Tropes become vulnerable to criticism once they are too legible. If a metaphor becomes overused, consumers will be quick to disdain its too earnest attempt to get in our heads. It’s a shame, really. To quote Donald Glover with a grain of salt, “No one ever died of being cringe.” You know what I’m talking about. There was never anything wrong with Live Laugh Love except everything about it.

As a young person learning to drum, fellow drummers (all boys) would chide my self-seriousness about breaking a gender stereotype that made no sense outside of the west. My attempts at performing too masculine a musicological role were decried as petty. Professional lauds for creating a gender diversion before “diversity hire” was a phrase were met with derision by peers. To fend off this 1990s misogyny, I agreed to the claim that my dreams were in fact a too-legible trope, cringe-inducing. I stopped pronouncing my difference and worked on blending in.

But running away from a trope can be dangerous work for someone seeking inspiration and confidence. And something about the emphatic quality of being a drummer — loud, monotonous, but consistent at best — was especially enticing as a challenge to the status quo. The fact that a stranger on the street was more likely to composite a male figure when asked to picture a drummer felt more like a provocation than an insult. 

Gendering the drummer in this way may have even led me to reposition myself as a “percussionist.” A percussionist could delve into aspects of musicology more commonly perceived as feminine — soft, melodic, and even possibly seductive. Add to this the presumption of ethnic specificity when an Asian American dared to play western music. “Shouldn’t a Japanese girl like you be playing taiko?” I avoided the taiko precisely for this reason; so as not to fall into the pitfall of another trope. I let the word percussion subsume the professional high ground of what counted as a drum. I was spiraling existentially as a musician.

Then I discovered Susie Ibarra.

I was a graduate student in New York City fighting with my whole life to be relevant and knowledgeable about culture but the tropes were killing me. I might have been on the verge of giving up when I read about Susie and heard her music. I will never forget: everything in my head went quiet. Learning about her and listening to her play taught me to accept all of these possibilities as a musician — the good, bad, and ugly. When I caught wind of her work via John Zorn’s Tzadik label, the anxiety of gender and ethnic identity dissipated like a tone out of key. We all hear it but willfully move on in order to accept the intended sounds as a blended ear of performer and audience. There are too many factors in accepting the reality of a differentiated artist to name here, but Ibarra’s recordings contradicted all of my fears of being myself. I discovered her album Folklorico (2004), which was composed and performed in soft tribute to her Filipinx heritage without so much as a nod to the representational politics of the more protracted media caucus of community organizers. Her practice persistently kept me in mine.

Susie Ibarra, who looks and sounds more like me than anyone I’d seen portraying the role of drummer, taught me to simultaneously let go of and surrender to the terms of being. 

In June, I had the opportunity to interview Ibarra in the thirty-minute window we managed to isolate leading up to a trustees dinner in New York City where she was to deliver an encomium and introduction to her practice of foraging for sounds in nature. (We were implicitly gathering on the occasion of her much celebrated Pulitzer Prize in Music, too, by the way.)

I got to tell her that she has inspired a generation of people to musical practice, not the least of whom is this very interviewer. She was gracious in accepting my plodding fawns and affections before leading this conversation about her work lately. In Berlin, Ibarra had just completed her Music and Sound Fellowship with the DAAD Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Program, and she is currently in artist studio residency at Callies. She has been leading charges of musicians, educators, writers, and scientists in exploring sounds in nature. Her latest musical work delves into field recordings and the utilization of natural elements as instruments. In this practice, she takes on the more sociological role of educator and mentor. I asked if she sees a critical difference between the two.

Susie Ibarra: There is a difference between mentorship and education, and perhaps it is just the individual relationship in a mentorship. 

Anne Ishii: Do you make a deliberate effort to make yourself available as a mentor because you have a desire to connect with others, or do you think the relationships develop because you have to for the work to succeed? Is the nuance of a mentorship the intimacy of an individual resource versus a teaching situation?

Susie: I think it’s the first thing you said. I am so fortunate to have had great mentors and to be part of a lineage, and that’s how we make sure future generations have this knowledge. I want to know how do I leave this information for the people who come after us? The next generation and seven generations from now. Hybrid societies make generational legacies. How did we inherit knowledge over seventeen thousand years of the anthropogenic era? 

Anne: Can you name some of those mentors who felt particularly important to you in your musical journey?

Susie: Yes, my mother was a role model for me, having been through WWII in Manila, Philippines, interested in literature, writing, and medicine, and graduating medical school at age twenty-three. She was so smart. She went back and specialized in radiation oncology when I was a toddler too. I know it was not easy for her, but she definitely was a role model and always recognized and encouraged me in my talents and passions. My mother took me to visual art school very early on and music lessons at the age of three, so it really was a part of my life, just like studying math and science. I also grew up going to the Houston Grand Opera with my mother. I loved it and it made a huge impression on me as a child.

These are mentors that I either studied or worked with who have passed on that were integral to my creative practice, learning, and also very dear people to me personally, spiritually, intellectually, socially, and creatively: Pauline Oliveros, Trisha Brown, Vernel Fournier, Earl Buster Smith, Milford Graves, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nana Vasconcelos, Danongan Kalanduyan. 

Currently Tania Leon, Maria Ressa, Michele Koppes, Claire Chase, Aziza Chaouni, Colleen Keegan, Ione, Geena Rocero, Tarek Atoui. Some are my mentors and elders, and some are my peers and younger who I have worked with but have also learned so much from.

I am surprised there is no grand fulmination, no chip on the shoulder when she speaks. Ibarra believes in the power of ideas so seriously. 

Anne: There’s something really profound in what you’re suggesting about how having an idea can be powerful, as it suggests that merely thinking, having the idea, may be enough to cause power. 

Susie: One person can’t change the world, but think of how powerful one individual can be in a community. A thought becoming action is quite powerful. And think of how many thoughts we have in a day. I think about what ideas we need to discover. You know, many of our models are broken, and not just in the US. I think models are broken all over the place. What are the models that are not broken? Who is doing this now? I look to younger people who are collaborating. They see it all more clearly, the ecological effects of our broken models, and they know it because it’s all they’ve known. 

Anne: In your music, you have had a continuity of desire to understand the interrelatedness of people and nature, whether by ascription — naming your relationship with nature — or by direct engagement with sound studies in the field. Does this change how you think of yourself as a musician? Do you think musician is still the word you’d use to describe what you do in nature?

Susie: I think I am really conscious of the fact that I am a musician when I am in nature! The tools that I bring to nature, into the field, the forest, the river… are very different tools than the scientist or architect. We are connecting with these different tools, and I think I’m a connector. We’re connectors, musicians.

Susie Ibarra is a musician. She is a Filipinx-American drummer, percussionist, performer, composer, and mentor. She speaks English, Tagalog, Spanish, French, and is “now working on German.” The difficulty of determining the right nomenclature for a musician for someone like Susie is in the abundance of ideas. I may solve the issue by finding the highest canopy for her practice. Susie Ibarra is in the sky; she is in the land. She is a musician.

From her speech to the USA Board:

It was in the sound of the water source, or the rain, or a tack of a piece of wood or rubber hitting cement, the ping of a glass cup, or frequencies singing out from a metal object. Our sounds have always been coming from deeper sources. When preparing to record for the first time in 2016 a glacier and its water source, a sea river, I imagined all of the things that I would be afraid of and what would be the most difficult. I thought it was going to be the cold, or maybe the ice picking.

What changed me was discovering a giant expansion of the page of musical composition while experiencing a large landscape with a geomorphologist and glaciologist. It was so physical each sound I was hearing. It was so massive amidst Nature.

My research in sound moved my practice into a focus of recording, composing, and performing with the materiality of sound in and from our biodiverse habitats. These studies have brought me to question and study rhythm in sound in various physical senses. Some of these include the rhythm of an ocean wave in motion. How does this differ from the rhythms of glacial river systems and the pitches of ice and tropical water cave systems? How are the growing storm systems globally changing these habitats and can we better prepare for and understand them through these changing rhythms?

I became fascinated with the equation of fragility and its existence in the composition of desert systems. What does this sound like and how do these rhythms of fragility change as the water quantity changes and desertification increases? How is this affecting the migration patterns and habitats of some of our earliest drummers, our songbirds? I have learned over time that listening and collecting sound in my body has also been a journey of collecting knowledge in an ever changing environment of our holocenic world. By listening and collecting the sounds in my body, I am acknowledging our physical habitats and carry with me the importance of giving dignity and mutual respect for our environment and our existence.

What I might have failed to understand in my quest to become a self, and in unpacking her career as a sort of answer key for how to succeed in being a million things at once, I had discounted the most important task of the musician. She mentors artists and scientists to realize the full potential of their musical roles in the natural world by doing the only thing that matters to someone in the business of sound: to listen.