Amanda Gookin: Forward Music Project 1.0
Bright Shiny Things

As committed to self-empowerment as she is, cellist Amanda Gookin is as fervent about empowering others. The intrepid Brooklynite is the creator of Forward Music Project, a socially conscious organization designed to support the creative endeavours of artists like herself and share stories of womanhood around the world. On Forward Music Project 1.0, Gookin presents pieces by seven composers, all with different backgrounds and multi-cultural experiences, and thereby fosters the sense of community the project is designed to promote. Recorded in Brooklyn at National Sawdust and Shiny Things Studio in 2019, the recording is, excepting pre-recorded vocals by the composer on one piece, all Gookin, the cellist augmenting her playing with vocals on two tracks. While the sound worlds created are enhanced in some cases with electronic treatments, the pieces with cello in its unadulterated form are as engaging.

She began playing the instrument at an early age but found herself pulled in other directions. A post-graduation trip to Europe found her moving to Barcelona where she taught after-school English to young children before returning to the States and NYC to pursue a master's degree and a hoped-for life as a performer. While working as a veterinary technician, cello-playing and composing opportunities began to materialize, followed eventually by the formation of the new music string quartet PUBLIQuartet and teaching courses about entrepreneurship and women in music at The New School and SUNY Purchase. For someone so fearless and politically aware, it was only natural that she would found the Forward Music Project, rooted as it is in social justice and women's rights.

Dam mwen yo by the Brooklyn born Haitian-American artist Nathalie Joachim makes for an appropriate opener, given that its title translates from the Haitian Creole as “my ladies” and serves to honour strong, hard-working Haitian women. By weaving recordings of her own voice and family members into this entrancing folk-tinged meditation, Joachim pays tribute to women who empowered her, and Gookin leaves her own imprint on it with deeply personalized cello phrasings. She wholly commits herself to the material in the seven performances, never more audibly perhaps than during Morgan Krauss's memories lie dormant, a suitably unnerving exploration about what it means to be a survivor of sexual abuse and assault. Gookin's cello is shadowed by breath-laden vocalizations that amplify the agitated character of the playing, the performance evoking the image of a survivor re-experiencing the trauma of the original event. The other setting featuring Gookin's voice, Leila Adu-Gilmore's haunting For Edna features the cellist singing words of comfort and inspiration the composer wrote to honour the resilience of women who've lost children or been abused by partners or the system.

In Stolen, African-American composer Allison Loggins-Hull explores the phenomenon of young girls being sold into marriage, the music's tone moving from mournfulness to urgency and eventually acceptance, the shifts mirroring the trajectory of someone denied the right to make her own life choices. Perpetuating the theme is Las Desaparecidas by Puerto Rican-born composer Angélica Negrón, a piece for cello and electronics that takes as its topic young girls used for human trafficking. In contrast to the unadorned cello presentation in Stolen, an abundance of babbling vocal-like effects and thrusting rhythm textures accompanies Gookin's cello in Negrón's, the music rife with desperation and teeming with detail. In Stray Sods, Irish composer Amanda Feery couples cello with processed samples of toys, heartbeats, and hospital equipment for an elegiac, lullaby-inflected statement on abortion rights, the piece written in reference to the fact that until 2018, abortion's illegality in Ireland meant that for decades thousands of women had to travel to the UK to receive medical care for abortion.

September 2020