Beth South  0:03

BS: Okay, my name is Beth South and today’s date is May 27, 2021. To start, can you please tell me your full name, your date of birth, and your current job title.

Nathan Froebe  0:15

NF: Okay. I’m Nathan Wayne Froebe, I was born February 7, 1983, in Larned, Kansas, and I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music here at IU East.

BS: Can you tell me a little bit about your family background?

NF: Okay, I’m actually adopted. I was adopted from birth, and I’ve never been a secret so like I’ve never had any like weird issues or qualms or like it suddenly, magically came out in high school, like, ‘Oh, God, you’re not my mom.’ None of that now. They’ve always let me know and my sister is also adopted. I’m the homegrown one, I’m American, she’s actually adopted from Russia. So, just a little. And then like, I’ve got two cousins were also adopted, my cousin Cory who’s a year younger than me, he’s Filipino and then his younger brother Jake was Romanian. So, all current Froebe’s are adopted, there is no more actual Froebe blood line, and so. But it’s an interesting little thing that our family’s, like, very big into adoption.

So, we, I grew up in Southeast Kansas in a little town, Columbus, about 3000 people. If the biggest landmark is Joplin, Missouri, if people sometimes heard of Joplin, Missouri, it’s along I-44. A big tornado hit it about, like, a decade ago and messed it up. Joplin’s only about 30 minutes from us, so. The way I usually describe it is if you imagine where Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma all meet, that corner is where I live. I can be in Missouri or Oklahoma in like five minutes. So, like we’re in that extreme corner. So, it’s a very rural upbringing. We were, we just nothing particularly notable, like just normal stuff. Dad was self-employed as a mechanic. Mom, I don’t want to like, she was, she’s a housewife, but that seems like diminishing in a way because she also did a whole lot of other things. Like she, she built a soccer league in the entire region for me because I didn’t like playing baseball and basketball, so she ended up building a soccer league over a number of years and eventually got it put into the school system. So, she does quite a bit. She also helps Dad out with the business, she does a lot of the, the books and things.

So, I mentioned my sister, she’s actually 13 years younger than me, and this will sound so shady, but, like, I sometimes actually forget she exists because of our age difference. Like, as I was a freshman going into college, she was just going into kindergarten, so we don’t have a whole lot of, like, shared life experience other than just, you know, complaining about what Mom and Dad do. So yeah, that was, that was my beginnings and just little rural Kansas like. It was a very sheltered experience, shall we say, and we’ll be able to get into that more in other questions.

BS (2:57): Can you tell me a little bit. Well first, can you tell me, when did you realize you were LGBTQ, hold on, and would you mind telling me a little bit about your coming out experience?

NF (3:09 ): Yeah. So, in the back of my mind, I kind of always knew and the first signifier I had was the old Adam West Batman show. And it’s because I looked at the actor Burt Ward in, in his Robin costume and those flesh-colored tights, and something in my little like five-year-old brain went, ‘that’s nice. I like that.’ And I didn’t, I had no idea what that meant because in, in Southeast Kansas in the, growing up in the late 80s, early 90s, there was no word or any terminology for it, there’s no queer visibility, nothing. I had no idea what it was, and I always had little things in the back of my mind that I knew about, but it never really came to fruition. During my like senior year of high school, some things kind of started happening and I was like, ‘okay I think maybe I do this,’ but I also, like, I had a girlfriend at the time, who is still to this day, the butchest person I’ve ever actually dated, ironically.

And so, between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, like, there wasn’t a moment where I was like ‘I am out, I am gay. I am this,’ it was more of a process of just kind of coming to terms with what it was and learning what the terms were. Because, again, in that timeframe, and in that very rural area, nobody talked about it, there was no visible queer figures. I had no terminology, the closest I had was the old ‘oh, well that’s gay’ as an insult. So, I didn’t have any bearing or knowledge, I had nothing to imprint upon about like ‘what is this thing that I’m feeling? What I’m, who am I?’ And so, by the time I got up to be a sophomore in college, I had, I had figured out I was gay. But again, I never, I never had a big moment where I like sat down with a friend or something was like, ‘I am going to tearfully come out to you now.’ I never had that. I just, so I, I’m always, I don’t know what to say when I am asked. It’s like ‘when did you come out?’ And like ‘sometime in college? I don’t know.’ I don’t, I don’t have a specific story about it. But I did also realize shortly thereafter because I was just living as who I was, with it being just part of my identity.

Because of the areas, so rural so very, it was very, like, the smack dab, middle of the Bible Belt, all of that. I found out that I ended up being a role model for others just by existing and doing what I and being open with who I was. I found out later, from somebody who I actually never got along with, we never got along, but he did express to me how jealous he was of me about, you know, ‘oh I see you living openly and I’m jealous of that.’ Because he was someone who was very closeted from religion, but, and not to be stereotypical, but he’s like, there are sometimes you can tell when a person’s gay like, they cross the hill and like the rainbows appear and things and like, he’s one of those people. That’s, nothing wrong with that but like, he repressed that because of his religion for a long time. So, again I never had a specific coming out moment it was more of a long, tortured process really. There was a moment during my freshman year where I was in a very dark place. And I, I knew I was in the mindset of doing something that may hurt myself, so I found a couple of friends before I made that decision, and I was like ‘I need something to help.’ So, I was in a hospital for a few days and, like, kind of starting to come to grips with it like, ‘okay I am this.’ Because suddenly people started asking, like, ‘well if you have these feelings about men, you’re probably gay’ like. So that was kind of my, un-glorious coming out was just kinda like this, slow drip feed of like, I knew in the back of my head, but just I never had the terminology.

And this, this thing about, like, not having the representation or the visibility of any of it, not knowing about it, that’s going to be a running theme throughout my career as both a composer and a educator, about like how I present. Because, like, I’m not, I’m not the, I’m not the Grand Marshal of the pride parade, but I’ve never I’ve never been hidden. So, and I keep that as a thing so that like I know whether I like it or not, like my students will see me, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, okay. He’s open, and out, and gay and successful. Okay maybe I can be too.’ So, I’m not choosing to be a role model, so much as I know that I’m going to be that to someone, regardless of what I do and think so I may as well lean into and embrace. So as a long rambling answer for how I came out.

BS (7:37): No, that’s great. I think that’s a good side of it, because, yeah, a lot of people do think, ‘Oh it is just this one time,’ or maybe several time experience of coming out to people but not, sometimes that’s not everyone’s story. So, yeah, and you, you’ve already touched on it a little bit, but where did you receive your education and what led you to your subject area?

NF (8:00): Okay, I have a little sore spot with this actually and it’s gonna be interesting to hear. So, I started playing piano in second grade, I have a knack for it, and then in high, later in middle school, in high school when I got to choose band, I played saxophone. So, by the end of my high school career I was taking both piano and saxophone lessons at Pittsburg State University, in Pittsburg Kansas. It was just a little division two school right up the road from where I was, at about 30 minutes away, so it’s local, homegrown stuff. And because I was kind of going through a lot during my senior year, trying to figure out, like, my sexuality and other things.

There was never a conversation with me about ‘what do you want to do for college.’ It was always just this presumed thing, because I’m, I’m, I’m an older millennial, I am of that generation where they’re like, ‘you’re going to go to college, so you don’t flip a burger’ and whatnot. We all saw how that, what that turned out to be, but. So, I, there was no question, I was gonna go to college, but I never had any say in like where I was going or what I was going to study. Like the closest I remember, I remember vaguely thinking, like, ‘well maybe I want to be an English major because I always really enjoyed that subject as well.’ But obviously, I was really good at music. I was a star and everything in music in our school. And so, and because I was already taking lessons with some of the college instructors there, everyone just assumed ‘Oh well he’s just going to go up to Pitt State and that’s just where he’s gonna go and do.’ And I had no idea what I was getting into, I didn’t really know. I knew I was going to college, I guess, I guess I’m going to do music, I don’t know what my degree is. I had no idea I was studying music education, wasn’t until like late my sophomore year I was like, ‘Oh, that means I’m gonna be a band director.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh, okay. Whatever.’ So it was very weird and I do have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about like, no one ever had, never let me have a choice, or like having an audition for other schools, or talk about it so. But I mean like, music is a lot of what I do anyways it’s natural to me, it’s inherent in how I view things, so I’m not mad about it in the long run.

So, in 2001 I went to Pittsburg State University, I did a Bachelor of Music Ed there. And, so, here’s where it gets a little bit weird and how it ties into me being a composer, because I had no idea about, that you could even be a composer. I just thought composers were old dead German white guys and that’s all it was. Because our, our program had Music Ed and Music Performance, they didn’t have a Music Composition. But we have a class that we have to take called Orchestration. Which is a class that’s teaching you about like, how to like, write and arrange for all the instruments. The purpose for Music Ed people was really like, ‘Okay, we realize that we’re in a rural area, you have to go out to your band of 12 that consists of like five flutes, and a tuba and an accordion, how do you rearrange the music to make it work for that.’ That’s the point of the class and the usual final project is ‘take a small piano piece, write it for band and orchestra.’ So, I did that I took a little Debussy scene piano prelude I was working on. The band version is terrible, never will see the light of day, does not work, but it does work for the orchestra. So much so that the, when we were doing the read through of it, the orchestra director, turned to me and she said, ‘Nathan, if Debussy had orchestrated this, this is how he would have done it. May I please put this on a concert?’ And I was just, I was kinda taken aback. I was, I had not even thought of that in any way, shape, or form. And so after she did that, put on a concert that I started just kind of doing what I was calling orchestration exercises where I was, you know, playing with like, ‘well what if I took four horns I did this, or if I did this?’ But I was not taking preexisting material, I was creating my, I was composing. And it ended up working out that I kept doing this over the last couple of years of my degree. And I’ll never forget. It was in November, the semester before I went to student teach. I was sitting in the living room in a recliner looking, like, right there at the ceiling, and I looked over my roommate I said, ‘I think I have to be a composer, I think I need to pursue this.’ So, what I ended up doing is I still went through with my student teaching, but what I worked out with my advisor was, I would not graduate at the end of student teaching, which confused the Department of Ed people to know that. I was going to stay an extra year to do our performance degree because it had some extra theory and composition classes, and that way I could go and start applying for Masters in Theory and Composition. That was the plan.

So went through student teaching, did all that. Had a few performances and then didn’t graduate, had all the credits, but I just didn’t go through the formal process of graduating. Now right before the next semester started, where I was going to do this second bachelor’s degree, I got an e-mail a couple weeks before school started, and it said, ‘Hey, our graduate assistant isn’t coming back. We know you’ve had interest in, like, doing like a conducting Master’s. Would you like to just take your spot since we have all the degree credits and just be a master student working on master’s degree in conducting?’ So, I thought ‘okay, I’ve woken up it’s 10am and I’ve graduated and I’m getting a free Master’s, yay.’ So that’s what I started doing. I started working on a Master’s there in the Wind Conducting. And this is going to start to play into how this, this piece I wrote for this project began. Because when that fall semester started, I was on top of the world. And then I met a new, hot, little freshmen guy named Billy who, we entered into a relationship that went on for way too long and was the genesis of the whole “In Paths Untrodden” project. So, what happened is we dated for a while, then we had a hideous breakup, but we did not, like, separate. We were still like certainly at each other constantly. He would try to go away to someone else, but then he would come back to me. It was a very ‘will they, won’t they,’ Rachel/ Ross kind of thing. And I did not handle it well. So much so that I actually ended up flaming out of that master’s program. And for the next couple years, Billy and I ended up moving across the state, I kind of followed him, it was not the healthiest or smartest thing to do in my life, but it was the only thing that kept me going. So, we kind of became friends, kind of establish things, and in the meantime, I wasn’t teaching, I wasn’t in school, I was just taking odd jobs to try and make ends meet. And we were trying to repair whatever was broken between us, but like it was a very weird thing because I kept always saying like, you know, ‘I want to be with you, I think we are like, if I describe like how we act to other people, Billy, they would say that we are dating. Yet you constantly say you don’t want to, yet you’re over here all the time with me, or constantly spent like, we do everything that a dating couple does without the word dating on it.’ So, again it wasn’t, it was not. We were both toxic and abusive to each other in horrible ways, so it’s not a, not a, not a most shining moment.

But during that time, I also finally managed to get my first teaching job as a little K12 position in north central Kansas, that same time he also ended up making the decision to move out to LA to, like, pursue doing, like, cosmetology and things which he wanted to do for a while. And so, I taught that K12 school for one year. My day literally was K, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Middle, High every day. It was exhausting. But I’d always been writing in the background and always been composing in some way, even though I wasn’t having people play it. So, I found Fort Hays State University, which was out kind of where I was at in that region of Kansas, and I found they had a composition program. They didn’t have a Master’s in it, but what they had was a Master of Liberal Studies, which is like a create your own kind of Masters. So I started talking to them, I obviously, I can see the writing on the wall with that K12 job as like, ‘if I’m here for five years I will be severely burnt out and not be able to do anything.’ So I got into Fort Hays State University, we created the whole little, my own little program track for my Masters and that’s where I started to really lean in and finally, I didn’t really study composition formally at my Bachelor’s program except for like one semester at the very end, everything else at that point was very self-taught, but it was doing okay with it. But I got into Fort Hayes, then Hays Kansas, and I started focusing on composition. I also had a conducting emphasis as well. It was very flexible, I got to teach a lot, which was good because I, even though I always label myself as a composer first, my music education side and my educator side informs a lot of what I do.

And so while I was at my Masters, and I’ll talk about this more when I talk about the actual piece “In Paths Untrodden” but like that’s where I wrote the first song in this cycle, the piece For Him I Sing, because I was just looking through random Whitman poems, thinking like ‘okay I’m gonna mark these, because they’re public domain and I am cheap.’ And I was gonna just mark them for later use, that turned into, ‘okay, well, I’m just gonna sketch a little idea for this, let me just do this whole thing’ and then three hours later I had the whole art song. And my teacher there told me he’s like, ‘don’t touch this piece, but add to it and make it a full song cycle, a collection of songs.’ So then I went back through and I started piecing together poems that resonated with me and reflected how Billy and I, in our post relationship status, how we had been navigating things, about how we were like ‘okay I think I know who you are, but then I don’t know who you are, this is how we’re kind of relating to each other’ but like, it was very weird and unprecedented territory for me. Because there’s not really a hetero-normative model for after like, you know, ‘you’ve been sleeping with your best friend for a while, and like that still keeps on happening, and what do you do with that.’ It’s, it’s a weird thing I had no model for it, so I thought I would create one in what I was doing. And through that I would, like, process, like, my emotions about this whole event. And I, Billy knew about it at the time, I haven’t talked to him in quite a while though so he doesn’t, I don’t think he knows that I’ve actually finished the piece. But like when I first talked to him about, he did not like the idea, because he’s like, ‘we kind of stopped living in those feelings,’ and like, ‘Yeah, but this is how I’m getting rid of that. It’s like I’m processing them through my writing,’ again I’ll talk about later, we do like talk specifically about the piece and how that changed over time.

But, so I did my Masters at Fort Hays and then right after that I went to University Wisconsin Madison. In 2014, I think, I started there to do my doctorate and composition and I had a minor in conducting. So again, all my teaching load was like, you know, actually teaching the band and doing that. I wasn’t a theorist by any means, but I did all the composing stuff, and I, that, that might offer a story in its own as I’m sure most people in, with their with their masters or doctoral programs are like, ‘that is an entity unto its own.’ But during that time, I was becoming, through all this I was becoming much more open with who I was. I wasn’t writing explicitly queer work yet until the end of my doctorate when my dissertation actually ended up being met. But at the same time, like, I started to have success with it I was making my own opportunities, I was, I was, I was really, I was deep into composition, I was like, ‘Okay finally I’m where I’m supposed to be at and what I’m doing.’ So then in 2018, I finished with doctorate and spent an unfortunate year in Florida after that teaching high school band. And I say that because there were just like, literally, a handful of people that made that job miserable. Every, the students loved what I did, the parents loved what I did, my colleagues loved what I did. But two administrators and two other people decided they didn’t like what I did, even though they were never in my classroom. And it was also the year that my work got me nominated for a Grammy Music Educator Award, I was a quarter finalist for Grammy Music Educator Award, and I was told that I was not a good fit for them. It was, yeah, make it make sense. It just doesn’t. And ironically, of all things, we kept like trying to wonder like, ‘okay, are they doing this because I’m gay in any way,’ and oddly enough, never once came up. That was never, we could never, like, if we had any inclination that they were trying to be discriminatory towards me because of that, we probably would have jumped on them a little bit more. But like they never did anything about that, so ironically that nothing came of that, they just, they just didn’t like me because I made one of their colleagues look bad. And it’s not because I was trying to, it was just because, I say this with complete, humble, modesty, I was just better at the job than she was. They didn’t like that. ‘I’m sorry, like, this is just what I do. This is what I’ve trained to do.’ And then after that I came to IU East, so.

BS (20:23): Yeah, so. So, when did you come to IU East, what year was that?

NF (20:31): So that was the 2019/2020 academic year. That’s when I came to IU East. I had actually, that, that Florida job I mentioned, those administrators that I was complaining about, they were retiring, and they were leaving, and the ones that were coming up and they were going to take their place, their mantra was ‘just hold on until next year, Nathan, just hold on to next year, they will go away and all these problems will go away.’ Well, those are the outgoing administrators decided on their way out, they were going to take me out with them. So I didn’t have a job at the end of that school year unfortunately. S

o, I was applying to everything I possibly could, and I was getting a little worried. And then this job position came open, and it was listing like being a band director, teaching theory, doing piano classes, like this, it was almost a checklist of what my skill set is. So, there’s a part of me, I was actually contemplating leaving education altogether because I had had such a bad experience with those handful of people in Florida. But I got, I ended up interviewing for this job I got hired pretty late. I was hired at, like, the very end of July beginning of August before the school year started. So, within two weeks’ time, I had packed myself up and moved across country here and hit the ground running. And that was also a very strange year to be a college professor for the first year, because we all know what happened in March of 2020 and so. I never, I never felt like I really got my footing that first year because that first semester was just ‘go, go, go, you’re in it and figure it out as you go.’ And then by the time I was kind of feeling comfortable in the second semester, then the pandemic hit. So, but yeah that’s I came here in 2019/2020. Did I answer all that, all that question?

BS (22:16): I think so, that’s great. So, again, you’ve touched on this a little bit, but can you tell me a little bit more about your inspiration for your work. It, is it, is it just centered kind of around your personal experiences or is there other things that you sort of draw upon when you either compose or you know when you play?

NF (22:37): Okay. It’s a little bit, kind of a piece-by-piece basis, obviously “In Paths Untrodden” is very much centered around my personal experience. I have a handful of pieces that are very directly, like, inspired by a personal thing to me, and “In Paths Untrodden” obviously the biggest one. Another piece is called What Words Cannot Say, it’s for trombone quartet, and I wrote it shortly after the 2016 election. And it was a very frustrating piece to write and I’m sure we can all imagine why. Because I, and that was when I literally woke up at like, 2am I couldn’t sleep because I was so restless, about what had happened, especially because at the time I was living in Wisconsin, and I was blaming Wisconsin for giving him the electoral votes to win, because it just infuriated me. And so, yeah, that was, that was a random like, ‘oh, like the mythical composer is up in the middle of the night writing by candlelight’ and whatnot get in so that that piece was that. But, so I was trying to look at this question earlier and I, I don’t necessarily know how to like, quantify it into, like, one solid answer so a lot of times what I do, and I actually have sticky notes for myself so if you see me looking down here I’ve made sticky notes about these things. So, there’s a few angles. One angle is, I don’t, I don’t anymore, I do not write pieces in a vacuum, meaning I don’t write a piece, and then say, ‘who would like to perform this’ because I find that’s much more difficult to get a performance out. What instead I do is, I befriend a performer, and I work with them, and I get into their world, and I understand them, and then I say ‘Hey, I would like to write a piece for you.’ That way I already have somebody who’s gonna play the piece and I don’t have to worry about selling it later on. And so, I, it’s really partly inspired around, like, working with my performers and sometimes my ideas aren’t necessarily my ideas, they come from the performer. Like I had commission last summer that is from a clarinetist, who she asked me to write a piece that was specifically around all of the dumb things composers do, like, ‘oh I need you to switch to this instrument for one note and then switch back really fast’ or ‘I want you to play the bass clarinet, but you’re gonna play only in the high register where it’s not really doing what is supposed to do.’ And so, I created an entire piece around that because that’s what she asked for, I was like ‘Okay.’ And that gave me, like, something to grab on to. And so, if I’m coming up with a piece on my own where, like, the performer has said, ‘just write whatever you want,’ like. Which is obviously, like most composers, like please don’t tell me that give me something to go on. So then I’ll usually come up with either, like, just like, a general idea or an image of some sort or some, maybe, compositional technique I want to face. I just got to find one kernel of an external idea to, like, focus on and I can build a piece around that. But I would say I don’t think I have, like, a specific inspiration source for anything, it depends. Like, and I’ll talk about this a little bit later, because it asks about LGBT works in one of my later questions, but I am working on developing a series of miniatures based around the progress pride flag now. So, you like, each color and stripe, like, the original pride flag each, each stripe had like a different, like, ideal put towards it, so I am going to create little miniatures for that sort of thing, based around those ideas. So it is, it’s, I don’t know. It’s a mélange of ideas, I don’t have like one specific thing, it’s partly like, what the performers I’m working with, are doing or if I just have, like, some intangible concept. One thing I do like to do is I want to try to explore nuanced emotion, I feel like a lot of times we’re like, ‘okay let’s just make the piece be happy, let’s make the piece be angry,’ and we go for the big broad strokes. We don’t dive into the subtlety of things, which I really explored “In Paths Untrodden” and like certain things. Like, maybe, saying, like, I am, like there’s the words ‘I am the words I am satisfied,’ in one of the, one of the songs, and it’s one of the duets. And during that, that particular line the way I said it was I just said it all on the same note, and I told them like ‘this is distant, like you’re looking away,’ like, it’s just, like this person has, like, no matter what’s gone on and they’re like, ‘Nope, I’m satisfied with this,’ and exploring the nuance of that emotion rather than just, ‘oh, we’re really sad because we broke up, whoo,’ but kind of diving more into, like, the gritty of, like, the friction, and those kinds of things. So, like, so my inspiration comes really from kind of anywhere, whatever’s at the given time usually.

BS (27:15): So, you’ve already touched on your work “In Paths Untrodden” which you, kind of, donated materials to the archives for, which, thank you. Can you go into more detail? You talked how you kind of created the first part, at one time and then, when did you start kind of bring it up the others and again, why, if you can, like, maybe pick one of the two reasons why you, besides the Creative Commons reasons. And then poetry, what was it about those specific poems that kind of, you know, you felt were a fit?

NF (27:47): Right. So, how I created “In Paths Untrodden.” Again, like I was just looking through Whittman poems, and I found that poem For Him I Sing, which you would think it’s only five lines long and I would have it memorized by now, but I wrote it in 2013, so it’s been a while since I’ve actually visited that text, let me pull it up real fast. I’ll just read the poem. Okay, so here’s the original poem, For Him I Sing. It goes, ‘For him I sing, I raised the present on the past. As some perennial tree out of its roots, the present on the past. With time and space, I him dilate and fuse the immortal laws to make himself by them. The law unto himself.’ It’s only five lines and just, it really made me think at that time when I was reading it, about how all the past stuff that Billy and I had been through and how we were, kind of, like, trying to rebuild a friendship, a relationship whatever you have, like, trying to find that common ground because it was clear that we wanted, at least at that time in our lives, to be in each other’s lives. And like we were clearly important to each other on some level, like we couldn’t, we just could not extract ourselves from each other. And that’s what I got out of that poem. And so, all the poems that are chosen after that, were all based on some form of like, we’re still kind of, like, trying to figure out who we are, we’re still entangled in each other but like, we’re slowly realizing, especially at that point since I had moved away and he’d moved out to California, we were still in contact through text and video calls and things but like, we weren’t like, you know, writing, we weren’t living in the same town anymore where, like, he could just come over at the drop of a hat. So, all the poems kind of dealt with like some evolution of, like, ‘okay we are in each other’s lives, but like, there’s this friction and tension and like, maybe this person is actually changing in a way that I haven’t recognized yet.’ And at the time, like, I was finally starting to recognize about, like, ‘okay we are going on our own paths, we’re going to be our own things, we’re not going to be together, but I still very much care about this person. There are so many things I still like about this person, that like I would, I don’t want to lose the friendship that we have worked so hard to rebuild.’ Like, that, that I wasn’t ready to let all of that go just yet. And so, a lot of those poems are about friction, about that like, kind of, starting to grow apart in direction even though we’re like, we’re still somewhat connected but, like, that bond is getting more tenuous by the day really. And so eventually, actually during my doctorate, there came a point where I literally texted him just one day just to be like ‘Hey how’s it going?’ Just completely, just random ‘hey, what’s up?’ And then he like sent me this huge, long thing about like, ‘I don’t need to talk to you about my problems,’ about like that. I’m like, like I was just like, I was just saying ‘what’s up,’ like you know? If you don’t want to talk to me about something that you’re going through, that’s fine, but you do not need to sit here and berate me for saying, ‘what’s up,’ at random, like. So then after that, like, he’s only messaged me once or twice. I have not reached out to him and, like, finally we’re like, ‘I’m, I’m free, I’m free, I’m done with this. Like, I’ve had enough.’ So, all those poems do kind of like reflect that and the order that I performed them in at our concert, a few weeks ago. One of the features of the work is you can take the poems and put them in any order you want to perform them, to create your own narrative. And the order I put them in shows us being together but then it starts to, kind of, like, fray and pull apart until finally, we’re off in our own directions. Which is how he and I ended up being.

So, that’s how I started. I wrote the first four pieces. Well, three to four, because one of them is two poems actually put together. I wrote the first four, I wrote two of them at my master’s and then the second two were the first year of my doctorate. And I was just kind of like, I made them as, like, a backburner project because, like, when I started it, like, I was already in the middle of a bunch of other pieces and doing other things I, like. That night that I started writing it and I magically three hours later had the whole art song done, I thought, ‘okay, I don’t really have time to do this now, but I guess I have this thing so,’ and then when my teacher told me to, like, make them into a cycle, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m gonna have this in my back pocket,’ kind of like I was originally to do with any of the Whitman poems, and be like, ‘Okay, I have a little break in my schedule, or like, so like, maybe I want, or maybe I want to work on an art song.’ So, then I could just go back to them when I wanted to. So, the, the first year of my doctorate like I, I worked on a couple more. But then after that I made, I was making friends and colleagues and whatnot. And so, I was pretty booked up and like, I didn’t have, I didn’t have a need to go to my spare pile for a while. And then when I went to Florida, that year was so draining on me I wrote almost virtually nothing, and I got really behind on all this stuff. And so by the time I got here and I had time and, like, part of, literally part of my job is for me to start, is to keep doing this kind of thing so, like, there is time in my schedule and day to be able to be like ‘I can sit down and compose and that’s okay because this is literally part of what I’m supposed to be doing now.’ Because those, those previous administrators also hated the fact that I was a composer. They did not like it, they were actively trying to get me to not do things with it. I was like, but I’m getting chosen for conferences and having to go to do things and, like, I’m incorporating it into the curriculum and there are national standards that back up what I’m doing, like, why are? Anyway. So, when I got here, I met our faculty and then, just seeing who we had in our faculty and access to, I was like ‘wait a minute. I think I might be able to actually go back to the song cycle now and finish it,’ because I always had the poems, I would pull them out once in a while and read through them and kind of be like, ‘yeah, okay, I’m still into this, I’ll still finish this and do this.’ But then I got here, and I saw, I was like, ‘okay I think I have access to, just the right mix of resources to do what I want to do with this.’ So, starting in fall 2019, I started to get back into writing those art songs. I think I wrote one or two that fall, I didn’t finish all of them. I finally settled down like with, when I talked with Jessica Raposo about, like, what we wanted to do next, like for the next year, I mentioned the song cycle tour. I was like, ‘this is about a concert length work, though,’ and she’s like, ‘well, why don’t we just do that as the faculty recital then. Since you’re gonna be pulling so many resources for that, we could just do that.’ And so that was our goal was for this year to have it be the faculty recital, which is what we did. We had to postpone it because of COVID, unfortunately. But, like, we got in right at the butt end of the semester.

And so, I spent, I didn’t end up, so, like, fall ‘19 I wrote a couple of songs. I didn’t get in touch on anything in the spring of 2020, because who did. And then the summer was spent doing the clarinet commission, and in the fall of ‘20, I really buckled down and got those, the rest of those songs written out. And by January I had kind of finished them, finally. It’s about a month before it was actually supposed to be premiered, I was like ‘it’s done, take it performers, please.’ Because I was, I was so exhausted because I was finishing that, and another, like, big consortium commission for, like, a 10-minute work. I was like, ‘I’m doing a 35-minute work on top of a 10-minute work, why am I insane?’ While, also, during the middle of a pandemic where I’m also filling in for Jessica as interim coordinator. I’m still learning to be a college prof, because not a single year of this has been normal for me, it was, it was a lot, but I got it done. So that’s, it’s how I ended up doing it, and it also was interesting during that time how that worked developed. Because at that point, like, the pieces I have left are, kind of, more the ones that were, kind of, like, tearing apart in our relationship, anyways. And, like, at that point I hadn’t talked to Billy in a couple of years. And so, like, for the most part I, kind of, finished internally, like, my self processing then even if, even if I hadn’t processed it through my music. But I also at that point, notice I’m wearing a wedding ring. I got married to someone else in the meantime, and I’m very, very happy with that relationship. So, like a couple of those were like, they were, like, pieces where I was just really angry with Billy. It felt a little weird to write about, because I’m like, ‘I’m, kind of, having to really pull out and dredge up old things that I have dealt with and put away. They are, they’re in their spot on the shelf, they’re important in my life, but they’re not things I need to pull out every day. Now I have to revisit them.’ And it was a little bit weird. And so, I think that in some way, I needed more time and distance from the work to really see how fully that affected, like, the, the last couple of pieces I wrote in the cycle. Because by that point I was married, Jeremy was living here. So, it definitely changed over time, but it still was very much about like, I felt a finality to the piece when I finally had it all written about like, ‘here is this long, almost decade long, thing that I have been writing and dealing with. I finally processed it, I have grown from it, I, there’s a lot that I respect and learn from it, but I am ready to go on from it.’ The piece itself I’m gonna shop around of course, because not just gonna let that sit on the shelf. But, like, the emotional part of it, like, I’ve dealt with it, we’re okay. We can put that to the side.

So that’s, that’s where we ended up kind of settling on. And, like, when we were rehearsing it, like, I would let the ensemble know, like, ‘okay this is the moment where he and I were fighting with each other,’ or, ‘this is the moment where we’re like, okay I’m finding out he’s broken up with someone, but I found out because he was in bed with me,’ and this whole mess. So, there’s lots of layers with it, but that’s how we ran like rehearsals. I informed them with their performance.

The other things with this work that I wanted to do, since I was making this is like an LGBT narrative. One of the things I decided early on, actually, when I, when I started looking at the poems, some of the poems I was like, ‘this doesn’t seem like it’d be sung by a single person, seems like it might be a duet,’ or, like, I could have, you know, maybe one song start here and then go to another voice. And so, what I did was, I decided it was going to be for two voices, but it was not going to put like a gendered fock on it. Fock just meaning the range of voice, like tenor, alto, soprano, base. So, instead, what I did is I labeled them just as high, low, so that like a high male voice, like a tenor, could sing the high parts, or a low male voice, like a baritone or bass could sing the low parts, that’s all we did for our performance. We had, we actually had two LGBT men singing it. And so, one was a tenor, one’s a baritone. So, tenor took the high part, and the baritone took the low part. And so, you can do it so you can have any. Sorry, words just escaped me for a moment. You can have any gender identity or expression singing either of the parts in any combination, and it is completely okay, in fact highly encouraged. So that’s one way for us to have, like, a more explicit queer reading of this text, other than just ‘okay, Nathan did his setting of it, and so that’s the queer reading part,’ but then you can have the other layer of like, ‘who are the performers who are presenting it?’ And then later on I, kind of, started developing the idea of, like, ‘what if this was like, I just gave them freedom to reorder it however they wanted to create their own narrative.’ Because at that point, I was finally realizing like, ‘okay, a lot of narratives that LGBT people go through and, like, how we model our lives, like, heteronormative narratives don’t really fit that. It’s not the whole you grow up, find your wife, you have 2.5 kids, and a dog in a white picket fence, and you do this to this job, to this time to retirement,’ like, it’s just not the culture of LGBT society, it’s just not what we do. There are certainly parts of it that do and, by all means, I’m the one who’s married now, I’ve got a dog, we’re not going to have the kids part, but we’ve got the dog. We have a black picket fence instead of a white picket fence. So, but I was wanting to allow people to also be able to choose what narrative, they were showing with it. So, by doing, by, by laying out all these choices, that’s my further queering of this material. And then the two versions of the piece, don’t really necessarily have to do with the queering of it, just so much as it’s a more practical matter, in that it started out as just for piano and voice, which there’s tons of just piano and voice art songs. There’s stacks and stacks. That’s a normal thing. But then I also chose this particular ensemble, it’s called a Pierrot ensemble, which is a flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, plus the voice, and it’s called that based on Arnold Schoenberg’s work Pierrot Lunaire, which was written in 1912, I think, yeah 1912, uses that instrumentation, it’s about the stock character Pierrot the clown. And so, in that group, it became so common, and used that it just earned the nickname Pierrot ensemble, which just stuck with it. So, I wanted to do both versions, but I wrote it first originally for piano and voice. And then I orchestrated that out, so I took all the lines, I was like, ‘okay this middle line is now on the cello, this piano line is now on the flute,’ and so I just kind of mixed and matched. So, its musical material is all the same, just one is for piano, one is orchestrated out. And I did that just, that was more of a me being extra thing, because then I give it more body and it also, I think sometimes when I’m creating works, I think about what might pair well with this on a concert, what piece that might have like a big historical impact, or it’s the standard piece in the repertoire, but doesn’t get performed enough because maybe it has, like, a weird instrumentation, like, what can I pair with that so that you have more justification for doing both works. Like, Stravinsky has this symphony of songs that, like, is extensively it’s for orchestra and voices but the orchestra is like, there’s no high strings, it’s all low strings and a bunch of woodwinds on top. So, it doesn’t get programmed very often because you have to take out, like, half the string section for it. So I’m going to eventually, one day I’ll write a work that will, that uses that exact same instrumentation to pair with it so that people who, like, this is a piece that people love and they want to do, but logistically, like, you can’t necessarily, like, justify, like, ‘well, we’re not going to have half of our orchestra play for this piece because it only consists of cellos.’ So that’s part of the reason why I did, with having the chamber ensemble version, is give it an extra dimension, give a little bit more color, but also, if, the two versions are also, like, if you don’t have access to the chamber versions, you can still perform this work. In fact, next year one of the singers, he’s gotten hired down at Augusta State University in Georgia. He wants to do the cycle again, but he wants to do it as a piano vocal version, because he doesn’t necessarily know what resources he’s got down there, if he’s going to be able to do the chamber version or not. So, he wants to do, like, just the solo version. So, there’s, that’s, I think, that covers everything in, like, “In Paths Untrodden” and how I made it, and, like. I especially, I, like, the title of it is one of the titles of the poems, and I thought, ‘okay, this is a very appropriate title for it,’ because, like, I had no map of how to figure this out, what I was doing with this guy and how I was navigating it while navigating so many other different things in my life. Forming my own identity, my own personality, all that. My own identity as a queer man like, so it’s very much, “In Paths Untrodden,” ‘here let’s explore it together.’

BS (43:36): That’s great. Can you, yeah, just real briefly, like, tell me a little bit about the performers you’ve worked with for this performance?

NF (43:45): Sure, so we pulled in, performer, so like Jessica played on flute, so we had her. Michael Ronstadt is our adjunct cello teacher here, he came in and played for it. And then the rest of them actually came from Ball State, all but one. Our pianist, Taiwan, was going to do it but, like, we just couldn’t get scheduling to work out. Unfortunately, she lives like two hours away, like so. So, the two singers, Aaron Paige, and Marcel Vermeil, are both from Ball State. Marcel just finished his doctorate there, and Aaron teaches there as well, the voice faculty. Then the violinist was the, Yu-Fang Chen, she’s from Ball State, she’s the violin teacher there. Daniel Hilton, I didn’t, admittedly, get to know Daniel that very well. He’s got some relations at Ball State, I think he’s a student of like, because he was originally going to be the clarinet professor there, but she suggested this person because scheduling didn’t work, so. It was a mélange of people from around, and then we also had a person from CCN, the Cincinnati Conservatory come in, and while he, she was a pianist. She was wonderful and beautiful. She came in so we all had, like, this variety of experiences and for a lot of us, this was also the first time we were able to make music in an ensemble setting since all of this had started with the pandemic. So that was a, that was nice. Marcel and I were also, like, he and I became friends, right as I moved to Richmond, because he was teaching voice over at Earlham College and we got to meet, we ended up crossing paths, and getting coffee, and becoming really good friends and really sad that he’s moving away down to Georgia. And so that’s how I, that’s, he’s part of, he’s one of the reasons I got the kind of fire in my belly to be able to be like, ‘Oh, I have access to seniors and things now that I can actually finish this whole cycle.’

BS (45:42): Right. So just pivot a little bit. I know you’ve had sort of an unusual time at IU East since you arrived, but just from your, your experience here the last two years, maybe? Do you think IU East is supportive of LGBTQ students, or has supported LGBTQ culture on campus?

NF (46:05): I think from what I can tell, yes. And I only say that because, like, I have spent more time off of campus than I have on campus because of all the pandemic stuff. But I do see, like, how much material we have out there, like I’ve gone through the safe zone training myself. And so I’ve got that little sticker on my door and all that. So it does, it does. My impression is that we do have it. Now I haven’t really, I will admit I have not really been able to interact with, like, some of the students in the organizations to, like, see what their perspective on it is. But I do think, like, the fact that we are trying to do so much, that we can on a small campus is great, and, like, would have been a world saver for me when I was. Because like my campus was bigger than this in my undergrad, but, like, still I don’t remember there being any sort of like LGBT group on campus for us or anything. So, I do think we have good representation here. I do think we have good resources here available for our students and I would like to get more involved in those. I can’t remember, I was trying to email somebody about like joining the diversity and inclusion committee, I haven’t really heard anything more about that. I would like to be part of that because I do remember in the Safe Zone Training, I’m not sure if any of the instructors in that were actually LGBT themselves. Like, I didn’t want to make any assumption or know, but, like, I just kind of got the impression, like, ‘this is a little weird.’ Because like when I was in it and, like, they gave us that big list of terms and things and I felt, like, and it is no shade to them, I felt like, there’s a couple times I was like, I was having to explain some of the terms to them. So I feel like that might be a good thing for me to get involved in because, like, I steep myself in particular sets of the LGBT community, like, I studied a lot about drag. Like, you can see on my, my shelf behind me, those are all Funko pops of RuPaul’s drag queens. You can see a couple of, like, the prints of different Queens by, like, Chad Sell, the artist in Chicago, like. If you could see more up above, you would see more images of, like, Queens, specifically from Drag Race, which I know is its own entity that’s kind of going away into its own thing that’s drag but not, not drag in its entirety. So I spent a lot of time, like, working in the, researching that sort of stuff. My, my dissertation was a symphony about the coming out process, and it has a movement called Drag in it. So, where was I going, I completely forgot what the question was.

BS (48:23): Just if, if you feel like IU East is supportive of LGBTQ culture or students or even faculty and staff, staff.

NF (8:57): Yeah, I do think we’re very supportive of it. I do remember there was a mildly contentious faculty meeting, a while ago, where we were talking about, like, diversity and inclusion statements and whatnot, trying to talk about that. And, like, a lot of the people who followed on, like, not even just LGBT, but a lot of people who were in the diversity and inclusion kind of, like, huge umbrella. We were all kind of like, ‘this is not, like, whatever we’re trying to come up with, the initial statement was kind of crap.’ And we were all just not on board with it, it was weird. So I do think there’s a, and it got to the point where we were, like, ‘okay we need to listen to the people who are saying, like, this doesn’t work, this doesn’t, like, don’t do this.’ So I do think we are doing. If we are stumbling, we are taking the steps to correct it well and I think we’re doing a very good job about being proactive rather than reactive without being supportive to the group. Because there, there can be so many times, like, we see something bad happened to, like, the LGBT community, or the AAPI community, or the Black community, and we issue a reactive statement, rather than having set up something proactive and I feel like we have proactive things going on campus about, like, with our Safe Zone Training making sure, like, the students know that they are taken care of, that we have this space for them, and I’ve had one of my students used to be in charge of LGBT group here on campus. So, like, I’ve got little bits of information. He’s not, he’s not associated with him now because he’s graduated and moved on, but it does seem like we do have the resources here. I would like to actually get a little bit more involved in it. I just, because of this, this whole two years of being in the pandemic, like, I haven’t met a whole lot of people face to face, like I should have. So, I just don’t know who to necessarily ask. To be, like, ‘can I please, I feel like I should be part of this. Can I can I do this? Who do I talk to? I don’t know.’ So.

BS (50:23): I just really have one final question, and is there anything else you would like to add about the song cycle, or about your experience at IU East, or just anything?

NF (50:32): I don’t know. We’ve covered, we’ve covered quite a lot of the ground. I mean it’s great teaching at IU East because we’re small and we get to have, like, little more one on one experience. Like, I’ve, my education took place at both small schools, and large schools, there’s advantages and disadvantages to both, but I do lean more towards the small school aspect, because I think you can get your hands into more things. Rather than, like, at the large school, I, I, I’ll admit I don’t even know how many music students there were at UW Madison. Like, I have no idea what the number was because we’re all big enough that we can just be, like, in our own little corners, and we do cross contaminate because of certain things that we have to. But like, I like, I have genuinely like, no idea how many string students are at that school. I don’t know what the music ed program is like that because I was so far away from it. But like, I, I like the small school setting because we get to do more things and we get to tailor it more specifically to the students. Like, I had a student last fall, who’s in the T to T program, and he ended up getting a job halfway through the semester so we took all of his assignments, the second.

BS: Yeah, sorry. What’s the T-to-T program?

NF: Oh, the teaching, the Transition to Teaching Program. Yeah, so he had gotten his degree, he got his bachelor’s from here and he was in the T-to-T program here to get, you know, his stuff all set for teaching music. He got a job halfway through the semester teaching here at Richmond High School, it was the choir director. And so, we took all the second half of the semester assignments, and I was just like, ‘we’re going to do them, but you’re going to do them as like what you’re actually doing in your classroom. So just write down what you’re doing in your classroom and turn that in as your assignment so that you, instead of just being this like theoretical makeup curriculum about something, like. No, your final assignment is you’re going to make your curriculum for the next semester. So, I’m going to help you out with it, and you actually get direct feedback on what you’re doing.’ So, that I really enjoyed being able to do that, we actually were looking at trying to incorporate more, like, music education things into our curriculum to, like, help that process. So, as for my music. I know like, Marcel is going to try to do the “In Paths Untrodden” cycle next year in Georgia. I’m going to start shopping around to various calls for scores which are just, like, ‘hey we’re holding this festival, submit your piece for consideration,’ that kind of thing. I’m going to be doing that. I’ve got a new LGBT project I’m working on, so not a lot of my music has been, actually, expressed the LGBT, in fact they sometimes take umbrage with people, like. There’s a, I was in a history class one time where we were talking about Schubert, who it’s largely suspected he was gay, but there’s no confirmation, and they were talking about like, ‘well he used this one type of chord and so that means he’s gay, right?’ And I’m like, that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That chord, for one, that chord has existed, like, for 400 years beforehand. Two, why on earth, you, also the instructor was a gay man, I don’t, like, ‘Are you seriously making this, really, like, you are making this assumption?’ Because like everyone saw somebody says, like, ‘oh your work’s LGBT themed’ and I, actually, point blank ask them, ‘where? In what point?’ Like, like I know which pieces of mine are pointedly, like, around an LGBT topic, but otherwise, I really haven’t, no. Like, other than the fact that I am a queer composer, that layer, sure. But that’s so surface level. Like, I have, at this point I’m working on my third piece that’s LGBT themed. So, I’ve mentioned my dissertation, the symphony for wind ensemble that, that was like the process of coming out and forming an identity. So that’s an LGBT themed work. “In Paths Untrodden,” LGBT work, and then the one I’m doing now, which I mentioned briefly earlier was creating a set of miniatures for soprano saxophone, just solo, for a saxophonist friend in Kansas, who’s also queer, and each of those movements is going to be based on a different color of the pride progress flag. So, like it’s the normal pride flag, but now it’s where it’s got the, the, the triangular indents with like the light blue and pink and white for the trans and then the Black and Brown with those members of our community as well. So, I’m doing a movement on each of those different colors to represent those. So that’s my next actual explicit LGBT piece. But otherwise, it’s just when I want to do it, not necessarily, like. It is a part of who I am, and this is the thing that comes up in, identity politics comes up a lot with composers, because like women composers are underrepresented, bipoc composers are underrepresented, LGBT composers are kind of unrepresentative. I will only say kind of because like there are some very famous ones, I’m like, we all know they’re gay. Like, like Aaron Koechlin, gay, Leonard Bernstein, bisexual. Like it’s, there’s. I as a, as a white, cisgendered, hetero, no. Heterosexual, God, I am not heterosexual. I as a cisgendered, homosexual male, like, I’m actually not that underrepresented in some of these groups, so I sometimes feel weird applying for things, for like LGBT stuff, because I’m, like, well I’m still the white guy doing this, like, what about the trans women. What about the queer bipoc. Like, they need to have their voices heard as well. And I’ll still grab on to, and be like, ‘I am part of this community,’ but I also want to make sure there’s room for all the other voices, because like my voice has been heard. So that’s where I’m at with being that. Because I know other composer friends of mine deal with the identity thing, like, I have a friend, she’s still studying medicine, she’s female, she’s black, and she’s having a real fight with her instructor right now because her instructor is accusing my friend of getting a lot of opportunities, she’s having a lot of success right now, it’s great, and she’s accusing her of getting those opportunities, ‘well, it’s just because you’re black.’ And I’m like, and this is also coming from a woman composer who grew up in a time where it was, like, frowned upon to be a female composer, who’s, like, related to all these things and it’s just, it’s very frustrating. But so what my friend Brianna and I talked about a lot was like, it’s like, we can’t control that, someone’s going to look at me and say, ‘oh well he’s gay so all of his works are obviously gay, you’re a gay composer.’ I’m like, yes and no, there’s far more to me than that, and that’s the same stance that Brianna’s taken with her, she’s like, Yes, I’m a woman, yes, I’m a woman of color but like that’s not everything I do. Am I doing some works like that now because of, like, things with Black Lives Matter, yes she’s absolutely doing that. Like I’m doing things around queer narratives, and I’m specifically doing them because, like my symphony, I chose to do it because I didn’t have that when I was that young queer kid. You know, so I didn’t have any queer visibility growing up. That’s why I write some of those pieces now. So that little Nathan, back in, when he’s 18 and 19, can have that piece there available for us now. So that’s why I do it. But I don’t make the entirety of my over that because I’m a multi-faceted individual, despite the fact that I wear rainbows all the time.

BS (57:26): That’s great. Well, Nathan, thank you so much for talking to me about your project and for those hurdles to your project.

NF: Yeah.