Continuous Revelations Interview with Alexandra Fierra

Below is a snippet of our founder Alexandra Fierra's conversation with Continuous Revelations.

CR:

Alexandra, what is your origin story?  When did you first fall in love with music and/or creating instruments?

AF:

Hi!  Thank you for thinking this project is worth your time, there’s a lot to delve into, but I will try. 

So an origin story…I am from Pennsylvania, a small town called Emmaus where my family was in publishing around organics, Rodale Press (1939-2017).

I'm trying to think what my first inventive idea was, or why….I do have a photo of an excerpt from a notebook in maybe 1st grade where I wrote something to the effect: “I really like Thomas Edison, because without him we would be in the dark, and he got in a lot of trouble!” Many of my family remember me as someone who got into trouble, but usually the kind that came from experiments rather than run-ins with the law. However, I got a lot of detentions in high school for very dubious things, like forgetting to go back to a study hall because I was reading in the library (I got three detentions just for that once!! Can you imagine?).

Anyway, I did have some inventors in my family going way back. My great grandfather was JI Rodale who started an electrical devices company with his brother in the 1920’s. They made different adaptors for plugs and I believe made rather good money in that time. He used the money from it to start his publishing company to disseminate Knowledge about Organic agriculture and healthy living to the people of America and eventually the world. He founded Organic Gardening magazine as well as Prevention). 

I bring this up because I thought that route of publishing would be my life. I was actually surprisingly a luddite for much of my life before I was 30. I wrote on a typewriter, refused to buy an iPhone or an iPod, eschewed elevators where possible, ate raw veggies, wrote pen and ink in a mountain of journals.  I bought plain clothes and thought fashion was worthless.

He worked with, and his daughter married, Joel Spira, who invented the household dimmer and began the company Lutron based out of Pennsylvania. I knew about this as a kid and thought it amazing, without knowing the technology inside of it could ever be understood.   I met him several times in my life and he had tremendous charisma and intelligence, but also a joie de vivre; he loved growing Asian pears and had orchards of them, but then also invented the dimmer. I think between him and JI Rodale I saw that inventors can be many things, and always should be learning.

When it comes to music I think my first memories were when I was before 6 and lived in this old house in Emmaus, PA in the same house with my cousin's family. My cousin was a few years older than me, but she loved music. She would play Madonna and dress up and dance and sing all around the house. She would play Michael Jackson and we would dance around like feral children to this exciting new music. This was in the 80’s when it was coming through the radio and on cassette, the sound was rich and magical and exciting. I still love this music immensely.  

I also remember crying a lot to music when I was a very small child, all the movies I cried in, the Jungle Book, An American Tail, A League of Their Own, The Lion King. I love how music and images filled me with intense emotions inside that tiny Emmaus movie theater next to a freight train line that would come by twice at least every movie. I think that was a pretty amazing sonic experience, hearing these soundtracks and the wild thunderous train sound that shook your being. So many people hated it and it was rarely full there, but I began to love it. The train was a reminder the world is always bigger than your perception of it. There's always things entering and leaving your purview. And those deep rumbling sounds were as beautiful as a sky full of thunder.

I think the most heartbreaking moments of my early life were around music. I remember in 4th grade wanting to play the cello, and I loved it. It was the most beautiful thing I ever thought I could hold in my hands. I remember trying to make music, and practicing, and my father really not being supportive. After a month he said I had to stop because he was tired of driving me to school and the cello was the only instrument that couldn’t go on the bus. 

Two school years later this flier went around for a school chorus. I thought that would be fun, and I wanted to sing like Madonna or Michael Jackson, but there was this form that a parent had to sign, and my father refused. “Why would you ever want to do that??”  I think the worst part was when the chorus lessons were going on, I would have to sit alone in our classroom, with the lights off, while everyone was off singing down the hall in the auditorium. I was the only one whose parents wouldn’t sign their form. It was very lonely. But I soon learned how to perfectly mimic my parents' handwriting. And the juxtaposition of a group singing down a hall mixed with the silence and sounds of a rattling window AC, it's a kind of music I guess.

From these travails the intense and somber seed of music was planted in my heart. When I was sitting in that classroom alone in the dark, hearing everyone singing down the hall. I made an emotional symphony in myself, something close to Mahler’s 5th or Debussy’s Claire de lune. I created music I could never share, and as sad as that was, I still felt one day I would make music.

Read the full interview on Continuous Revelations: https://www.continuousrevelations.com/interviews/an-interview-with-alexandra-fierra-of-eternal-research