The musician building the Great Native American Songbook

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Musician Tim Long was sitting at his dining room table on a September morning, looking at old family photos and talking about how good can sometimes emerge from suffering.

Long’s mother, Stella, a member of the Choctaw Nation, grew up destitute in rural eastern Oklahoma. When she was young, her widowed mother remarried and moved nearby, leaving Stella and her four brothers to fend largely for themselves. The Oklahoma government put the children in boarding school, where Stella caught tuberculosis. One of her lungs had to be removed, and she endured two stints in quarantine that lasted a total of five years.

One thing that gave her solace was her discovery of a classical music station on the radio. She developed a special fondness for Beethoven.

“Without that, I wouldn’t be in music,” Long, 56, said over cups of oolong tea. “My life would not have happened if she — if my parents — had not had that broader outlook.”

Long’s wide-ranging life in music has included playing the violin and piano, conducting, coaching singers and teaching. And now, he has taken on a new role, perhaps the most significant yet: commissioning.

During the pandemic, he conceived and started the North American Indigenous Songbook, a project that aims to create a new body of vocal works by Native American composers. A set from the first round of songs will be premiered Nov. 16 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, including pieces with a firm grounding in traditional styles as well as forays into avant-garde music and groovier singer-songwriter veins.

“I find this project to be beautiful in the way that it expands the repertoire,” Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon, a contributor, said in an interview. “And it just lets people know who of us making music exist from tribal backgrounds.”
The idea for the songbook emerged in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Long is warm, even sentimental, but he can also be direct to the point of bluntness. He recalled how artists started coming to him four years ago “freaked out with guilt,” suddenly interested in performing works by people other than white men. They asked if he knew of songs by Native American composers.

“But there were none,” he said. “Really, hardly any.”

For him, this is a corollary to the broader invisibility of Natives and their culture: “People don’t look at us, hardly ever. The most educated people don’t know almost anything about us.”

The Trail of Tears, the American government’s forced displacement of tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the Southeast, brought both sides of Long’s family to Oklahoma in the 19th century. His mother’s Choctaw family was poor, but his father’s, Muscogee Creek, ended up in an area where oil was discovered.

“He grew up in a nice house,” Long said. “He looked like a little rich kid. And I would not have ended up like I did if I did not have the benefit of ancestors in those generations with wealth. The oil eventually dried up, but the psychology, the sense of pride and success, was still there.”

As a boy in small-town Holdenville, Okla., Long grew obsessed with his mother’s Beethoven records, and “consumed by” classical music in general. When his early experiments on a toy piano were advancing, his parents borrowed a real piano from family members, and he became the first student of a local teenager. She turned out to be a talented teacher; he was 5, and flourished.

Introverted, he had a private fantasy life full of synesthetic meldings of sound and image. He could play with toy cars for hours, imagining each as a different flutist with a sound influenced by the car’s shape and shininess. He would hold mock violin auditions in his mind, creating teams of fantasy players whose styles were determined by the visual qualities of their names.

“I lived in my head a lot,” he said. “My parents gave me freedom because I was just in my room quietly.”

It wasn’t the only way that Long was quietly different. “Growing up gay in Oklahoma, in the Bible Belt, in the ’80s during AIDS,” he said, “I felt great shame about myself. Both, in a way, for being Indian and for being gay.”

He was terrified of being associated with the out gays at Oklahoma City University when he was an undergraduate there. And his sense of guilt and unworthiness persisted through his time in the master’s program at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. — where he now teaches and directs the opera program — and a move to New York City in 1994.
“Despite everything that I had, and where I was and where I was working, I was kind of living the life of a reservation Indian,” he said. “I was getting wasted, like so much. I was living out a life of shame.”

Slowly, with age, he grew more focused and confident. He met his future husband, baritone and teacher Christopher Dylan Herbert, in 2003, and started to conduct. It wasn’t an easy fit at first.

“The biggest thing about conducting is, it’s psychology, group psychology,” he said. “And I didn’t have any of that. I didn’t want to be on a podium; I didn’t want to be a maestro.”

He also didn’t want to be typecast. Long had been mentored by Louis Ballard, the longtime dean of Native American composers, and participated in some of the rare programs that brought together the handful of Native artists working in the Western classical sphere. But he feared being seen as a diversity hire.

“I was always hesitant about using being Indian for my career,” he said. “I saw people doing that, and I was disgusted by it. Then I got invited to do ‘Missing’ in Canada.”

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