By Anne W. Semmes
Late last January noted composer and new age artist Cheryl B. Engelhardt, late of Greenwich and now of New Paltz, NY, (where she lives with her mountain guide husband), made an inspired decision to take a cross-country train ride to attend her fourth Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. “It’s a really neat way to see what my [music] community is up to right now,” she tells of that ceremony. After finding the airfare challenging, she booked her five-day train ride from New York. Come February she’ll head for L.A for her fifth Grammy Award ceremony, but this time as a Grammy Award nominee for “Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album” – music she composed on that long train ride she named “The Passenger.”
So, the story goes, after she’d decided upon that long train ride, the idea came, “What if I tried composing on it?” So, she packed her computer, and “a tiny little keyboard” that connected to her computer, and “a lot of different headphones,” plus a “mini controller” so she could “play on a small piano, but the source of the sounds was coming from the computer program.” All the tools needed apparently to compose ambient new age music in transit.
So, from her cozy roomette, and sometimes from the observation car, or dining car, the great scenery of the snow-covered west swept by her windows as her 32-plus minutes album, “The Passenger” took shape. All nine tracks of it. (And it’s all there in a video she made of herself on the journey at cbemusic.com) And it was on her long return train ride home that she enlisted other musical artists, including Grammy Award winners, to play a part in the piece. “I sent them the track that I had created,” she tells, “and then they used what I had given them as inspiration to create on top of the track.”
A key part of that inspiration was the tragic passing of a close musical colleague shortly before Engelhardt’s train ride departure. Thus, her composition, “The Passenger,” became “a reflection on grief, loss, and the healing process.”
Engelhardt’s creative path in new age music began with piano lessons. “I grew up listening to a lot of calming piano music, classical music,” she says, “but also I loved Celtic music, especially Enya, who is one of two solo female artists to have ever won this Grammy Award before.” She notes that this ambient new age music has five nominees at the Grammys (as most other categories do). But that “in 34 years only two solo female artists have ever won, and Enya was one of them.” So, she believes with herself, “There was always a new age artist waiting to come out.”
Along the way she enjoyed singing in choirs at Greenwich Academy where she graduated in 1998. “I was in the Madrigals at the Academy, and I did a lot of musical plays” she shares. And she would write her own piano music. And at Cornell University she joined an acapella group and was “taking a lot of classes in music and music technology, just because I was interested in it. I always thought it was a hobby.” She was after all majoring in “Biology in Society,” until her advisor seeing all her music courses suggested her double major.
It’s that calming, healing power of music that draws her. She sees a “social revolution happening,” she says, where “people are starting to normalize things like yoga, and meditation, and wellness, and not hustling.” She sees, “a slow shift” into “mindfulness and self-awareness and taking responsibility for yourself. And one of the biggest parts is really talking about emotions and learning that we have them and how to talk about them and share them, so they don’t get pushed down.” What needs processing, she says is “to express yourself…whether it’s grief, or anger, or trauma, whether that’s capital T trauma or lower-case t trauma, we all have it from childhood.”
“So,” she continues, “I think the role that music plays – it supports the accessing of those emotions. New age music and ambient music when it’s done right is laying a foundation to process emotions rather than dictating emotions.” She gives an example: “A really good pop song that’s about a breakup, maybe you hear it in the grocery store, you’ll start feeling really sad – a Katy Perry song that gets you really pumped up and excited, like ‘Roar,’ one of my favorite songs. Which is a beautiful thing about music that you can change your emotions just by listening.”
With her new age music, she says, “The music I try to create is allowing people to have a foundation so that they experience whatever emotions, whatever experience they need to have. And it could be different than what I was experiencing while I was grieving.”
So, with the clock now ticking before she’s off to L.A., she’ll be eager to see she says, “who else is out there creating at a level that gets recognized by their peers.” She explains, “The Grammy’s is the only peer voting. The winners are not chosen by a panel of six people, it’s the entire voting member population, about 13,000 people. So, what is my community valuing? What’s the quality of work and production?
“It’s really inspiring to feel the energy of everyone rooting for everyone else, It’s a big dream. The Grammy’s have been around for a while, they’re a stable in the music industry, and to be around a lot of people that are sharing this dream, it’s a very unique experience to go as a musician.”
