I mean it probably started happening in the late 1900s, but I think more and more music students and young artists were interested in a more direct relationship to the audience. And that started happening. 

Alex Chambers:  Speaking of direct relationships, we got interrupted for a minute, someone came into the dressing room. So we're just going to pause for a second for that. 

Alex Chambers:  Okay, back to Graham. 

Graham Reynolds:  You know so Golden Hornet was the Austin version of that and the whole alternative classic scene in Austin that didn't exist back in the nineties. You see that in London and in New York and all over the place, parallel organizations. Bang on a Can was earlier than Golden Hornet doing similar things, having a more direct relationship with the audience, bringing in electric guitar and instruments that didn't have a home in a traditional Western orchestra or in composed music. 

Graham Reynolds:  So, from National Sawdust to Poisson Rouge in New York, there were venues that became open to this and hybrid venues that welcomed different kinds of music. So you've seen it change pretty rapidly. 

Graham Reynolds:  There's a reason that institutions move slowly, and in many ways we're all for that, there's a stability to them. But I think at this point the musicians are moving much more quickly than the institutions. 

Graham Reynolds:  It's not meaning to condemn those artists who didn't have that relationship with the audience at all, it in a way helps to understand that's why they drifted away and it just was not part of their art-making, and that's what shifted. That doesn't mean we reject that music and there's not a place for artists who are not interested in the audience, but we do need music education that helps those that are interested in an audience engage them. 

Alex Chambers:  Tell me about how you ended up as someone who does a lot of composing for film and theater. 

Graham Reynolds:  So when I moved to Austin, my only goal was to play my music and to collaborate with other musicians to make music, and it was mostly at punk rock clubs who were the only-- Sort of like jazz teachers when I was studying piano were the ones only fit for what I was doing, even though I wasn't doing jazz. We weren't doing punk rock, but it was the only venue that was open-minded enough to accommodate what we were doing. But, literally, as soon as I played my first gig in Austin people started asking me to score things. It was like, "my puppet show" or "my experimental short" or whatever it was. And each time I performed, more people would ask. 

Graham Reynolds:  And so gradually saying yes to each of those things turned into bigger projects and different projects, and then a career in scoring. I like collaborating a lot. My interests were always broad, and narrowing down to just music was narrow enough for me, and so collaborating across mediums or across disciplines keeps life interesting in a way. It keeps my brain involved in things beyond music which has always been something I've wanted to do. 

Alex Chambers:  So, what do you think it was about your music that people were hearing that made them be like, "oh, we want you to score our puppet show or movie"? 

Graham Reynolds:  I mean most people going out to a punk rock club weren't meeting composers, and there weren't other composers playing at these venues. We were playing instrumental, somewhat narrative-sounding music. It sounded like a film score to people, not necessarily like John Williams, but there was a melodic element. There was a shift in styles throughout the pieces that had a story-like component. And so I think it just made sense for people to try to apply that to what they did. Or choreographers thinking, oh I want to make a dance to something in that direction. 

Alex Chambers:  One collaboration tends to lead to another. The librettists for Pancho Villa were based in Mexico City, and working across the border, especially while Trump was in office, got Graham thinking about more cross-border collaborations. 

Graham Reynolds:  So after Pancho we had been developing all sorts of relationships in Mexico City, as well as with Mexican-American artists in Austin, and wanted to move onto another project. We started developing MXTX, and for that we were trying to cross a bunch of divides. Golden Hornet came from this composer background, people who write notes down that other play, was the simplest way we thought of it. And DJ producer folks who don't notate, who don't even read notation necessarily, come from such a radically different musical vocabulary and we wanted to see what happened when we put all these people in the same virtual room. 

Graham Reynolds:  So we ended up making this sample library album and concert with artists from Mexico and artists from Texas and by the end 60-somewhat artists were involved. Forty made the sample library, loops and samples and bits of sound, things that people can play around with and do whatever they want. It's going to be free for everyone. And then we commissioned 13 artists to write something using the sample library, but also for an ensemble that was partly recorded in Austin, partly recorded in Mexico City putting this album together, sort of merge all the elements of the project. Then we'll premier it in Austin and then in Mexico City and Marfa and beyond from there. It is our next cross-border collaboration. 

Alex Chambers:  I had hoped to use the sample library to score this episode, but when I first ran it, the sample library had yet to be released. Instead, Graham's publicist offered me the opportunity to use music from the album itself which came out on April 1st. After the music from the Pancho Villa Opera, everything you've heard today is from that album. I'll list the particular songs on the website. I'd like to thank Brittany Friesner from the IU Cinema for thinking of us to interview Graham, David Lobel of Lobel Arts for helping to coordinate, Alberto Varon, Director of the Latino Studies Program here at Indiana University for helping to get Graham out here in the first place, and of course Graham Reynolds himself for taking the time to talk with me. 

Graham Reynolds:  Oh, thank you so much for having me. 

Alex Chambers:  I want to close today with another consideration of the crossing of borders. A few years ago the poet Ross Gay wrote a collection of short essays, essay-ettes he called them, about delight. One a day was his plan, and he mostly stuck to it. But whether or not he stuck to it is not what's at issue. What is at issue is the things he noticed when he started paying attention to what delighted him. It wasn't all what you might think of as delightful. Ross may laugh a lot... 

Ross Gay:  [LAUGHS] [LAUGHS] [LAUGHS] 

Alex Chambers:  ...but he's no Pollyanna. It's not like he thinks we're not going to die, or that humans aren't cruel to each other. Delight is a practice for him. So, today I want to share a delight about being woven together, even if our time here is limited. 

Ross Gay:  Joy is such a human madness: the duff between us. Or, like this: in healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused. 

Ross Gay:  By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight, the phrase fungal duff meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes who get a little of sugar for their work. The pronoun who turned the mushrooms into people, yes it did. Evolved the people into mushrooms. 

Ross Gay:  Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things – the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this – joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy. 

Alex Chambers:  That was Ross Gay reading "Joy Is Such A Human Madness" from his book, "The Book of Delights". Alright, that's it. You've been listening to Inner States from WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana. If you have a story for us or you've got some sound we should hear, let us know at WFIU.org/innerstates. Speaking of found sound, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up, but first the credits. 

Alex Chambers:  Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers, with support from Eoban Binder, Aaron Cain, Mark Chilla, Michael Paskash, Payton Whaley and Kayte Young. Our executive producer is John Bailey. 

Alex Chambers:  Special thanks this week to Graham Reynolds, all the people who helped coordinate our conversation, and Ross Gay. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Additional music today is from Graham Reynolds' Opera, "Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance", sung by Paul Sanchez and Liz Cass, and from Golden Hornets' album MXTX, a cross-border exchange. We'll link to that on our website. I want to acknowledge and honor the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people on whose ancestral homelands and resources Indiana University, Bloomington, home of WFIU, is built, as well as the generations of workers who built it. Alright, let's listen to something. 

Alex Chambers:  That was a woodpecker pecking on a tree at Griffy Lake in Bloomington, Indiana. In case your ear isn't totally tuned to the different kinds of peckings of various woodpeckers, that was a pileated woodpecker. Until next week, I'm Alex Chambers, thanks for listening.