CREATIVE REACTIONS CONTEST 22/23 WRITING & DRAWING
Vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY CONCERTS
CREATIVE REACTIONS CONTEST
AWARD WINNERS
First Place (WRITING) Youngseo Lee ’25
Second Place (WRITING) Yaashree Himatsingka ’24
Honorable-Mention (DRAWING) Chas Brown ’26
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ABOUT THE 2022-2023
JAZZ VOCALIST CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT brought a new work inspired by author Toni Morrison’s archives to our Performances Up Close series in April 2023 — part of a campus-wide celebration of the former Princeton University Professor’s winning the Nobel Prize in Literature 30 years ago. Princeton University undergraduate and graduate students in attendance used her new composition as their own source of inspiration for creating a written or drawn contest submission. The anonymous entries were reviewed in two rounds of judging.
CREATIVE REACTIONS CONTEST A contest designed to capture the impact of music as perceived by Princeton University undergraduate and graduate students.
Vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant
FINAL JURY (WRITING): Aleksandar Hemon, Princeton University Professor of Creative Writing Dorothea von Moltke, Princeton University Concerts Committee Member/Owner of Labyrinth Books Final Jury (Drawing): Marsha Levin-Rojer, Artist Tom Uhlein, Princeton University Concerts Graphic Designer
Sponsored by Princeton University Concerts
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Vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant with Painist Sullivan Fortner
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WINNERS Youngseo Lee ’25 Yaashree Himatsingka ’24 Chas Brown ’26
FIRST PLACE Youngseo Lee ’25
Haikus For Beauty After All dear toni —
only
dear jazz — dear jazz &
the edges went ablaze &
echoes — i mean dear memory —
pages have survived.
we wanted the high spelling & spilling elders from each seam, i came with bottled water
dear piano, light
notes, flat then floating, beauty easy after all. reflected glossy
dragging in the deep archives,
over the water
-graves. waiting for homecoming
quiet hollow shades,
through time & empire.
ribboned centuries & knots woven in boredom — the sound of it all often escapes me. dear email, dear paper page, dear shield of all ours.
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SECOND PLACE Yaashree Himatsingka ’24 Swamp
It’s finally warm in the second week of April. Gargoyles are drenched
forget that you love to sing. It drains you to write sentences or brush
into the sea. In this moment, the city ceases to be a city. In the blur of
in sunlight, the air is thick and sweet, and pink-cheeked freshmen are
your teeth, so you lie in bed, memorizing the drip stains on your ceiling,
monsoon and from a reasonable distance, the streetlamps along the
splayed on the grass. A graduate student reclines in a hammock slung
longing for rain. Numbness protects you awhile, perhaps because the
bay turn into stars.
between sycamores, luxuriating in the golden heat of afternoon, andVis
vastness of sorrow can’t be contained within the frame of your small
narrowly missed by a poorly lobbed frisbee.
body, but eventually you must find a way to feel again.
I’m not outside with everyone else. This is the third day I’ve
hurts the most. I shed the cocoon of my patterned blanket, noting
spent in my room, in bed, from fatigue or a lack of will to do otherwise.
dust and spores that fill the air this time of year. She glides between
that the floral sanganeri print is unusually vivid in this light – wide
Imagine, my bed grew legs and walked to Princeton Junction, put me
registers, inflecting her low, silvery timbre with the lightness of
leaves in a greenish cobalt, petals ruby-rich like merlot. I walk
on a train to the city, which promptly broke down and landed me in a
clouds, weaving a tapestry of sound that swathes each one of us. I
towards the window.
swamp in Metuchen.
drape myself in the velvet of her voice. As she turns, the vines from
What is your need to journey from color to color?
What does blue mean to you, and what can yellow do for you?
her robes climb up the balustrade, fresh green tendrils curling and
A green splodge of courtyard is visible through the glass. I
Blue and yellow don’t exist here. I’ll learn them again when
swaying in tempo. The room fills with whorls of honeysuckle, creamy
wipe it to reveal bluish lupines and soft white begonias; emerald green
I return to the Real World, when I’ve moved past this episode. In the
white and fragrant, as Cécile and Sullivan parley in legato, bending and
hostas with lavender blooms; blushing magnolias and scarlet-lipped
swamp, under the vacant pale of sky, the sludge is grey and wet and
buckling, swishing and stepping in syncopated synchrony. Heads tick,
cardinals; sapphire foxgloves and sunlit buttercups. The world is
glutinous and it pulls me down, down.
heels click. I breathe it all in from the balcony, and something
supersaturated with the coming of rain, and I hunger for color.
What does color mean to you when there’s so much unfixable
inside me thaws.
pain?
The world bursts forth in lurid color! Cécile’s upper I can’t move my limbs, my bed is damp, and the fan has
stilled to a whir. Squares of white sunlight on the wall make my eyes hurt, so I press them shut. Grey slithers into my thoughts. Grey
flourishes glimmer like raindrops on a wind, transporting me home, to Mumbai, to the first rain of monsoon. I’m standing on a sea-facing promenade. The wind brings
swamps up my mind, and as I fall into the slick walled well of myself,
the salty smell of the sea onto land, and I can feel its grit and spray. As
weeds coil me in a thicket, beetles whisper in my ear like the black grin
late afternoon relaxes into early evening, the sky is swept by mournful
of night, color becomes an impossible concept, and I resist nothing.
yellows, fiery pinks. A mango sun dips low beneath the smoggy horizon,
What does rain mean to you when all that you hoped for is dead?
sinking slowly into an Arabian Sea choked by sewage and cement.
The thing about depression is that it isn’t all roiling
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Cécile sings to me like spring rain, washing away the
Princeton. The steady thrum of rain outside my window. Cécile says to write when hope is dead, so I decide to write when it
Wetness on my cheek. Dark droplets begin to fall,
breakdowns, tears, and turbulence. At its worst, depression is stasis.
intermittently at first, then in thick, icy sheets that soak through my
As the color bleeds out of your world and greyness settles in, you
clothes and collect in an inky puddle at my feet, draining, eventually,
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HONORABLEMENTION Chas Brown ’26
Writing In The Dark
This work is called “Writing in the Dark,” and I was inspired by Cecile’s reference to the Georgia law that banned anyone from teaching slaves to read or write, and then listed in a starkly matter-of-fact manner the terrible punishments that were not only legal but legally mandated. Toni Morrison is one of the most proficient writers of our time, and her success as a black woman in this domain of writing that was so actively denied to black people in America for so long is incredibly striking. I thought that by putting some images of Morrison’s writings together in a piece with documents about slavery—along with imagery referencing writing and slavery generally—could remind viewers of this amazing achievement and the long way black people have come in America, but also of the fact that this history by no means entirely erased, or burned away, today. To call back to Cecile’s piece, there still exist glowing embers today from the scorching fires of slavery, and they continue to cast dark shadows. I try to play with fire and shadow and writing imagery in my composition. The stack of books, typewriter, and writing utensils reference writing. The figures in the bottom and the motif of fire and shadow could reference slavery. One note: I would have liked to have found and included more meaningful documents in the drawing, but due to my lack of time and understanding, I just used pictures of some of Toni Morrison’s writings, documents discussing the abolition of slavery, and of course in the background some writing that is similar to the Georgia law referenced in the song. Perhaps I could develop the piece further in the future.
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STUDENT
BIOS
FIRST PLACE
SECOND PLACE
HONORABLEMENTION
YOUNGSEO LEE ’25
YAASHREE HIMATSINGKA ’24
CHAS BROWN ’26
Writing first place-winner Youngseo Lee, Class of 2025,
Writing second place-winner Yaashree Himatsingka, Class
Drawing honorable-mention recipient Chas Brown, Class
of 2024, from Mumbai, India has always considered music to
of 2026, from Beaufort, SC, is researching economic and
be a source of community and healing. A pianist and singer,
social issues as part of his academic pursuits. Although
she has also served on the Princeton University Art Museum’s
he does not play an instrument, Chas has been eager to
Student Advisory Board. Passionate about climate change,
take advantage of opportunities on campus to learn about
Yaashree was one of twenty-four sophomores in her year
music, and entered the Creative Reactions Contest as a
to receive a Dale Summer Award to pursue a project about
fun music-to-art translation challenge. “Cécile McLorin
environmental education in Kanha National Park in Madhya
Salvant’s performance was very memorable, and the task
Pradesh, India. The judges were impressed by the way in
of brainstorming visual reactions to it made it even more
which Yaashree’s intimate essay lets us into the experience of
stimulating,” he shares. From a large, multi-talented
a sustained kind of suffering and shows us how, in opening
family that includes a twin sister and three younger triplet
oneself up to song, it’s possible to open back up to the world.
sisters, Chas has also written for The Daily Prince during his
Yaashree is pursuing a concentration in History.
first year on campus and does illustrations for the Nassau
from Chandler, AZ has enjoyed discovering and sharing a lot of wonderful new music by serving as a DJ for the WPRB 103.3 FM radio station on campus. Having played a handful of instruments when she was younger, she now considers writing to be the primary way in which she makes sense of the world. Youngseo regularly writes poetry and creative nonfiction; translates from Korean; and is the founding editor-in-chief of Pollux Journal, a literary magazine dedicated to multilingualism, an assistant poetry editor at Split Lip Mag, and an interviews editor and translator at The Hanok Review. Her writing has been nominated for the Best of Net, and recognized by Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist, and National YoungArts Foundation, among other distinctions. The judges selected her winning submission, “Haikus for beauty after all,” for the way in which it looks with every line-break and rhythm-change for an elusive “inherited sound”—the linked poems composing their own jazz riff in response to Cecile McLorin Salvant’s performance. Youngseo is pursuing a concentration in Electrical &
Weekly. The judges responded to the strong sense of force and movement in his drawing, and the way in which it referenced Morrison’s writing, glowing embers, and dark shadows depicted in the music at the concert. His drawing was inspired by Cécile McLorin Salvant reference to the Georgia law that banned anyone from teaching slaves to read or write.
Computer Engineering.
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puc.princeton.edu
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