“Jump in, start singing, find my way through:” a conversation with Shara Nova
“Jump in, start singing, find my way through”
a conversation with composer Shara Nova
by Matthew Brown, 2026 summer associate @ The Crossing
The Crossing spent July of 2026 rehearsing and recording How to Survive, a multimedia project conceived, written, and designed by Suzanne Bocanegra with new music by Julia Wolfe, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Shara Nova, and Ayanna Woods. Each of the four movements prescribes memorable steps to survive a different natural disaster: hurricane, earthquake, tornado, and wildfire. On the sidelines of the July filming sessions, I had the opportunity to interview Shara Nova and Ayanna Woods, composers of the tornado and wildfire movements respectively. Keep reading for my conversation with Shara about how “Tornado” fits into The Crossing’s larger canon, how to sing about serious subjects, and how to stay surprised in the act of creation.
In this piece, you quote John Luther Adams's Canticles of the Holy Wind, and Donald said that when he first reached out to you about writing for The Crossing, you mentioned that as an album that introduced you to the group. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Somehow that record found me, and I don't know how I came across it, but that was the first album that I heard of theirs. I think I first heard it in maybe 2018. I would listen to that album on repeat, and I was just obsessed with it, and didn't understand it. I had never heard choral music like that…
In My Brightest Diamond I often will refer back to something else that I've written, but taking the meaning and turning it a different way. Or if I'm talking about the same thing, I might use the same metaphor…The Crossing has this visionary intention to make work about topics that are really difficult and hard to grapple with, and they don't want to tell people how to think, but they want to also provoke thought in a way. So I felt by pointing to that past work, it's expanding the meaning of what the wind is. Like [with “Tornado”] we're talking about what the wind is for destruction, but there's another side to that, and they have a whole album about it. So I just liked pointing people to the other point of view that they've already brought into the world.
As you say, their goal of not telling people how to think, but encouraging them to see what there is to think about it…Showing several sides of a theme seems to be really productive to that end.
Yeah, the work that we did in Titration was about the nervous system, and it largely was influenced by Resmaa Menakem, who wrote My Grandmother's Hands, which is addressing somatic practices or somatic responses in racialized situations and calling you to attention to the nervous system responses, and then training your nervous system to respond differently in crisis, and Resmaa has entire practices built around that, and so to reference “Safety in Peril or Calm” [from Titration in “Tornado”], the humming is one of those practices that engages the vagal nervous system to calm yourself through the act of singing. You're actually helping your nervous system to calm down. So even though that message isn't in the text [of “Tornado”], again, they have a whole album about this, and so I wanted to just quote it.
And by quoting your own past work or by quoting the work of another composer in The Crossing canon, you're extending the big dialogue of their music and all these issues…
Yeah, or just trying to bring a couple of the pieces together. I think the text also is a very informational text, and so finding ways of expanding the purpose of the text or allowing the listener some space to take in what's been said without having to use words or by abstracting the words.
It's actually a lesson from David Lang. David always talks about there being enough time in the music for there to be reflection inside of a piece. You know, don't be afraid to take space so that the listener has time to not have this constant barrage of new stuff coming at you.
So you can take that break from the text and have a more vowel or sound based singing. And then there are also ways that you vary the kind of tone of delivery. At the end of “Tornado,” it sounds very comforting. It's like a lullaby compared to earlier, when it's a warning. How did you navigate bringing those different characters to the piece?
Well, I lived in Oklahoma when I was a kid and that would have been in the '80s where commercials had really great jingles. And there were so many tornado warnings that we would hear…Coffeyville is where Dorothy is in the Wizard of Oz. And that's where my grandparents lived and my mother was born. So I wanted this sort of jingle aspect, as though it were a commercial in the '80s of what to do in a tornado because that was my experience as a child, but then shifting out of that kind of tunefulness going to The Wizard of Oz and asking, "Where's the rainbow? Is there a rainbow in this piece?” And how to make one harmonically, you know, where can this arch of melody make us feel this lift of the rainbow at the risk of it being too cheesy or sentimental or something too Disney?
But you save it for the moment when the tornado stops. And we can appreciate the other sounds of a “better wind” in that interlude…
Of Canticles of the Holy Wind. Yes.
And then also you recontextualize the siren. We've heard these warning sirens throughout the piece. But then there's a beautiful solo that Olivia sings that's this floating slide, and it feels so expansive and like that rainbow really is being drawn.
Oh, cool. I didn't ever think about that as an alteration of the siren, but that's a really nice image.
When you’re getting that progression from jingle to more serious to the rainbow ultimately, how much of that are you plotting out, planning ahead of time? How much of it is felt and explored?
So the way that I write is in Pro-Tools to a click track, and I sometimes will have an instrument for pitch reference, but 90% of it is all by ear. I don't write vertically. I write one line at a time. So the first agenda is to read the text many times and find the pattern inside of the text…So there's some pre- decision making about how to set up pattern making and where the hooks are going to be.
Because it's through-composed text I also wanted there to be a refrain. So finding those few moments that there's repeated material, those were telling me the form. And then just jump in, start singing, and find my way through.
The rainbow section was very, very, very hard to find. I just couldn't get the harmony right…I just really struggled with it for a good couple days, but then when I got it, I'm like,
“OK, now I got it.”
Going more on that idea of working by ear, in harmony in this piece, it's often bouncing between two different parallel worlds. There's this beautiful moment right at the beginning where we have, “If you are inside, when the tornado comes, remain inside.” There are B-flats. There's a kind of groundedness to it. And then all of a sudden a big brightening in “Stay away from the windows.” The B-naturals come in. How do you come to that?
This is a really serious subject, and there needs to be a kind of aggression about these instructions, but also, you don't want to feel like you're getting yelled at. So finding that balance between wanting the listener to feel the seriousness and gravity of what's being said and also not wanting it to become so much pressure on the listener that they psychologically will check out. Everyone's different and every society is different, but as a writer, it's always fascinating to me when that pressure point on an audience happens where you feel people mentally leave the room...And so I think the major/minor aspect is a little bit trying to soften the intensity of the material.
And you can soften it with sections of the piece—that's what we've talked about with the ending—and even within a phrase level, in a more intense section, you can give these sudden moments of clarity, of brightening, and of slowing down the heart rate to give that reprieve…You're caring for the audience.
Yeah, yeah. I'm a pastor in a certain way.
You mentioned you're not thinking vertically. You're thinking about line…
And tune. Tune is the first priority.
But then there are moments of striking vertical unison when things are just snapping into such resonance. How do you balance that?
Well, I think with the time that I've had working with the Crossing when I've wanted the most text clarity, having vertical alignment really gets the text through the most. It also makes it the loudest. That watercolor of John Luther Adams is just so glorious that I really love that. And at the same time, if it's like more like an announcement where I need the text to be super, super clear, having that verticality is effective.
There were a few places in this piece where the choir imitates tornado sirens for long stretches, but they're not just glissing freely. Different voices have a variety of distances they cross and they do so at different speeds. How did you find that as the best way to make that sound?
All I did was I threw in a tornado siren into my Pro Tools session and just literally tried to imitate it with eight voices. And so with eight passes, then I just went back and transcribed exactly what I did trying to imitate the real. The real siren, it's microtonal. It has many different pitches happening at the same time, so it's an incredible sound.
If you're in a studio and you've got a pop ensemble, there's a lot of sound capabilities just by sampling or by electronic processing, but with a choir, you have to find every sound in the voices. Can you tell me about working in those two different lanes?
…The human voice is also limitless, but the notation is where the limit is.
So you often make demos for the choir?
Oh, yeah…I don't think I've ever written a choral piece without singing the whole thing.
And what is that like, singing perhaps in places where your voice doesn’t usually go? What is it like to go embody the bassline?
My bass writing is probably my weakest aspect of my writing for that reason. So I'm trying to keep working on that and strengthen my bass writing.
When you have a goal like that, is that something that you're just thinking about on each project? Do you go and do a project that will specifically challenge that for you?
…Because the process of my writing is the way that it is, it leads to certain kinds of results. So the next opportunity that I get to write for basses, then I might think about playing with a synthesizer or prioritizing that rather than starting with the tune first. Maybe I do start with the harmonic structure on the bottom.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you came to the choir world? As a singer, did you grow up singing in choirs?
My dad was a music director in the Assemblies of God Church. So I grew up with a father who was preparing for choir practice every week, and my mother played piano for the choir, so that was the culture of our family. And then I had a public high school choir that competed internationally, and we were doing really incredible material. So having that foundation in high school and in my family meant it was never far from me. I just never thought that I would write for choir for some reason. But the first opportunity I had was in a rock festival curated by Bryce and Aaron Dessner at [Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014], and Brooklyn Youth Chorus was going to be there, and I saw the other rock people were writing for them, and I thought, OK, well, I'm gonna write for them too and just hand them this piece and see if they'll do it. And they did, and then they were my first commissioner after that.
How has writing for the Crossing and other choirs impacted the work that you do in the studio writing for yourself?
Everything that you learn about music is this kind of collected base of knowledge that informs everything. So whether I'm learning this idea about space in a choral setting or from a DJ producer who presses a mute button…it does become this collected experience of music language, and the more you have acquired that language, the more fluently you can speak it. So it's the beauty of age…And hopefully you get closer to the target of being able to have an idea and then achieve that feeling or whatever you're going for in the work. You get closer and closer to the target of your imagination.
Do you think you ever hit the target? Or are we always just trying to get closer?
It's just always throwing darts (laughs). You do have to have an idea of where you want things to go ahead of time…but you also get surprised and music has its own will. So sometimes you think you are going to do one thing and the music will bend you in a totally different direction.
And you cultivate that willingness to follow the direction that it sends you…
Yeah. I do think that music may be its own life form in a way. There are other forces at play beyond just our making of music…We get help.