You’re talking a lot about creating community and a group where you’re supporting each other’s creative output. Along those lines, Kinds of Kings is centered on the amplification of and advocacy for underrepresented voices and new music. How do you view allyship and advocacy, in the context of your own practice and in the context of the collective?

WASHINGTON: I’m a black woman from the Midwest. I’m a marginalized person, but also, I’m definitely in a position of power, because I’ve been able to do all these crazy things like move to New York and go to NYU, and now I’m at Princeton working on a doctorate. I’ve definitely had hardships of my own, so I know, to my own extent, what it’s like. So for me, it’s a no-brainer: if I have a hand that’s reaching forward, then I have a second hand that I can use to reach back and to lift up. It’s just my every day.

My first Master’s degree is in education, so I’ve always thought of helping. I view educators as helpers—you’re doing what you can to lead as a guide. And mentorship is part of what we do. We realize that we’re all still learning at our own levels, but we’re still in a position where we can be helpers, too.

PEACOCKE: And I think it’s probably worthwhile pointing out that all four of us studied with Julia Wolfe at NYU, and she was, and still is, an amazing mentor and advocate for each of us individually. And she was always really supportive of us and our private lives and private struggles as well as about music and compositional practice. And Shelley studied with Caroline Shaw as well, who’s a very similar kind of supportive, incredible, and generous person and amazing composer. So, I think we felt so much warmth from them, although that’s not really allyship, in terms of other marginalized groups, apart from women.

WASHINGTON: But we’ve been able to start our own fellowship this year with the National Sawdust residency. It’s a residency-within-a-residency called the Bouman Fellowship. We were able to commission three up-and-coming “emerging” composers. This Friday we have Andrew Rodriguez, who is a phenomenal musician and composer from Illinois. We’re able to commission him to write a new work that’s going to be premiering. And I’m really excited that we’re able to use what means we have—if we had one million dollars, this would all be so much easier. We’re working with what we have, and there’s probably going to be people saying, “wow, you could have done this,” and of course there’s a million different things you can do, but we’re trying our best. All of us are working and you can only do so many things at a time. But I’m really, really proud of the fact that we were able to commission three people and pay them money to write music and fly them to New York and have their work presented alongside us.

PEACOCKE: One of the things we want to do with the collective is have it not just focus inward on those of us who are the members of the collective, but on building a community, in the United States, of people who freelance and are trying to do something new and interesting, and who could benefit from more of a spotlight.

WASHINGTON: We want to use our platform to help people who already have a voice to amplify it further. Composing is a very solitary, isolated kind of work, because you spend a lot of time by yourself, and traditionally you have to be your own advocate, which is very difficult to do. But when you have a whole group of people, a community, it makes it a lot easier and also makes it a lot more enjoyable. I’ve always been on teams – sports teams or ensembles – and going into composition is the thing that made me the happiest, but also the most lonely and most sad. We’re thinking about how we feel, and then thinking about how different kinds of marginalized people feel. All of us in the community have a responsibility to do something bigger than ourselves, I think. But I’m glad that we’re able to start boosting other people up, and not just ourselves.

That’s great. So along the lines of the Bowman Fellowship, can you talk a little bit about how you selected the three winners?

WASHINGTON: The process was more on the internal side. It’s something that, if we do it again, we’re definitely going to be working on how it happens.

PEACOCKE: One of the reasons that we didn’t run a call for scores or applications was that so many of them are unfair. A lot of organizations charge application fees, and block out people who aren’t good at filling out application forms, or don’t have the money to put in a bunch of applications. You’re just skimming off money from people who can’t really afford it. And I think we all really believe that you shouldn’t have to pay to have your work performed; you should be paid for your work. And so we had this residency come up with National Sawdust, and we knew right away that we wanted to share it and amplify beyond ourselves and support people who represent marginalized groups beyond the ones that we exist in. And, like Shelley said, hopefully we’ll get funding to do it in future seasons as well. And we might tinker with the way that we find people to be a part of the program. But I think avoiding onerous application forms and application processes is really key.

WASHINGTON: They’re so exclusionary! I’ve seen so many application forms that are so long, and you really don’t need to know anything beyond my name and the title of the piece. Or it asks, “Who did you study with? What are your previous accolades, your previous awards? What colleges did you go to?” I feel like there’s a lot of preexisting bias.

PEACOCKE: So with Andrew Rodriguez, Shelley and I met him at New Music Gathering a couple of years ago and we’ve mainly been friends with him on social media, on Twitter.

WASHINGTON: We see him in person every once in a while. Twitter is a wonderful place.

PEACOCKE: It’s a sort of democratizing force, in some way.

WASHINGTON: It really is—that’s how I’ve met a big majority of the music people I know. I either met them in person at NYU or I found them on Twitter, or I found them on Instagram, and then we become in-person friends.

PEACOCKE: With Mason Bynes, she was recommended to us by our friend Luke Ellard, who’s a Texas-based new-music clarinetist and composer. I think he tutored Mason; she’s from Texas herself, and she’s just started her master’s degree in Boston. Shelley and Susanna met Cassie at Bang on a Can, right?

WASHINGTON: Yes, yeah.

Shelley, this piece  you’re premiering at your first residency concert on Friday is The Worker’s Dreadnought, and it’s this story about a newspaper of the same name. Could speak a little bit about what drove you to choose this inspiration, and how you’re incorporating the story into your composition?

WASHINGTON: I actually wrote the first portion of this piece during my second year at NYU, in a class. It was the composers ensemble. Whatever performers showed up in the class was the ensemble you write for. And it was one of my all-time favorite classes that I took there. My final year, there happened to be four electric guitarists, and I thought, “This is awesome, because I love electric guitar and what a cool ensemble. I want to write something for it.” I had been doing research into Sylvia Plankhurst and other feminists, just going back through history, as far as history is recorded, and found a lot of similar stories where you fight a battle and you win a battle, but it’s still just won against the entire war of working towards equality.

I stumbled upon the title, The Workers Dreadnought, and I was immediately obsessed because it’s such a cool title. It was also called The Woman’s Dreadnought for quite some time, and then at some point they changed it. I was really drawn to it, because I knew of the term “dreadnought” from warships — World War I, World War II machinery. They were these big iron, steel, behemoth monster battleships. And I grew up with a real fascination around that and old-time machinery.

In my mind, in a collage kind of way, I was putting women and marginalized people throughout history together, battling against the same kinds of things. It’s not at any one person or one group specifically, but there’s been so many similar stories throughout time, and I wanted to put sound to all of that struggle through all the triumphs, the losses, and to build something really powerful. I felt like having four electric guitarists was one of the more powerful groups I could work with. That’s a lot of sound that I was pretty stoked to work with. What was the second half of the question?

Well I think you’ve begun to answer it, because the second question is: how are you telling the story in the work? And the instrumentation seems to be a big part of that.

WASHINGTON: Yeah. I also write a lot of poetry in lieu of program notes, so there’s a poem that I wrote that I broke into three chunks, and that is the overall structure of the piece. There are three different movements: the first one is called “Ironclad,” the second one is called “Blossoming,” and the third one is called “The Workers/Hell Hath No Fury.” It follows the narrative of the poetry that I wrote. And it isn’t about any one specific character. It’s more a cumulative stack of puzzle pieces. It’s all happening at once all the time—all of history in one little electric guitar quartet package.