Zosha Warpeha and Mariel Terán Talk Through Their Instruments

Zosha Warpeha is a composer-performer based in Brooklyn; Mariel Terán is a composer/improviser and cultural researcher based in La Paz, Bolivia. Zosha and Mariel recently collaborated to make the record Orbweaver, which was just released last month by Outside Time. To celebrate the two got on Zoom to catch up about it. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Zosha Warpeha: It’s nice to see you.

Mariel Terán: Nice to see you, Zosha, after a while. 

Zosha: Yeah, it’s been a while. I guess the last time we saw each other in person was when we recorded. 

Mariel: Wow. 

Zosha: So almost a year ago.

Mariel: Yeah. And we talked twice for the production of the album, but that was it. We never talk!

Zosha: [Laughs.] The most talking we’ve ever done has been trying to come up with names for all the tracks. My least favorite part of any recording process.

Mariel: No, it wasn’t fun. It was just trying to dig into our compositions like, “OK, what were trying to say about that…?”

Zosha: Yeah, “What were we trying to say? What does this sound like? Were we trying to say that?” That’s always a challenge. The easy part is making the music.

Mariel: [Laughs.] It’s true, actually. From the first moment that we played together, we never talked about what we wanted. It was just us talking through our instruments, through sound. That’s it.

Zosha: Yeah. Do you remember the first time that we played together as a duo? We were at the OneBeat residency in 2023, and the room had emptied out. We were supposed to be rehearsing with an ensemble at the time, but everyone went and took a break and we were like, “Where’d you guys go?” We didn’t even say anything to each other and picked up our instruments and just started to improvise together. And it was one of the most beautiful things that had happened all week, I felt.

Mariel: Yeah, it was amazing. We just looked at each other and said, “Do you want to play? OK!” And you connected me to your pedal, I remember, and we were both going through pedal and it was really amazing. And it was really long.

Zosha: Yeah, I think we played 20, 30 minutes, maybe, no stopping. Just kept on exploring and going deeper. I remember it feeling so tactile and textural. I don’t play with very many wind players, so the sound of air and the sound of wood in that way is just really inspiring. 

Mariel: Yeah, it was great. The instruments are not really polished inside, so they have lots of textures when you blow. I felt the same thing. Of course, it was not like playing with a violin — it was the Hardanger [d’amore], and I never really had the chance to listen to it live. It was always a record. And I loved it too. It felt really organic. We didn’t have to talk at all. It was just listening to you and seeing what you were doing with your hands, with your voice, with the strings. It was amazing. I’ll always remember that.

Zosha: Yeah, me too. We sort of had an awareness of each other’s practice as we started this residency. Like, I knew that you had worked a little bit with Andean folk traditions, or that your instruments were from those traditions. I also knew that you were involved in contemporary music. But somehow we hadn’t quite connected in that way before that moment. And then suddenly it was like, “Oh, yeah, of course, this makes so much sense.” Both of us are inspired by tradition and using these traditional instruments that have such rich histories and lineages in the Andes, in Norway, but we’re completely diverging from the tradition. We’re not full time practitioners of traditional music. We’re really trying to push them into new territories and just focusing on sound for sound itself. 

Mariel: Yeah. I remember about your presentation in OneBeat, you improvised with your violin, and it was like, She comes from contemporary music improvisation, she loves sound. That’s all I could see about you. And we didn’t have the time [to meet] — you were one of the busiest musicians in residency, you were in many ensembles.

Zosha: I think I was maybe intimidated by you. I think I was like, Oh, she’s a contemporary composer. I’m just, like, fiddling. [Laughs.] 

Mariel: [Laughs.] No, come on! It was great because I was just looking to all the musicians. Some of the guys said they didn’t know how I was going to fit in with my instruments, and it all happened really naturally. And with you, it was even more natural than with anyone. I understood that it was because of the things that you were trying to find in your sound, and also because you come from contemporary music as well. So that was our common ground, and the traditions that we had to study to get to the instruments.

Zosha: What was your process like when you were learning the instruments? When was it that you started picking up all of these instruments? 

Mariel: When I was a teenager, I started having the interest. I was studying at school, and we had a professor that actually gave us some melodies with the sequence, but I wasn’t really good. I don’t know why, but it was really difficult for me. And then when I was at university, I discovered this place in my city, and the lessons were free. We had an amazing teacher who studied for years, so I decided to go. It was supposed to be a short workshop, but at the end, we decided to become a research group. I knew these instruments and contemporary music through traditional music, so it was pretty interesting. I decided to just dedicate much of my time to learning from these instruments, their traditions, the communities where they come from. I also had the opportunity to travel to many of these communities and actually hear the real sound of the instruments — because these people from the communities, they actually grow up playing. They grow up listening to this music. So it’s pretty amazing. 

After that, I started playing contemporary music with these instruments and composing for them too. So I think it was just an amazing process, a beautiful one, to get to know the tradition and then get these instruments in the present, in the future, and learning about their possibilities in other music. How did you start? How did you get to Norway?

Zosha: I guess it was a long process. I had played a lot of fiddle music when I was quite young, when I was seven, eight years old. I would play American fiddle music, Nordic fiddle music — I grew up in Minnesota, which is a really Scandinavian-influenced area of the States — but I never played the Hardanger fiddle. It was once I was in college studying jazz and improvisation and trying to be a jazz violinist [that I found it]. I was really unhappy with that process and felt like I wasn’t finding people I really connected with as an improviser, and then I suddenly came across this instrument, the Hardanger fiddle, and heard some people who were really digging into these amazing sound worlds with the resonant strings, the sympathetic strings. So I got my hands on an instrument with sympathetic strings and started improvising right away with it, and writing my own songs and trying to fit it into my performance practice. 

But then a year into that, I was feeling a bit lost and like I really needed to pay respect to the tradition, to the instrument, and the history if I really wanted to use it. There was this tremendous guilt about, Is it appropriation if I’m a person of color learning a Norwegian folk tradition? It was just a strange way of engaging with the instrument, but not engaging with the history. So I decided I would move to Norway if I could. I applied for a Fulbright grant and miraculously got it, and moved for what I thought would be a year, but then it turned into two years. The pandemic started, and I decided to just finish my Master’s in Oslo. 

I won’t say I was bad, but I was a beginner on that fiddle. I was really just learning those songs and styles and rhythms and all the things by ear, face-to-face with these teachers, and I was struggling. It is a different instrument than the violin. I just kind of plunged into it. I learned to dance, I learned countless tunes. And little by little, I just felt a shift in my body and in the way that I heard things, in the way that I heard harmony and intonation. A year-and-a-half into my studies, I had to put on a process concert. I had no idea what to do, but I was preparing and I picked up the fiddle and I started to play, and everything just clicked into place. I suddenly knew exactly how I wanted to improvise and exactly how I wanted to construct a performance using the instrument. It was a really special process for me. And now when I play, some people think that it sounds like traditional music. I don’t think so, really. I think that it lives in a different space altogether. It is really connected to the sound and the physicality of the instrument, how it feels under my fingers and how momentum in the bow feels in my hand. But the Nordic tradition still has a really special place in my heart, and I hope to keep on engaging with it throughout my life. 

Mariel: Yeah, I completely agree when you say that it’s like paying the price to play the instrument.

Zosha: Yeah, you gotta pay your dues.

Mariel: I’m just two hours away from the Andes region, but I also felt like it wasn’t my right to take something and play it, and that’s it. It also helps you to know the tradition of the instruments, knowing the possibilities that they are already using in tradition and what you want to get out of the instrument. And the same thing happened with me: Every instrument has its personality and it wants to get out through the material, through your body, because it sounds also through your body, and you just use that to improvise. You use that to create new sounds, to get it to the sound potential that it wants to get to.

Zosha: I think a big part of it, too, is not even just learning about what the instrument likes and how it’s supposed to sound or how it has sounded over its history, it’s also learning about the process in all of these traditions. And learning, what does it mean to be in a cycle of oral transmission and learning by ear? Or how has a melody been passed down for generations? Because that is as important as the music itself. How has this instrument been speaking over a few hundred years? I didn’t even think about that going to Norway. I didn’t think about it until many months later that that was the true value of that experience. 

Mariel: Yeah, and how it’s moved through the years. Because it’s the same here — it’s oral tradition as well. The instruments are different. They are not perfectly polished or tuned, and you find your way through the instrument. There’s also this amazing idea that, if you buy the instruments for 20 people, let’s say, and all the instruments are supposed to be the same, but they are not. Because of the material, they have their own differences. So every player gets the personality of the instrument with his personality too. So you have your own sound. And that’s an idea that is inside this music. Which I also find very beautiful, and also a common ground for us. 

Zosha: Yeah, I think that is common ground. In Norway, the personal imprint that you have on the music is one of the more important parts of playing it. It’s about what you bring to the music and what you bring to the song. You’re considered a master fiddler really only if you have your own unique approach to doing it. And of course, you’ve studied the tradition and know how to play it. But they’re always looking for that spark, what makes it different and what pushes the tradition forward. It really is a cycle of innovation. And so in that regard, I think that we are practicing that even when we are pursuing more contemporary music and improvised music — this is part of passing on these instruments, voices. It diverges, of course, from that thread of tradition that we’re used to hearing, but it is kind of part of the transmission process. 

Mariel: Yeah. I think that we’re kind of explaining what we never explained before.

Zosha: Yeah. [Laughs.] This is a really great conversation.

Mariel: We do have that in common. I always thought that we were kind of talking through the instruments, learning to create a language through what we were doing. Listening to each other and creating a language to talk just the two of us. We never said, “OK, you are going to do textures and I am going to do a melody,” or something like that. It was always: you listen, I listen, and we follow each other. We try to weave.

Zosha: Yeah, to weave. Exactly. We didn’t talk about it, even when we went into the studio. We didn’t say, “OK, we’re going to record an album today.” You were in New York for the MATA Festival, and I had some free time and I was like, “We have a room, we have some microphones, we have someone help, let’s see what happens.” And we just sat down and started playing take after take without really talking. I think once in a while, we were like, “I want to do this texture,” or “I think this is a really nice thing.” But then we just kept on playing. 

Mariel: Yeah. Seeing you after a year [after meeting at OneBeat], it was like you were a different Zosha, a different player, a different improviser. 

Zosha: Right, it was a full year. I wonder what it would sound like if we played now — I mean, it’s been another year since we played. We’ve been doing so many different projects over the last year as well, and everything kind of contributes to our individual development…

It is interesting how the release process makes us think more about, what are we doing as composers? What are we doing as improvisers and practitioners of traditional music? I don’t talk about it quite as much when I’m just performing or playing a show, playing a gig. I just play my music. But when someone asks a question and starts talking about me as though I’m playing folk music, I feel myself getting really defensive. Like, “You don’t get it! That’s not what this is!” Which, I don’t begrudge that question at all. I think it’s a really valuable experience to think deeply about process and about what it means to play these instruments and to improvise and to engage in deep listening practices. 

Mariel: Yeah. It’s heavy sometimes. You have an instrument that comes from an ancient tradition, and people assume the music that you’re going to play, and sometimes it gets really difficult to explain that you are not making that. Personally, I try to avoid using melodies that come from traditional music, because of the respect that we already talked about. And also because of the personality of the instrument, I take it as a part of something bigger that wants to get out instead of just repeating something that has already been told about the instrument. And I think that it’s the same thing with you, right?

Zosha: Yeah. It’s kind of looking for, what are the sounds that it hasn’t made yet? What are the things that it wants to still say? I think that’s a really important part of this process, digging deeper into what it can do, what it wants to do, but also not ignoring what it has done. I think that really drives my explorations forward. And it’s not about making weird noises or stuff. I’m not really interested in the noisier side of the contemporary music, free improv string players. I really respect that scene as well, but I am interested in the very subtle differences and developments that you can pull out of the instrument, and really letting it sing. 

Mariel: I love what you’re saying. It’s also up to our personalities, the boundaries that we have, and I love that. And that’s why it sounds like that when you listen to Orbweaver. I hear that balance, trying to say things, but there’s this boundary. We’re not going to be shouting or pushing the instrument so hard that it will just break the atmosphere. We try to build atmosphere and, yeah, weave.

Zosha: There’s a bit of a gentleness. There’s a care that goes into it with both of us, and it’s like a conversation with our instruments. And it’s not an argument with them — it’s a really loving conversation. I think that’s one of the things that we have really connected over. It’s also a care for each other as collaborators, and a care for our audience. 

Mariel: I’m glad that we could talk about that finally. [Laughs.] 

Zosha: Finally. [Laughs.] Thank you, Talkhouse, for convincing us to talk about this!

(Photo Credit: Alexia Webster)