Sova – An Xperience Interview

The Wisdom Behind Sova

Acclaimed local pianist Sova (aka Sophia Subbayya Vastek) talks with Sara Busone about her new album, the meaning behind her chosen name, performing vs composing, and alleyways.

By Sara Busone.

RRX: I’ve noticed in some of your videos you seem to have a penchant for alleyways!

SV: Yeah!  You know, I didn’t even really realize that.  I mean, I’ve only really shot two videos in the alley, and it’s directly behind our house in Troy and … I don’t know, I just like the way it looks.  It feels very connected to my home, and it’s right there, so it’s kind of easy. So, I don’t know … just kind of happened that way.

RRX: It looks like you did an announcement for the name Sova, which I understand is a mash-up of your first and last name.  During your announcement in March, you said you’re “not turning away from who I am. Rather, it’s a conscious decision to choose who I am.”  I was just wondering if you could elaborate on that.

SV:  That’s a great question.  I think, you know, obviously we’re born with names. I really love my full name … some of the stuff that I talked about when I announced that name change was just … how all of my names, they mean so much to me … they kind of hold different pieces of my heritage from my mom’s side and my dad’s side, and … all of that is like very dear and important. It also was kind of grandfathered in a way with my earlier musical career, and … my artistic practice has been changing a lot over the last several years, and I was just kind of getting to a point where my name just didn’t feel right for the music that I was making, and … I don’t know that I honestly have any other way of really explaining that. It was just kind of a gut feeling.  And … I honestly hemmed and hawed for a long time. I had toyed with the idea of changing it before … you do things when you do things and when the time is right, and so I just kind of pushed myself to finally do it, and it feels really good. There’s definitely like a big, kind of confusing period. I mean, it’s been a while since I announced the name change, but … yeah … in the digital age it’s so hard to do something like that, but it does feel worth it; it feels really good.

RRX: I do remember when I looked you up on YouTube, you have music under your full name (Sophia Subbayya Vastek). I was curious about that.  I think it’s a great name. I like Sova!

SV: Thank you. Yeah, and the other thing about it too is, I mean, I kind of had mashed it up, and I liked the way it sounded, and then I realized sort of after the fact … I mean, before I had announced it, but I realized that it was a word in Polish, and actually several other languages, that means owl. And my dad’s native language was Polish, so … my name Sophia means wisdom, which owls are also associated with. So there are all these … pathways that felt like they were leading me to Sova, right?

RRX: It looks like you and Sam Torres got awarded in May of last year at Troy Music Hall. You were given the Community Artist Award.  That’s amazing. How did that feel?

SV: It felt really good. We have a really lovely relationship with the Troy Music Hall. They’ve just been incredible to us. We’ve collaborated with them for the last six years on the Lift series, and we just finished up the last show for our sixth season actually on Wednesday of this week. And yeah, it’s just, they’ve been so wonderful both to us and also to the local music community and the way that they welcome in the artists that we’re bringing to the Lift series. It’s just been really incredible, and that … it was a huge honor that they thought of us for that.

RRX: And it looks like you have an album coming out, “Alight!” And then you had “Histories.” Tell me a little bit about how you feel that your music has evolved.  I’m just curious what you think about when you look back, like when you look back at your work, what you’ve noticed over the years.

SV:  It’s changed pretty significantly. So, I came up as a classical musician. That’s my training. My first two albums …“Histories” and also my “Lili” album are, I would say, classical albums. I was very focused on contemporary classical music, but even so, I was playing music written by other people, and then, I forget exactly when, but there was … there had just been kind of a slow shift happening for a while where I would say that … I was feeling not settled as a musician. I just kind of felt like something was missing. I was not really happy with what I was doing musically, and it took me a while to kind of figure out what was missing … and then it sounds so … I feel like it’s kind of hard to explain if someone isn’t more familiar with the classical music world … but in classical music, the performers and composers or people who write music are often very separate tracks.  So you get on either a performance track or you get on a composing track, and that’s kind of your lane … and so very early on I was on a performance track. I was playing piano. I was very good at it as a kid and … I was shuttled in that direction. I look back, and it’s really sad and kind of unfortunate that there was never a person or kind of a moment where I was encouraged to write my own music. So it took me quite a while into my kind of early adulthood for me to realize that that is what I had been missing in my own music making, which sounds so silly saying it out loud, but … that’s what it was. So eventually I just started writing my music and it just kind of came pouring out, and I would say that was … the big shift was focusing now on my own voice rather than interpreting other people’s music. 

RRX: And I did notice that you had sheet music books that you published last year. They were limited edition, lay-flat, bespoke books. Tell me about that.

SV: That was a really fun project to work on. I still have a couple copies left. I think, again, kind of dealing with the baggage of classical music, I was really hesitant to notate my music. None of my music starts notated.  It comes from an improvisational place. Whenever I’m playing or writing music, it’s all just … it’s truly in my head, or it’s recorded. And so I was hesitant to write it down because I think I was … I don’t know how to explain it … I was kind of becoming a composer with a capital C, which is something that I had sort of run away from, I would say, in classical music. But … I came around to it. I’ve had a few people ask me about it over the years … if I was ever gonna publish any sheet music. I just got to a point where I was ready, and I was ready to share the music in a way that allowed other people to play it. And when I realized that this was just another way of sharing music in community with people, that was when I was like, “OK, this is something I want to work on, and I want to make it really beautiful. I want collaborators that I care about to work on it, to design it, to print it … I don’t want to just have it be … a thing like … I want it to be beautiful and like kind of an art object on its own.” So, that is what I set out to do, and I’m really proud of how they came out. Another Troy person, Patrick Kiley at PS Hudson, did the printing,  and I think they turned out really beautifully.

RRX: Is that something you’re going to do again someday, do you think?

SV: Maybe, yeah, we’ll see. They’re definitely expensive to produce, and I feel like I wanna kind of see how this next album does and if it seems like there’s some interest for sheet music, then I would definitely consider doing another one.  I think I’m very, as a musician, especially … so much of our work is ephemeral and digital, and I’m just so taken with the idea that I want people to have objects in their hands that go with the music, whether it’s a vinyl record or a CD or a book or maybe even a zine. I’m kind of interested in making zines. I don’t know anything about it, but I’m interested in it. Just like … the ways that you can connect with listeners and community members and fans, for lack of a … exchanging a physical object of some kind is just really powerful. It sits in your house somewhere … I have records that are just really dear to me or other objects from musicians that I care about and then I pass by it and I see it and I think about them or I think about that music and maybe I go listen to it and that’s just like such a, I don’t know, it’s just a powerful thing that I think we can do.

RRX: Yeah, I get that. So I can’t wait for you to put out a zine. That would be cool. Is there anything else coming up on the horizon for you?

SV:  I mean, I haven’t announced the full tour yet, but there will be a tour. I would love to shout out … I’m doing kind of launch show (for the album) on the release day at Troy Music Hall in their new music hub space. So that’s gonna be on September 4th, and I’m really excited to launch the album locally with like my friends and people that I care about, and I think that’s gonna be a lot of fun.