The Cello Sherpa Podcast

"Sacred Strings and Sweetgrass Things" - An Interview with Cellist Wilhelmina Smith, Soloist and Chamber Musician, and Composer Dawn Avery, Professor at Montgomery College

• Joel Dallow • Season 5 • Episode 22

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A sacred plant, a living coastline, and a cello that sings in two voices—Sweetgrass brings them together with uncommon clarity. 

The Cello Sherpa Podcast Host, Joel Dallow, sits down with composer Dawn Avery and cellist Wilhelmina Smith to share how a pandemic idea turned into an immersive album where Mohawk language, indigenous song forms, and contemporary classical textures breathe the same air. Dawn traces her journey from conservatory training to a compositional practice grounded in Mohawk heritage, storytelling, and soundscapes that fold in blues, meditative space, and rock energy. Wilhelmina reflects on early breakthroughs at Curtis, a life-shaping stint in George Crumb’s experimental lab, and the chamber instincts that make her a natural collaborator. Together they unpack the title track’s symbolism—sweetgrass as strength and tenderness—and the craft behind multitracking cello lines that anticipate each other’s rubato, merging voice and instrument into a single, human pulse. We go inside key works, including We Enter Together and Decolonization, a gripping solo journey that threads a healing song, a women’s stomp dance, blues gestures, and a Hendrix-tinted national anthem to reframe what “American music” can hold. The conversation widens into a practical guide for making records today: funding with grants and community programs, choosing the right hall and producer, navigating label partnerships, owning your masters, and prioritizing digital releases when physical CDs gather dust. At heart, this is about why artists still record: to plant repertoire for younger players, to carry culture forward with respect, and to keep curiosity at the center of the craft. If you care about new music, indigenous voices, recording workflows, or the evolving music industry, this story offers both inspiration and a roadmap. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves the cello, and leave a review with the track that stayed with you.

For more information on Wilhelmina Smith: https://www.wilhelminasmith.com/bio.html

For more information on Dawn Avery: https://www.dawnavery.com/

You can also find Wilhelmina and Dawn on Instagram and Facebook: @dawnaveryartist @wscello

If you are looking for in person/virtual cello lessons, or orchestral repertoire audition coachings, check out www.theCelloSherpa.com

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Threads & YouTube: @theCelloSherpa

For more information on our sponsor: www.CLEAResources.com 

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Cello Sherpa Podcast, where we explore all aspects of the climb to the summit from intermediate musician to the professional stage. Check us out online at the celloSherpa.com or follow us on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube at theCello Sherpa. I'm Joel Dalilo, your host. I joined the cello section of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra in 1999 and founded the Riverside Chamber Players based in Rosswell, Georgia in 2003. If you're looking for a bit of extra help on learning your orchestra or solo repertoire, perhaps we can help. Visit www.thecello sherpa.com and drop us a line. We offer virtual or in-person lessons. Today's episode is sponsored by Clear Resources, your premier resource for compliance, legal, ethics, and risk. For more information, visit them online at clearesources.com. Today's guests are cellist Wilhelmina Smith and composer Dawn Avery. Wilhelmina Smith made her solo debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra while she was still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music and in 1997 was a prize winner in the Leonard Rose International Cello Competition. Dawn Avery is a Grammy and Nama nominated performer, composer, and professor who has worked with notable musicians and composers like Pavarotti, Sting, John Cage, Philip Glass, and more. She is of Mohawk descent and is dedicated to the indigenization of composition and performance. Thank you both so much for joining us today on the Cello Sharpa podcast.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you. All right. Thanks so much for having us.

SPEAKER_00:

So the reason I invited you both on the podcast was because I wanted to talk about your latest album, Sweetgrass. Dawn, you compose the music, and Wilhelmina, you play all of the selections on the cello. But before we get into that, I'd love it if you could share a little bit about yourselves for our audience.

SPEAKER_01:

I can start. So I am from the land of the Mohawk, as you mentioned, and my Indian name is Yeli Hogwarts, which means she digs deeply into the earth to learn. And a lot of my compositions are based on indigenous and spiritual themes, especially from my Mohawk culture, also sacred stories and sounds from nature, which is part of how Wilhelmina and I got connected. I started out as a pianist and I'm a conservatory-trained cellist, and I'm delighted to have such a great cellist play my music. I primarily compose now, and I've always played a lot of different styles of music. So I love combining all my personal sound experiences in my what's called, you know, contemporary classical music, including my indigenous soundscapes, but also rock and roll and meditative and classical. So you'd hear that a lot in the pieces that I've written for Wilhelmina.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, actually, now I want to stop and ask you a question because we interview a lot of cellists on this program, which wasn't exactly the design, but it sort of gravitated that way because of the name the Cello Sherpa podcast. It was really designed for all musicians and to create a space where we can talk about this profession. But as I get these amazing cellists that keep coming on the show, I've sort of run with that as much as possible. So, Dawn, you played the piano and you played the cello. So, of course, that's a perfect fit. So, where did you go to school for cello?

SPEAKER_01:

I went to Manhattan School of Music, and then I went to NYU, where I got to study with David Darling. At Manhattan School of Music, I studied with David Wells. And then I went to University of Maryland to get a doctorate in ethnomusicology. And my main study was Native American classical music, classical composers, and then developed like indigenous theory to explain it all.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. Very cool. Well, Will Amina, can you take a minute now and tell us a little bit about your background too?

SPEAKER_03:

Sure. I have a slightly more traditional background. I, you know, started playing cello when I was six and came from a musical family, but an academic family as well. I grew up on the brand new campus of Hampshire College, as it were, and the youngest of four kids. And my parents said, you have to play an instrument, but you can choose what it is. And my mother, who was an organist and pianist, had a lot of students that she would be rehearsing and performing with that were coming through our living room all the time. And as soon as I heard someone playing the cello, that was it. I knew that's the instrument I wanted to go. I did have like a slight failed experiment and trying to play the bass. I was just simply too tiny to carry it. So, anyways, I grew up doing that and being a ballet dancer, and I ended up at the Curtis Institute. And, you know, from then I arrived at Curtis kind of wide-eyed. I felt like I probably didn't belong there with all these prodigies coming from different countries and all over the place. And I felt like I might have been a pretty underwhelming presence there. But I am someone who learns a lot from her peers and as well as her guiding instructors. So hopefully I learned something when I was there. And at some point I won the Philadelphia Orchestra Concerto competition. And that was an amazing experience because I played Blach Shalomo. And to play that with the Philadelphia Orchestra behind me was just, you know, one of the greatest experiences musically that I've ever had. I mean, it was so powerful. But also I would say, you know, just as powerful for me and maybe foundational in where my career has spun off from during my Curtis days was working with composers and actually working with George Crumb's class at the University of Pennsylvania. Many of whose students at the time and who were peers of mine are composers who have household names now, Jennifer Higdon, Osvaldo Golyov. And so I felt very lucky at that early stage to have the opportunity to kind of work with a great master like George Crumb, who is just constantly like experimenting with the cello and like, what can we do? What happens when, you know, when you turn your cello inside out, basically? It was a lab, really. You know, we were experimenting constantly. And I had a front row seat to that, which I felt very lucky to have. And I think that that was, you know, really kind of a career-shaping moment for me, or if I look back on that, just as equally important, like in my musical journey at that early point in my life, was participating in chamber music and going to the Marlboro Music Festival and really kind of experiencing the power of collaboration with other musicians. And that also has been really informative for me going forward.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, let's talk then about your album, Sweetgrass, which features cello and voice, and it centers on indigenous themes of nature, traditional dance, and song. How did this project come about?

SPEAKER_03:

Well, during the pandemic, so I run a chamber music festival on the coast of Maine. It's called Salt Bay Chamber Fest. And during the pandemic, when none of us could gather and perform together, I wanted to create musical content to continue to serve our audiences with music. And but I wanted to do it in a very visually stimulating way. And the coast of Maine is an incredibly beautiful place, one that is a spiritual home for me. I grew up there. And I decided to come up with a project that was pairing specific musical pieces with specific environments. So it was very intentional in how the music related or could relate, possibly, or have a conversation with the place. So I chose four different pieces, four different places within this sort of mid-coastal Maine area. And I really wanted to have a range of voices that could bring different perspectives to the nature that I wanted to be featuring. I had previously worked with some of Maine's Wabanaki musicians, and so much of what I learned from them had to do with how integral nature was in their culture and in their music specifically. And so I kind of did a random search looking for, well, I wonder, you know, if there is someone in Indigenous that's writing for cello, because the musicians that I knew and had worked with were, you know, singers, drummers, flutists, but not any traditional classical instrument. And so I did kind of a Google search and I found Dawn who was playing some of her own pieces on the cello, and it was incredibly beautiful and inspiring. And it was like, oh my gosh, this is it. And so then I called her up. I asked her if I could play her pieces. Wow.

SPEAKER_00:

And I assumed you had some past together that you worked together. So this was all through the power of Google, huh?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we call her Grandma Google.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. Well, uh, Dawn, can you talk then a little bit about the selections? I guess you wrote them before this album. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01:

Actually, a lot of them I had written already, but they had never been recorded.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

So Mina first found gratitude on a meditation recording I had done. And after she had recorded it, she sent me this beautiful video of all the landscape she's talking about in Maine and of her playing both parts on the cello. And it was just profound. And it went really nicely together. So then she said, Well, can you send me a bunch of other pieces? So I sent her a few other pieces. Some of them I rewrote a bit to make them for a cello solo or for two cellos. And then she commissioned me to write the title piece, which is sweetgrass. And I really enjoyed writing that because I got to write it specifically for her. Although the way she plays these pieces in many ways, she's taken a wonderful, not ownership, but a wonderful like guardianship of them.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And sweetgrass, Al Hunde Wasalago, is our sacred plant. And it's the sacred grass, really, of Mother Earth. And I chose that plant because it's a plant that is very revered, much as our women are revered. And it's sometimes hard to find. And it's used for baskets and for its essence. And but when you pick it, you go close to the earth and you pray to the earth if we may have a little bit of her. And then you gently tug at her. And so you revere her like you would a woman. And then as you pull her out, you can smell that fragrance. And it's also such a tender plant, but such a strong plant. And that's a lot of how I see Wilhelmina as a cellist, but also as a festival coordinator and organizer, community organizer. And she's really strong and can get stuff done, but she also has this beautiful musical tenderness in everything she does.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Wow. That's really cool. So I'm I'm glad you brought this up because I noticed when I was listening through the album that there's definitely more than one cello on a lot of them. So I assumed you were doing multi-track to get this done.

SPEAKER_03:

Exactly. Easier said than done.

SPEAKER_00:

I was going to ask you, how hard is it to play a track with yourself?

SPEAKER_03:

It definitely has its challenges. And typically it works best. I mean, you can do it in a lot of different ways, but for me, it works best to first of all, you know, you've you've rehearsed it, you have a concept of how you're playing it. But you start with the more accompaniment voice, but that voice has to anticipate all the melodic time taking and flexibility that the melodic voice is going to be taking. So it's challenging that way.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it seems like it would be. And then who was singing? Was it you, Don, on the album that brings the introduction of the voice into the tracks?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. I've also written versions where it could just be solo cello, or sometimes I found out well, Hamina actually will sing some of the parts, but she asked me to sing in Mohawk on it. That was such a beautiful idea to have us feel like we're joined in that way too.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And can you talk a little bit more then about what the other tracks represent? Because you spoke so beautifully about what sweetgrass represents. I'd love to know a little bit more about what some of the other tracks represent.

SPEAKER_01:

I can start out with uh the first track, which is We Enter Together. And that really is a piece that brings people together to come into the same kind of listening space or heart space. And then the second piece, decolonization, I'll let Wilhelmina introduce because she does it so interestingly.

SPEAKER_03:

Sure. Yeah, no, decolonization is one of my all-time favorite pieces to play. It's for Solo Cello. And I hope that some of your listeners will start playing this piece because it's so masterful. It's so incredibly interesting and full of heart and gratitude. It's kind of a journey, really. It starts off with Geronimo singing in a high falsetto, and Dawn can speak to that. And it goes through a lot of different kinds of both traditional songs and from her cultural background, and so many different iterations of things, all supported by new techniques in the cello, and just winding up with a very passionate and I would say very powerful kind of choral ending, if you will, just for solo cello. Don, you probably might want to mention a few of the parts of the journey in decolonization.

SPEAKER_01:

So I had heard an elder, Tom Porter, one of our most important elders, I would say, give a talk about how do we decolonize the colonized. And in that talk, rather than putting down everybody, which you know we can easily do, right? We can all find some terrible things that happen. But rather than doing that, he really wanted to teach our people about how to embrace our culture, bring it back, and live in the modern world with our traditions. And when he did that, he tells it in a very storytelling-like way. So he goes from one story in Mohawk, one story is in English, one story is a creation story, one story is about around the block. And he had such a humorous, passionate way of telling a story. So what I decided to do was to take different American, if you will, pieces and link them together to show maybe what it really means to be American. So I take an old blues style of Tim Fehey from Tacoma Park, Maryland in the 40s, I think he was. And then I take a Human Healing song and a Hawanishone women's stomp dance, and I take the inspirations from all of those and link them together. And I think maybe the part that a lot of people remember the most is I do the national anthem, Hendrix style, but I intersperse it with a women's stomp dance. And now this women's stomp dance sounds just nice. But you know, when it was being sung and danced, it was actually banned as being too savage. So when you hear the two of them juxtaposed, there's definitely some irony there in what I'm giving her.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. Would you be interested in taking a deeper dive into what it takes to pull off a recording project like this? I mean, obviously, Wilhelmina came up with the idea, found you, Dawn, and then you started talking about what pieces you would put on the album. What from there were the steps you had to take to get this from that point to the end to where you're now marketing the album?

SPEAKER_03:

Sure. I mean, and just speaking generally, not necessarily this CD, but there are just so many ways to go about this process these days. And I, you know, I can speak to how I have done it. This is my fourth solo album. And I, in the last three albums, have applied for and received grants from the Minnesota Arts Board to specifically make solo recordings, which are of course tied in with a lot of community events and you know, reaching out to various underserved communities in in northern Minnesota. So it's really tied with serving community. So that's how it gets funded. And then there's the process of, you know, figuring out what's going to be on it and then choosing a producer. In this case, I've worked for pretty much my whole life with Judith Sherman, who's won, I think, 15 Grammys.

unknown:

Nice.

SPEAKER_03:

And then you need a, you know, to have a haul that feels like a good match for your instrument. And then, you know, it usually takes about three days of intense recording. And then once it's done, you know, the producer does all the editing and producing. And I have a a part in the editing process. So she'll, you know, put it together and then I'll say, Well, I really didn't sound good, right? In this part, do you have a different take from there? And so that gets, you know, put together in probably a normal fashion of record production. And then when it's mastered, then you approach different labels. And even that has dramatically changed in the last few years.

SPEAKER_00:

Can you elaborate on how?

SPEAKER_03:

I can. So to just give you an example, my past two albums were put out by Andean. It's a Finnish record label. And actually, in my previous on on Arabesque, basically I created the master, but then it got handed over, including the rights to the master, to the record company. So then I no longer own my own work, right? But they then, yeah, I know, but then they put it out and they take care of everything else. They took care of publicity, they took care of, you know, just getting it manufactured and distributed and all that. And I have to say, like in the context of really niche solo cello music, you will never sell the amount of CDs you would need to recoup the costs of even just taking it from where those record companies took it. In the case of this release, since it was really a project that was, you know, about Don's music, about American music, I wanted it to be with a label here. And come to find out, actually, labels just don't take on these things anymore. So it's really on the shoulders of the artists. But record companies and like Azico, which is really a wonderful, wonderful label, are able to put things out digitally now. So while the artist does shoulder that cost, it's a lot less than it would be if you're going for a whole like manufacturer CD. Because what I've found is, you know, I have like, you know, a couple of hundred of my other CDs just sitting in my closet, and people don't listen to CDs. If you ask them if they want one, they're like, well, you know, maybe as a coaster for my cup of coffee, but you know, they're listing things digitally now. You know, they're like, if I want to hear it, I'll go on Spotify or I'll get it digitally. But no need for the actual physical copy. There are many, many wonderful indie labels out now that can work with artists to figure out what the best match for them is. You know, you need to figure out funding.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And I'm in the same situation actually. I have hundreds of CDs sitting in boxes that I I don't know what to do with them because I mean the coaster idea is actually a pretty good one. I hadn't thought of that one. So then you've laid out sort of the landscape and how it changes. And it used to be that you would give it to a big label, but then they take everything, basically. I mean, Taylor Swift went through this because she essentially recorded everything on the big labels and everybody owned everything except for her. So then she decided to just re-record all of her old stuff because people would buy that instead. So the whole industry has taken a huge shift over the last couple of decades. And I'm sure being nimble and trying to figure out how to best use this and to your advantage, or the best way possible for you to have your voice and be able to get your voice out there is changing even within the last couple of years. So it's kind of amazing just to have you lay it out that way. And I think it's great for people to hear about how that process works. I guess the question I would ask maybe both of you is what's the motivation then given that it seems like there's not really either you're giving your music to someone else and you don't own it anymore, or you keep it yourself and then you're trying to recover something that you've laid out in these expenses. Like if we're talking just from a purely monetary standpoint, that doesn't seem like that would be the motivation. So what keeps you motivated to keep producing albums and what are you hoping to achieve by going through these processes?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah, and I should also clarify that I think with a lot of these indie labels, including the Azika, where this particular recording is out, there's more of a sharing of, well, I'm gonna put big air quotes profits because the profit, there are no profits in these things and rights to your recording. So there's a lot more flexibility on that now than there used to be, which is attractive to recording artists. I mean, for me, it is so different from being in Taylor Swift because, like I said, the amount of CDs that one would sell can't come close to making up the costs of putting it out in this kind of niche musical corner. But I think for me, it's really partly, you know, an artist's calling card for sure. It gets your work out there. And for me personally, I am really dedicated to supporting the work of living composers and getting their work out and really expanding the repertoire for cellists and for chamber music, too. And so that's kind of what drives me is like, well, here's this such a gifted composer in Don Avery, and such a wealth of incredible cello music. This needs to get out there so that others can play it and to keep the future of our art forum thriving. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

That's beautiful. I'm so glad. Also, I think that the profit is really about not only sharing repertoire to younger players too, to our future, but it's also in for me sharing the culture, having it being so beautifully respected, having it be even shared with other people, you know, not just my community. And also, I I think that the younger generation is really interested in this newer music, honestly. Because it seems to me that there's a lot of blending of soul, heart, culture, styles, like there's different sounds that a lot of the younger generation hasn't heard. So I'm so grateful to Wellamina for putting out so much new music. And she's kept dedicated to this her whole career. And also to keeping music alive with women working together too, has been really a delight.

SPEAKER_00:

I'd love to ask you both, since you've shared so much detail about what this process is like and really offered, I think, some excellent advice to people who may be interested in following in your footsteps. What advice would each of you uh like to give to young musicians who may be considering a career in music?

SPEAKER_01:

I felt like I didn't have a choice but to go into music. I loved music since I was little. My father is a jazz drummer. And so to me, you have to love it. And you also have to be able to work hard. And I think the other advice is to always keep your heart involved in the process because it can get competitive, or you can start thinking a lot about money, or you can think about technique, or all these things that can get young people stressed out. And then all of it is a way into the music even deeper. Beautiful. Best I got right now.

SPEAKER_03:

And I think I would say that the most important thing probably is that you always define you and your work. And there are so many opportunities for other people to define you and you know, paths taken or paths not taken that can lead you somewhere that may not be what you feel is truly you. But just remember that you have control. And, you know, in those times where something didn't go well or I lost an audition and I felt like, oh my gosh, I'm nothing, I have nothing to offer. I really have taken away so much from those experiences and learned so much about channeling and pivoting to figure out what I do want to do and how I can help others and how I can always keep it about music, never keep it about yourself, keep it about music and perhaps how you can turn and do some good in the world.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's really great. Well, is there anything else either of you would like to add that we might have missed today?

SPEAKER_01:

I'm always inspired by these interviews by you, Joel, and by Wilhelmina, so I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_03:

Uh, likewise. Yeah. I can tell you a little funny story about my asking when I was at Curtis, I think I had just played with the Philly Orchestra, and Yo-Yo was in town. And I think that we were doing a master class, and I was asking him, so what do you think I should do with my career? Kind of like hoping he'd be like, oh, well, of course you should be a soloist, you know, but of course that's not at all what he said. And he said something that, like, now, whatever, 30 years later, like it really makes sense to me. And he said, go back and do something in your community. You know, you all, all of you in music have these gifts, and just bring those gifts back to your communities. And at the time, I kind of felt like, oh, I was really hoping he'd say something else. But I did take that advice and I did go back to my community and I did start something, and that has actually been an incredibly rewarding and difficult but rewarding musical journey. So that's something I try to keep in mind is like sometimes you can receive advice, but not always understand it until many years later.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that is really great advice. Well, I want to thank you both so much for joining us today on the Cello Sharpa Podcast.

SPEAKER_03:

Thank you. Thank you so much, Joel. It's really a pleasure to talk to you.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much to Wilhelmina Smith and Dawn Avery for joining us today and sharing their story with us. And thank you for listening to another episode of the Cello Sharpa Podcast. For more information on Wilhelmina and Dawn and any Of the links we spoke about today, check out our show notes by scrolling down on the episode. Be sure and catch our next episode where cellist Nick Cantilakis joins us. Nick recently joined the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music. He shares about his journey not just as a cellist, but also as an incredibly talented filmmaker who has built an impressive following on Instagram through his many comedic shorts. We're here to serve you, so if you have questions or topic suggestions you would like us to cover in future episodes, please use the contact page on our website, thecelloSherpa.com. You will also find information about the specific services we offer on the website. Don't forget to follow us and rate us on whatever platform you get your podcasts. This helps us climb the rankings so other people can find us. Today's episode was edited by Eric Bigay at Red House Productions and produced and recorded by me, Joel Dallow.