“Sacred Strings and Sweetgrass Things”

Sweetgrass began as a question: how can sound, place, and culture meet in a way that feels both ancient and new? Host Joel Dallow brings together cellist Wilhelmina Smith and composer Dawn Avery to trace that path from discovery to release. Their collaboration lives at the crossroads of indigenous tradition and contemporary classical music, where Mohawk language, sacred stories, and natural soundscapes find a home inside the voice of the cello. The project took shape during the isolation of the pandemic, when Wilhelmina’s Salt Bay ChamberFest sought a way to serve its audience through works filmed in specific Maine landscapes. That visual and spiritual context gave Dawn’s music a striking canvas and a clear purpose.
Dawn’s own journey anchors the album’s ethos. A conservatory-trained cellist of Mohawk descent, she composes with a wide lens: indigenous song forms, meditative textures, blues gestures, and even echoes of rock language. Her name, meaning she digs deeply into the earth to learn, reflects a process rooted in listening—to elders, to nature, to communities, and to history’s dissonances. Wilhelmina’s path complements it: early success at Curtis and with the Philadelphia Orchestra, balanced by formative time in George Crumb’s experimental orbit and decades of chamber collaboration. Those experiences taught her to treat the cello as a laboratory for new colors and a meeting place for voices that rarely share a stage.
The album’s title work, Sweetgrass, honors a sacred plant revered for strength and tenderness. That duality becomes a guiding image for Wilhelmina’s playing and Dawn’s writing. Many tracks feature layered cellos and voice, shaped through careful multitracking. Building a duet with oneself demands planning: the accompaniment lines must anticipate phrasing and rubato in the melody that doesn’t yet exist. The result is a living dialogue—breath meeting bow—that supports Mohawk text and chants with a resonant, human timbre. It’s hard to do well, but when it lands, the music feels like a single body breathing with two hearts.
Listeners meet key pieces along the way. We Enter Together sets the tone, a call to shared presence. Decolonization unfolds as a narrative suite for solo cello, threading a healing song, a women’s stomp dance, blues gestures, and a Jimi Hendrix–inflected national anthem into one American tapestry. The juxtaposition reveals irony and resilience: traditions once banned as “savage” now stand shoulder to shoulder with national symbols. This isn’t provocation for its own sake; it’s a framework for hearing how cultures interlock, collide, and finally converse inside the instrument’s voice.
Behind the sound is a modern production roadmap. Wilhelmina describes funding the last three albums with state arts grants tied to community engagement, then recording in tailored halls with a veteran producer to shape edits and master takes. Labels have shifted from owning masters and handling physical distribution to partnering on digital releases and sharing rights. CDs now languish in closets while listeners stream. The lesson for artists: own as much as you can, budget for the pieces that matter—room, engineer, producer—and choose partners who amplify your mission instead of replacing it.
Why make records at all when profits are thin? For Dawn and Wilhelmina, it’s legacy and service. Recording is a calling card that seeds repertoire for younger players, preserves language and stories, and keeps the art form growing outward. Their advice to emerging musicians is simple and demanding: love the work enough to labor for it; keep your heart present when competition and metrics intrude; define your path before others do; and when doors close, pivot without losing your center. Bring your gifts back to your community—sometimes the best career move is the one that grows roots. Sweetgrass suggests that when music holds both tenderness and strength, it can carry culture into the future with grace.