Every week, Pars3c profiles an interesting person with connections in the space field. This time it’s Anne Cabrera (@composerAnne), a musician in North Carolina and co-founder of Chubby Crow Records along with her husband, Bill.

When the Columbia space shuttle broke up on Feb. 1, 2003, Cabrera felt moved to compose music about the fallen astronauts — talking not only about the tragedy, but also the successful science mission that wrapped up before then. The result was the CD Columbia: We Dare to Dream.

Her next project will showcase music a little bit further from Earth, as she explains to Pars3c.

1) Bad things happen in many fields of life. What drew you to compose about the Columbia disaster?

It wasn’t something I planned, that’s for sure! I suppose the root of this music began with my father’s death.  But to know what that really means, I must share a tidbit of who he was: my dad Hiden T. Cox was a prominent scientist, one of the first biologists asked by NASA to come work on Project Mercury. He helped put astronauts Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn into space! And he ended up being a driving force in setting up NASA’s first Office of Public Affairs and received a special commendation for doing so.

I was an only child, very close to my dad and very proud of him. So imagine what it was like having lunch with him one day, so happily, and then, suddenly, two weeks later he was gone. It was the most horrible shock of my life.  As if that wasn’t enough, then my mother died – only weeks later. To top it off, I then contracted meningitis and almost didn’t make it myself. The Columbia disaster followed on the heels of all that.

So I was actually still recuperating and sitting next to my piano when I heard the news of Columbia, and I think my heart was still open and raw from my own losses, and so this music came pouring out. All I could think about were the families of those astronauts –  the families that had to have been as agonized and stunned and near-paralyzed as I still was.

One day my husband told me, “You have to put this out there. You have to do this. People need to hear this music.” And I said, “But how? We can’t afford even one hour of studio time!”  And he said, “We’ll do it ourselves, all of it. Somehow, we’ll do it.” And I knew he was right. That’s the exact moment when I first thought of this music as a CD, a tribute CD.

2) You mention in your liner notes that before the disaster, you barely followed NASA and weren’t aware that the crew was even in space at that time. Yet your CD, published five years later, is full of accurate NASA language like the words “payload” and “microgravity”. How were you able to bridge the gap in understanding space between the time of the breakup and your CD’s release?

Well, my grandfather was an astronomer and, as you know now, my dad was a scientist. So every day of my childhood upbringing was filled with acronyms and big scientific words! It was only when I got older and left home that I lost touch with that, that I forgot all those words.

Fast forward to the horrific day of the Columbia disaster, and that morning, suddenly there was a rush of the past in my face - you know, like catching a whiff of a childhood smell, a familiar “perfume” called “NASA.” I was acutely aware of all the space science from my past, but also aware that I didn’t know what had just happened. Here was a seven-member crew that had flown in space, for everyone including me, they had actually flown for me to make my life better and yet I didn’t know their names. And that really bothered me, a lot.

So I started staying up late, Googling their names on the internet, looking for every article, every interview, every video about each one of them. I was reading everything about their backgrounds, everything about the science experiments that they had been working on, and after almost two years of doing this constantly night after night, it felt like I knew them, like I finally knew the STS-107 crew.

3) Your added challenge in composing music at a synthesizer is you also have to pick which sounds/instruments to use in different songs — like the horns in “Hangar Doors” or the off-tune chimes in “Payload”. Tell me about how you made these decisions for “Columbia”.

Well, first of all, composing for synthesizer is like crayons – really great crayons! Remember how you felt as a kid when you got your first box of 32 crayons? Felt like the sky was the limit, right? Well, composing with today’s modern synthesizer takes composition to a whole new level: now there is no limit to that sky. There are all kinds of sounds you can come up with that cannot be produced by any normal orchestral instrument.

Seriously, a guiding light for me in composing is remembering to match my created synthesizer sounds to the sounds in my head. And the sounds in my head come from somewhere else, from beyond if I am lucky — I am just the conduit. That really is the job of a composer; you know, in the job description box you fill in “conduit.” Haha!

Anyway, you have this incoming stuff (some people like to brag and call it “inspiration”), and it sets up this “film” going in your mind, an almost-visual “film” of sound that’s going through your mind, and you’re trying to match what you come up with at the keyboard to what you “hear” in this “film” of sound that’s going through your mind.

So now, with this CD, how can YOU hear them (the crew), exactly, in this music? Well, if you listen very closely, not as background music but with your full attention, you can hear more than a hundred “mini-tributes” throughout the entire CD.

Here’s a good example: Dave Brown was one of the STS-107 mission specialists. He was also quite a renaissance man, versatile at many things including being an olympic-level gymnast! So, what was the musical result?  Smack dab in the middle of the waltz section in the piece “Microgravity,” what do you hear? A circus calliope!  I synthesized a calliope, and played it to sound just like a traditional circus calliope. You only hear it for about eight measures, but it’s pretty obvious, because for that short time it sounds just like a circus!

That’s my “Dave Brown tribute” – well, one of many such “mini-tributes” in the CD to him, and to the rest of the crew and their families, and to everyone involved with space shuttle Columbia.

4) I note that Kalpana Chawla’s husband, Jean-Pierre Harrison, generously allowed you to use his late wife’s name for one of the compositions. What were the reactions of the family and of NASA as you went through creating the CD in honour of STS-107?

Harrison is the only STS-107 family member I’m aware of who knows of this musical tribute CD. He was most gracious and sensitive and seemed to genuinely appreciate the music, comparing sections of it to other composers that I hold in high regard. It meant the world to me when he wrote that he appreciated our efforts and hard work.  I feel very indebted to him for his kindness.

But as far as the other Columbia families, regretably I’ve not had much luck in reaching them regarding the CD and I’m truly saddened by this. My husband (who is my audio engineer) and I have attempted to reach the families, via e-mails and letters to various NASA sites and people, followed leads, made phone calls – but never quite gotten through.

We’ve always had mixed feelings on this, though. For the families to hear it would be for them to go through it all again, in a sense. And the last thing we want is to bring them any more heartache. But after six years of non-stop work on this project, it is hard for me not to see the music come full circle. Why? Because, it is a tribute to THEM, to heroes, as well as to the loved ones they lost.

So, I’m still hoping to somehow reach the families. I do want them to know that I still think of them every day and am inspired, and that we personally give some of the meager proceeds of any CD sales to science scholarships. I especially hope that STS-107 Commander Rick Husband’s children are happy to find out that we purposely released the “Columbia” CD on July 12, their father’s birthday.

5) Your website hints at another CD in the works. Clues?

I’ll confess: I’m a rover-hugger! I’ve been following the highs and lows of the two beloved rovers Spirit and Opportunity and their amazing adventures on Mars for years. I think it’s one of the greatest stories ever, and it’s still going on!  So it’s looking like my next CD could be about them and their incredible team.

Yep, woohoo, we’re going to Mars! But, just like the years it took to get to Mars, this music could take awhile — it’s only in the beginning stages and already feeling very epic.

High 5