Carlisle Evans Peck (they/he). Photo courtesy to Buck Holzemer.
CARLISLE EVANS PECK
CEDAR COMMISSIONS SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEWS
Over the next few weeks we’re featuring the six artists of the 2021-2022 Cedar Commissions (taking place Friday, February 18th, and Saturday, February 19th at The Cedar) in a series of interviews on our site. The Cedar Commissions is a flagship program for emerging Minnesotan composers and musicians made possible with a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
In the second and now third year of the COVID-19 pandemic where shifts in daily life have been ever-present, these artists have been riding the waves. They’ve been composing, exploring new ideas, and assembling teams of musicians to bring their work to fruition in a mix of virtual and in-person work sessions. Over the two nights of the Eleventh Annual Cedar Commissions, audience members will witness performances about uncovering hidden truths of one's ancestors, uniting African music traditions across drawn lines, illuminating the Third Culture Kid experience, pushing oneself to the ultimate limit, the relational process of self discovery, honoring the disrespected beauty of our planet, and so much more.
Our first spotlight interview is with Carlisle Evans Peck (they/he). Carlisle is a songwriter and pianist. In their project for the 2021-2022 Cedar Commissions titled Iconoclasm, they explore what it means to queer their familial history of storytelling. Carlisle spoke with Marketing and Communications Manager Shasa Sartin about queer representation, uncovering truths, and the beauty of myth-making.
“Our world is built on stories, and it’s earth-shaking to see your experience reflected in those stories. It’s no small thing.”
Shasa Sartin (she/her): My first question is about the title of your commission, Iconoclasm. What brought you to connect with this word or this concept, and then led you to name your project after it?
Carlisle Evans Peck (they/he): Yeah, that's a really juicy question. My premise with this piece is taking the dominant, heteronormative narratives and strict gender binary narratives in my family and re-write them in a way that I can actually see myself reflected in those histories as a queer-identifying person. A lot of my family members are really big storytellers, and there's a lot of oral history that has been passed down of my great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and relatives far, far back. And there's a way that I feel a lot of connection there, but also ways that I felt... Like I said, I don't see my own experience as a queer person reflected in that lineage, which just can't actually be accurate.
What I see primarily is that history writes over those figures. So I chose five stories as sort of my jumping off points to create my own queer mythology of my family and chose five individuals whose stories didn't really ever get told, like they were eclipsed by the war heroes, the people who made lots of money, you name it. So yeah, the idea of the iconoclasm there is [asking] how do the oral histories of my ancestry characterize the icons, who do they choose as the icons? And I'm wanting to break that apart a little bit, queer it up a little bit, and write a new narrative that I am also a part of.
Carlisle released the song “Hyacinth and Apollo” in June 2021. You can listen to it here. Photo courtesy of Carlisle Evans Peck.
Shasa: Your song “Hyacinth and Apollo” is beautiful, I loved listening to it. I didn't know much about the story of Hyacinth and Apollo, but as I did some reading, I saw that the romantic love between them was largely written out in recounting of the story. So as you spoke about queer figures being written over, I thought “that sounds like this song.” Is this song part of the project?
Carlisle: No, “Hyacinth and Apollo” is not, but you're right that it has some big parallels in that way. Cause what are the Greek myths that everybody in Western cultures know about: it's not the gay ones. But there are tons of queer myths in [Greek] tradition and mythic traditions around the world. But, I learned later that Hyacinth and Apollo was queer, that was not how it was taught [in school]. So similarly with the way that my ancestors have told the stories of their lineages, I’m like, “the way that you tell that story of Great Uncle Ralph, interesting, you speak about him in hushed tones” and like, “oh, he was a bachelor farmer,” or whatever. All of these sort of codewords used that you come to realize, are those euphemisms? What are you trying to write out and cover up and not talk about?
Shasa: You sound like you're very particular about words and highly observant. Could you speak about that? About reading between the lines when people speak?
Carlisle: I think one thing that always comes up for me with songwriting, but has come up a lot in this project, is how I arrive at what I think is the truth, and how to say the truth in a song. I guess what I always find is that if I go into it with the front brain, rational thought, like, “this is what I want to say,” and then think about how I'm gonna say it, that never works for me to find the truth of a statement. I always find that I have to go in the back door and not even have it in the front of my brain … and not sort of hammer and hone the words away. But trust more of a channeling experience is all that I can say about it. And that was really hard, because for this project I'm handling people's histories. And also there's a structural expectation of what it's going to be in the end. It was really challenging for me to trust that sort of process, but in every case I found that the drafts of songs came out really fluidly when I wasn't thinking about incorporating this aspect of this person's story, and that I wasn't thinking about this thing that my grandfather said about this person when I was five. That actually the truth came out much more vividly and truthfully that way.
And I guess that brings me to another thing that I've been wrestling with with this project a lot. Mythology versus quote-unquote “historical accuracy.” There was no factual recorded evidence that any of these ancestors were queer. So I had to let go of the truth being a historical accuracy here, and instead trust that the truth is in the myth-making of it. The whole story is not maybe historically accurate in that sense, but it's painting some picture of an experience that has been lost to time and to history that I'm trying to bring about in this way. And I think in telling these stories, I felt a totally different sense of responsibility to the words, to word choice, and getting it right. Which I think has been really good. It's been hard, and it’s been in some ways frustrating, I guess. I feel, though, the sort of sacred weight of holding how I'm going to tell a person's story, even if I don't know their name, in my hands, in my voice. The words matter more than they even typically do for me, which is saying something.
Carlisle Evans Peck has band practice with Tarek Abdelqader, Crystal Myslajek, Willow Waters, and Peter Morrow. Photo courtesy of Carlisle Evans Peck.
Shasa: Do you have any collaborators for your project?
Carlisle: Yeah, I've put together a band for this performance. So there are five people total. There’s a drummer, Tarek Abdelqader, who was a Cedar Commissions recipient a few years back. Willow Waters who is playing upright bass. Peter Morrow who is playing guitar. Sarah Larsson who is singing along with me and doing some auxiliary percussion instruments. And Crystal Myslajek who is playing piano and keyboards.
One of my visions with this project was for me to not play an instrument. Piano is my primary instrument and I've played it since I was a little kid. And in my singer-songwriter work and my composition work, I've leaned so much on [the piano]. It’s been such a central part of my performance and my songwriting and everything. When I was coming up with writing this project I was like I think that what I need to focus on is performing and channeling these characters that I'm trying to bring life to, and I think I can't be playing an instrument.
That's been a whole new process for me, a new area of exploration to just be singing and performing without an instrument. So leaving the instrumentation fully to the band. It's been really, really fun. A little bit of a trust fall for me but I've been liking it a lot.
An ancestor of Carlisle named Mae Wilson. Photo courtesy to Carlisle Evans Peck.
Shasa: Can you speak more about storytelling being an important part of your family and your heritage?
Carlisle: My mom's side of the family has a lot of Welsh ancestry. And way back when, centuries ago, ostensibly, people in my family say that our ancestors were Bards, so musical storytellers who would go from town to town singing the mythology and the folklore of that place. Growing up, family gatherings always were… basically story time. My grandpa had his own stories, but then he would tell the stories of his parents and grandparents and aunts and great uncles. And my mom would as well, my aunts and uncles would as well. People told those stories and didn't write them down. My grandma tried. She tried to do a lot of recording of family histories and stuff, and she only got so far. It was almost entirely this oral story telling [...] it is like an oral history, which I think is really powerful. And the way that I've always thought about songwriting is very story-based. When I am writing a song, even if I don't think at the front of my mind about narratives, they always sort of lend themselves to some sort of narrative. Some sort of saga. I feel that storytelling impulse in myself in that way, in a musical way.
Photo courtesy of Carlisle Evans Peck.
Shasa: Bear with me, but what is a message or messages that you want audience members to take away from your performance on February 18?
Carlisle: Our world is built on stories, and it's earth-shaking to see your experience reflected in those stories. It's no small thing. I think that having representation in the stories that we tell, the cultural stories that we tell in our society is just so vitally important, that's how we make meaning of ourselves, that's how our lives are constructed.
Catch Carlisle Evan Peck’s performance of Iconoclasm premiering live at The Cedar on Friday, February 18th as part of the Eleventh Annual Cedar Commissions. Buy tickets here.