Distances Between: An Interview With Composer and Native Flutist Ron Warren
Occasionally a new piece of music touches me so deeply that (even after just one hearing) it haunts me for days. Ron Warren’s piano solo, Distances Between is one such composition. The appeal lies deeper than its lyricism, intricate cross-rhythms and elegant construction; for me, this piece has its roots in the bedrock of music, nature, and humanity. My Google search for the piece and its composer led me to Ron Warren and his recordings and compositions for the Native Flute. As a Western, classical pianist who has no Native American DNA, I was surprised that Ron’s Native Flute music evoked the same sense of “home” in me as his piano composition. After spending several months listening to his work (and reading his eloquent blog), I gathered the courage to contact this internationally-known, multi-award winning composer and ask him to sell me a copy of Distances Between. He generously sent me a copy of this unpublished composition, and (emboldened by our exchange), I asked if he’d be willing to be interviewed for No Dead Guys. He graciously agreed, and through this interview he expanded my knowledge of music, the Native Flute, and the common bonds that connect people of all cultures. It is an honor to share his words and music on No Dead Guys.
You are best known as a composer and performer of music written for the Native American Flute. When were you first introduced to the instrument, and what drew you to dedicate much of your career to it?
I don’t remember the first time I heard a native flute, though I am sure it would have been on a recording or film soundtrack. I was inspired to try and play the flute by hearing R.C. Nakai’s album Canyon Trilogy, which i stumbled on quite by accident while browsing a Native crafts shop in the Blue Ridge of Virginia. By that time, I had completed a DMA degree in music composition and was making my living as a free-lance composer/arranger/studio musician/keyboard player. While I had the greatest respect for my mentors, I was really dissatisfied with my music making, feeling that the music school experience had taken much of the joy and spontaneity out of the process. Even while in grad school, I had feebly begun working my way back towards a more grounded and tradition-based musical path, on my own time, of course.
All of the tracks on Canyon Trilogy are either solo flute or Eagle bone whistle. In addition to the sheer expressive power of Nakai’s playing, I was drawn to the subtle nuances and simple sophistication of the musical materials. Attentive listening was rewarded. If you tried to notate the music using the Euro-Classical system, it would not look interesting, but only because that notation system does not have the means to show what is happening.
Finding a well-made flute was more challenging then than it is now, but when I was finally able to hold one for the first time, there was a strange sense of familiarity, like I already knew what to do. I just had to figure out how to do it.
I had no intention of ever performing in public on the flute. I saw it as part of my musical healing process and as a way to explore my Cherokee heritage more deeply. Early on, I received a kind invitation from an Ojibwe flute player and maker to hang out for an evening and talk about flutes. After all my academic music training, I was nervously expecting him to share a lot rules and technical exercises. Instead, he simply showed me some basic fingerings, then suggested I go sit in the woods and listen for a few days. He would not tell me what I should or should not play on the flute. What he most cared about was that I was carrying a cedar flute. Cedar is a sacred wood. He wanted me to remember that even when the tree has fallen, the Spirit of the wood remains. When we breathe into a flute, we are breathing life back into the wood. It is not our job as flute players to try and force the flute to do what we want. Instead, we need to try and be connected to the beauty all around us and listen for what the flute needs to share.
Sometimes, when we finally find the right path, doors we did not know existed start opening. I didn’t so much decide to dedicate my career to the flute as follow a beautiful path that was slowly revealed.
Tell me about the Native American Flute. How old is it, and how it is used in Native American culture?
It’s important to keep in mind that there is no monolithic “Native American culture”. Just within what is now the United States, there are hundreds of native communities representing dozens of distinct cultures. A colleague who does cultural education programming for the National Museum of the American Indian informs his audiences that there are Native American languages in the U.S. that are more distinct from one another than English is from Mandarin Chinese. I think of the entire hemisphere as “Indian Country”, so it shouldn’t be surprising that there are many different flute playing traditions and many different designs for flutes. Most flute playing cultures have a Creation Story that explains how they were gifted the knowledge of flute making, the materials and design used and the typical uses within the culture.
General audiences in the U.S. are most familiar with the Plains Cedar flute, often called the “Courting Flute” because of its traditional use in those cultures. There is an Eastern woodlands version of this flute as well, although historically it is made of River Cane, not cedar and the flute is not confined to a courting use. When we say Native American Flute, this is the design we usually mean.
The flutes I play most often in performances and on recordings are modern hybrid Native American Style Flutes made by Colyn Petersen at Woodland Voices Flutes. Almost all of them are cedar and blend the characteristics of Plains and Woodlands flutes, but have a bigger voice than either of them. They also tweak the traditional tunings so that I can play more easily with musicians from other traditions. In addition, for live performances, I always carry a Cherokee style River Cane flute made for me by a tribal brother.
I think that the oldest artifact flutes from this hemisphere that we still have are several thousand years old from what is now the southwest U.S. A flute maker friend insists that they were among the most sophisticated flutes being made on the planet when they were new. They are mostly rim blown flutes, very different from the flutes that I regularly play, although I have recorded a track using one (on the Red Moon project). The embouchure is closer to Shakuhachi while the flutes I usually play are closer to European recorder.
I discovered you through Distances Between 2, a piece you wrote for the piano that pianist Paul Barnes plays so beautifully. Given your international success writing music for the Native Flute, what inspired you to compose a piano piece?
This question makes me laugh because my Mother started me on piano lessons when I was in kindergarten. I started making my own music very early on and my first little composition, thankfully long lost, was for piano.
However, I have never really loved piano as a solo instrument and don’t care much for the “Classical” piano repertoire, so when I have written for piano, it has usually been in a small group setting.
Distances Between 2 was inspired by hearing Paul Barnes intone Greek Orthodox Chant on one of his concerts. I love chant from many different traditions and even played Gregorian Chant on my Native Flute for a Papal Mass. I also love Paul’s piano playing and he is dear to me for many reasons, so a piano piece growing out of his chanting and based on a tune I can play on my flute seemed the right way to go.
Someday, though, I would love to play flute with him while he chants.
When I first heard Distances Between 2, I was so captivated by it that I immediately “Googled” your name and searched for a copy of the piece. You have captured the spacious, dare I say mystical, quality of your Native American Flute music on the piano. What underlying similarities between the two instruments allowed you to accomplish this?
We like to play our flutes outdoors. When we do that, we get a response, a resonance from whatever ecosystem we are in, whether that be a slap back echo from a canyon wall or a more subtle and diffuse reverb from the trees in a forest.
Because I can bend pitches and slide between them, my flute can play many more frequencies (an infinity, really) than a piano, which is normally limited to 88 discreetly tuned frequencies. But the piano has a much greater range than my flutes. Also, the piano can sound many frequencies at the same time. I think that those qualities along with with the extended sustain times and resonances available on piano allow it to emulate what I hear when playing flute outdoors. So instruments with very different design features can approach a similar sound world.
As an Echota Cherokee musician, how do you feel your music helps introduce Native culture to the rest of society?
I try to think of myself as a musician who is Cherokee rather than as an Echota Cherokee musician. Certainly I want to represent my People well, but my music necessarily comes out of my own unique journey. Which I guess is to say that it’s nobody’s fault but my own. If someone enjoys my flute music, they may become interested in the flute, which is good. If they notice that I am Echota Cherokee, they may become more supportive of my People. That’s even better. If they hear the variety of music I can make with the flute, they might grow in understanding that Native America is a diverse multitude of living, evolving cultures. We are not just museum artifacts, pop culture stereotypes or minor historical figures in the supposedly great story of Manifest Destiny. That’s almost more than I could hope for. But if they just want to get up and dance or sing along, that’s fine, too. We can have a good time together without getting too deep about it.
I’m not Native American, yet your recordings feel as intimate to me as my own musical language. What unifying ideas allow you to bridge cultures so successfully?
I’m happy to hear you feel this way. It’s not something I strive for, at least not consciously. I try to be open to whatever music needs to come through me. It’s the practice of music that holds my interest, the daily ceremony of it, more than the “performing” of it for an audience. When I do play publicly, it’s a way of sharing what I do and inviting others along for the ride. There probably is a certain intimacy about that. I find it more challenging to do that in a recording, so I’m glad it comes across for you.
Across many cultures, music making often comes down to ceremony, singing and dancing (physical gesture). We often connect with that, even in music that we are hearing for the first time, even in music that seems strange to us in some way. As humans, we are programmed to seek out new experiences. When Peoples bump into each other for the first time, for whatever reason, one of the good things that usually happens is that they start sharing ideas, food, music, DNA (that’s how people like me happen).
Almost all of the music we think of as “contemporary” music from the Americas is blended music with sources on multiple continents. After more than 500 years of this, a lot of bridges are already in place. I have non-Native friends who are fine Native Flute players. I also have Native American Indian friends and colleagues who are opera singers and conductors, jazz saxophonists, world fusion cellists, metal guitarists, hip-hop producers, Celtic fiddlers, on and on. Even those of us who play more “traditional” instruments are usually musicians of two or more worlds with experience and training in other ways of doing things.
This has often been forced on us. The U.S. government has worked long and hard to assimilate us out of existence. Long ago, when I was doing degree work, outside of school I was mostly playing and listening to prog rock, electronica and any Indigenous music I could find. In school, Euro-Classical music was the unavoidable core. Most American music programs remain incredibly ethnocentric. Outside of Tribal Colleges or trade schools like Berkeley School of Music, you would be hard pressed to find an undergraduate music curriculum in this country that would allow you Native American Flute as your primary instrument of study. Our music is still largely a specialized ghetto in academic settings. So we are forced to be flexible in a way that a person who enjoys practicing nothing but Euro-classical music six hours a day is simply not required to be. They can get through their degree programs without having to deal with other music on much more than a superficial level.
Younger music students are enormously creative, multi-faceted and often well versed in multiple traditions of making music. University music departments are very slowly adapting to this reality and need to if they want to remain relevant. There is little point in continuing to prepare thousands of young musicians for a 19th-Century European style musical life that doesn’t exist any more, if it ever really did outside of romantic imaginings.
Tell me about your understanding of “soundscape” and how it relates to your many compositions that beautifully (and seamlessly) blends Native American and western instruments.
The term has been around for a while. I usually see it attributed to Canadian composer/philosopher R. Murray Schaeffer. It refers to all of the sounds that happen at a given time in any particular, local ecosystem. Even sounds that we humans may not be able to perceive can be of great importance to other beings in the area. It can be a deciduous forest on an early spring morning or a busy urban setting on a weekend evening. The total loss of many beautiful soundscapes due to destructive development practices and toxic machine noise is sad, frightening and accelerating. The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krauss is an excellent introduction to the concept of soundscapes and issues of soundscape degradation. The e-book version comes with sound files that help you to hear what he is talking about.
Our Native Flutes were originally designed as outdoor instruments, a way that we could join the soundscape in a beautiful way and be in dialogue with birds, frogs, wind, etc. And it is really only fairly recently that Western classical instruments moved completely indoors, trying to isolate themselves from sounds now considered “unmusical” with each precious composition framed in perfect silence and god help any audience member who needs to sneeze. Of course, another recent development is greatly amplified sound that obliterates everything else in the soundscape and in this context could be seen as an aggressive form of pollution.
A lot of my music grows out of interacting with the soundscapes of places that are special to me. I enjoy inviting other musicians into a reimagining of those soundscapes.
Of the numerous awards and recognitions you’ve received (most notably, multiple Native American Music Award nominations) are you most proud of and why?
Well, since you are a writer and musician, you know that awards and recognition are always welcome. The NAMA nominations came by vote of my Native American musician colleagues, and it’s always very meaningful to have that kind of support from your peers. But allow me to share a few experiences that I would put ahead of all awards.
A few years back, I was at my tribal gathering in Alabama, playing flute during drum breaks. A young tribal brother approached my vendor table. He shared some of the horrific experiences he had suffered on his first tour of duty in Iraq. He was scheduled to ship out for his second tour soon and wanted me to know that one of my tracks (“Warrior Song”) meant so much to him that he would be using it as the ring tone on his phone while overseas.
At a Native cultural gathering a few years later in Maryland, another Cherokee tribal brother shared with me his struggles with addiction to pain killers after a surgery had gone wrong at a Veterans Hospital. The pain killers were effecting his personality in such a negative way that he decided to go off them cold turkey. He said a short playlist of his favorite music by Native musicians helped sustain him through the excruciating withdrawal period and my track, “Sundance”, was on his playlist.
Both of those songs came to me in a series of dreams. I remember waking some mornings and running to the writing desk to get stuff down before I forgot. Of course, like anyone else, I enjoy awards and recognition, but I am most grateful when music which came through me is meaningful and healing for those who hear it.
Also, having the opportunity to play flute with R.C. Nakai at the National Museum of the American Indian is a very special memory for me since, as I mentioned earlier, his music inspired me to get my first flute.
In addition to your composing, recording, and performing career, you are active as a Native Flute teacher and you even offer live streaming Native American Flute performances to groups as diverse as meditation groups, gallery openings, or even family gatherings. How do balance all these aspects of your work, and how do you feel your teaching has expanded people’s interest in the Native American Flute?
In some weird way, I imagine three large umbrellas that cover what I think of as my musical journey. There is the work itself, deep diving on Native Flute and shaping new material, either on my own or with others. A second area is sharing that work, whether it be in a concert hall or a club, at a powwow, on YouTube, whatever. I’ve been at this long enough now that I think my experiences may be helpful to others who are on their own musical path, so a third area is helping other people through private or group lessons, workshops, instructional videos, etc. It might just be a way of feeling less scattered, but it seems to work ok for me - most of the time…
Once in New York, I shared a concert with two wonderful musicians, one a Grand Master shakuhachi player and the other an excellent bansuri player. Each of us had a solo segment and we improvised duets and trios. Afterwards, another colleague came to me and said that as she experienced my solo playing, she kept having the feeling that I would be doing the same thing even if nobody else was there. I found that very affirming. It is the practice of music making each day that I treasure, showing up at the instrument, trying to connect with the beauty that is all around us and being present to accept the gifts and insights the flute might offer. When I do that in public or work with students, it’s an invitation for others to join in the experience in some way.
What advice can you offer to composers and performers who wish to celebrate their heritage, beliefs, and stories through music?
A lovely Cherokee Woman Elder once said to me, “You can be mixed blood, but you have to know who you are. You are either Cherokee or you’re not”. It’s a running joke, especially among NDN’s, that wherever you go, someone will come up to you and insist that their great great grandmother “was Cherokee”. Sometimes even “a Cherokee Princess” (we didn’t have princesses or any other royalty for that matter).
There is a big difference between saying “my great great grandmother was Cherokee” and saying “I am Cherokee”. If you want to celebrate your heritage and beliefs, you need to know who you are. If you don’t know your heritage, do some research. Family stories from your elders are often a good starting place. I don’t have a problem with non-Natives playing Native American flute. I do have a problem with those who stand in front of an audience with a Native Flute in their hands and pretend to be something they are not, claim knowledge they don’t have, share traditional tribal songs that are not theirs to share.
Understanding your identity and heritage can be difficult and complicated no matter who you are, but can be especially so for people of color. The U.S. was designed institutionally as a white supremacist country, really a white male supremacist country. Under the Constitution as originally written, fewer than half the adult population of the country was eligible to vote and slavery was legal. In most places, you would be excluded from the system for having even a distant ancestor who was not white. In some places, terms like quadroon and octaroon were used to keep track of how much unacceptable ancestry a person had. Several of the founding fathers were already recommending and planning an attempted removal of all Native Americans from the original states, what we would now call ethnic cleansing.
To survive in this system, many people kept their mixed heritage quietly in the closet. I met a gentleman once who said that by blood he was three-quarters Cherokee and one-quarter African-American. His family decided that they had a better chance of survival as Black than Indian, so they passed for Black. He had been raised knowing nothing of his Cherokee heritage and had only become aware of it in his 40’s. I also met a woman whose father was full blood Lakota. When he left the reservation for military service, he realized he could pass for white and never went back. The woman was in her 50’s before she met her Lakota family.
My Father’s family hid their heritage for a few generations and some of them are still uncomfortable with the reality. It’s impossible for me to judge them for the choices they made. I live in a very different world. If I thought my choice was between hiding my identity or seeing my kids ripped away from home and sent to a Boarding School where they would be beaten for speaking their language, what would I do? My Aunt found it next to impossible to talk about such things. One time when I was visiting her, she was still balking at sharing anything, even though her husband said to her, “My family is Ojibwe, yours is Cherokee. It doesn’t matter anymore.” Then, out of the blue, she shared a revealing story. During WW2, she had served in the Women’s Army Corp. She said that “one night, we were off duty, so we all went dancing. The next day, my friend was thrown out of the Service, just for dancing with a Black man.” I probably would have hidden, too.
I was at least aware from a very early age. My budding sense of identity was nurtured by neighbor kids who kept insisting, “you don’t look American”. But like most of us now, I did not grow up on the Rez or going to Powwows. Out of some 300,000 or so Cherokee on the books, I think fewer than 20,000 of us speak Tsalagi with any fluency. I am not one of them. So, much of my life has been a slow remembering of how to be who I am. Music and the flute have been a vital part of that process. So have Native American writers and poets, who have made significant, though usually neglected, contributions to world literature. Reading suggestions available on request…
I am especially grateful to tribal Elders and friends who have helped me on this path with their patient and gentle guidance.
I suspect that if all the skeletons were taken out the closet, “American” might basically be a term for a person of mixed ancestry. My ancestry is Native American Indian and European. I am grateful to my varied European ancestors and appreciate their struggles and experiences. I like to think I honor them when I play a keyboard or sit down to enjoy a Dufay motet. But as the Elder said, you have to know who you are. I am Cherokee and grateful to be part of a living community of my People, the Echota Cherokee Tribe of Alabama. Who are you? Who are your People? Please share a song about it.
As an enrolled Echota Cherokee, you write that you try to “walk in the wisdom of its motto, ‘Progress through Indian unity’.” How do you live this in your life and your music?
The Echota Cherokee Tribe of Alabama is a state recognized tribe with lands and offices in northern Alabama. I speak here only for myself and not for my Tribal Council or my People as a whole.
One of the most effective tools the colonial invaders employed was the strategy of divide and conquer. This isn’t the place to get into the complex and contentious history of tribal factions, levels of recognition, blood quantum and so on. Let’s just say that divide and conquer still works on us.
I lived in the D.C.-Baltimore region for many years. When I first moved to Maryland, there were no formerly recognized Native communities in the state. By that I mean no tribes in Maryland had a written agreement with the State recognizing them as Native and no tribe had a Federal Treaty that provided them with any recognition or sovereignty as a Native Nation.
But there were Native communities. People who knew who they were, knew something of their traditional ways and in many cases were living in the same area their ancestors were when John Smith first sailed up the Chesapeake Bay. I would expect dominant culture people not to be able to recognize them as Indian. What is troubling is that many Native American people would also refuse to acknowledge them or would even call them “fake” because they had no formal recognition from any level of American government. Eventually, the State of Maryland recognized one of these communities, the Piscataways. I had known some of these folks for years, had hung out with them and attended gatherings and powwows with them. They were no less Indian the day before the State of Maryland decided to recognize them.
In her essay, “To Carry the Fire Home”, Cherokee writer Kathryn Lucci-Cooper, discusses her confusion and hurt when a reservation raised member of a Federal Tribe disrespected her identity. “I wasn’t aware a reservation could define you. I had been taught tradition…ancestry…elders determined tribal identity.” (Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing, MariJo Moore, ed.)
“Indian Unity” calls us to examine the many ways we divide ourselves and by doing so compromise the struggle to preserve our identities and cultures. Sovereignty and land base are critical issues. The Federally Recognized Tribal Nations hold much of the remaining land base and have the greatest degree of real sovereignty left to us. But their sovereignty is only ensured by agreements and treaties with the U.S. government, and we all know historically what those are worth. There have been repeated attempts by the U.S. to terminate the treaties and there will surely be more in the future. State agreements can also be broken and those communities without any agreement in place have no real legal protection whatsoever. So it will take all of us standing together to protect all of our interests. It may help us to remember that concepts like Federal Recognition, Nations, blood quantum and card status were given to us by the same people that put most of us on some kind of Trail of Tears or Long Walk and gave us hundreds of bloody and traumatic events like Yahoo Falls, Sand Creek and Wounded Knee.
The arts in general are one of the most inviting ways for people to join in unified action. I have been fortunate to work with artists from many of our North and South American Native cultures and from other Indigenous cultures around the planet.
Ron Warren (Echota Cherokee) is an innovative Native American flute player as well as an accomplished song writer, composer/arranger and music/cultural educator.
Honored with numerous Native American Music Award nominations, Ron’s work has also been supported by the Music Omi Foundation, the First Nations Composers Initiative, and has been featured on NPR, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Pacifica Radio, and many other media outlets. His music has been used in several documentary films including a series on Native Repatriation issues produced by the Smithsonian Institute.
Ron continues on his path of creating new music for Native Flute that expands the musical language of the instrument while remaining firmly in touch with traditional musical structures and practices. His current project, Lunas y Agua, is a set of thirteen structured improvisations, notated as graphic scores, that celebrates events and encounters during each of the Lunar Months of a full year near his home in Florida. The pieces can be realized by any soloist or small ensemble. The first two pieces are available in solo flute versions on YouTube.
“It has been an honor to be a featured artist at the National Museum of the American Indian and at Indig cultural gatherings around the country. I have also enjoyed playing duets with Chinese Yang Qin and Highland Bagpipes, playing with classical orchestras, jamming with electronica improv musicians, working with modern dance groups and film makers. My flutes can go pretty much anywhere.”
Learn more about him on his website, Instagram, and YouTube. He may be contacted at ronwarrenmusic@gmail.com.