When esperanza spalding sits outside in prayer or meditation and allows herself to sing whatever comes up, what emerges is the guidance that she was sent there for. Regarding composition, the five-time Grammy Award^®–winning bassist, singer, and composer says, 

“I have these memories of being in song composition and having a sense of what I hope to portray lyrically or musically and know I have no idea how to bring those elements together. I want to distill it all into one line these five ideas…there is this point where it almost feels like a clear slice, comes from behind or from inside and it slices through all the elements of what you brought together, and its wake is that line. Or that chord.”

Even if you don’t subscribe to her spiritual ideal of music making, spalding believes that the musical experiences from which artists draw extends to and from lineages beyond them. Her sound, her aesthetic, the way she moves her body, so much of spalding’s practice as a writer and musician hinges on lineage and influences. Even if we do not have the access or resources to identify where we are in relation to a lineage, spalding says, “We are already in study of those lineages, the lineages are studying us.” 

For esperanza spalding the music in the composition may sometimes begin in prayer and meditation, but it always begins with the desire to actualize love. 

I was just looking at this piece I was trying to write for this Library of Congress commission. I was looking at an early draft of this violin concerto, and noticing in it that it felt very sterile because I was trying to write before there was will and love. And I don’t feel the love in it and the life in it. Maybe [the music] starts in the necessity to write something that’s beyond a deadline. 

spalding, whose critically-acclaimed album, Esperanza, stayed on the Billboard chart for over 70 weeks, has played twice at the White House as well as for U.S. President Barack Obama three times. She began her current professorship at Harvard University in 2017. Whether she is writing for the Library of Congress, President Obama’s Nobel Prize reception, or for herself outside in prayer, for esperanza spalding, the music starts with “whatever brings [her] to the instrument, whatever gets [her] humming something. It’s in the unseen place [and] it often starts with a sound that’s already coming out of [her] mouth.”