Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Echo of an Artist's Life

Tucsonan Jessica Wing was living her dream as a composer in New YOrk - until she lost her battle with cancer. But she lives on through her music.

SANDRA VALDEZ GERDES

Tucson Citizen

Most of us will never know Jessica Grace Wing, but we would have liked to.

Those who knew her say she was unarguably brilliant, creative, intelligent and - at 5 feet 11 - strikingly beautiful. She could discuss any subject with authority, but also hold your hand during a trying moment.

Born in New Haven, Conn. and raised in Tucson, Wing is described as a gothic princess, punk rocker, an intellectual and a Renaissance Woman.

Her dark brown hair was sometimes dyed blue, but with stark confidence she pulled it off. She was down-to-earth, compassionate and had an oddball sense of humor.

At the time of her death last month, Wing was living in Brooklyn, N.Y., and fulfilling her dream of becoming a composer and filmmaker.

"She was this rare combination of drop dead gorgeous and tough. She was super-sharp and talented," but once you got to know her she was also silly and sweet, said Chad Gracia, friend, colleague and executive director of the Inverse Theater in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Wing dedicated much of her time.

Her life was cut short on July 19 after a two-year battle with stage-4 colon cancer. She died less than a week before her 32nd birthday and three weeks shy of the Aug. 9 premiere of "Lost: The Musical."

The modern opera based on the classic tale Hansel and Gretel was written by the Inverse Theater's Kirk Wood Bromley, with music composed by Wing. Wing described the music for "Lost" as a pastiche of romantic-era opera, art song and bluegrass.

The timing of her death so close to the musical's opening - as well as the coincidence with the sadness surrounding "Rent," the hit off-Broadway play whose composer Jonathan Larson died just after the show's final dress rehearsal - sparked such a frenzy that "Lost" premiered to sold-out crowds during its run this month at the New York International Fringe Festival.

The opera has since received a glowing review from The New Yorker that said the show had a "precise, sparkling score."

"I believe that 'Lost' has the potential to become a huge hit," said Wing's mother, Jennifer P. Schneider, a Tucson physician. "The music is so lovely ... but it will take me a long, long while before I can enjoy her music without feeling the pain of her loss," she said.

Wing was diagnosed with colon cancer in July of 2001 about the same time she began work on "Lost." It came as a shock to Wing and her family.

"It was unusual because she was only 29 and she didn't have the usual symptoms such as rectal bleeding or weight loss. She had no symptoms until almost complete intestinal obstruction," Schneider said. "Being a doctor, I think it was extra hard on me because I had a good idea of what was going to happen to her. I couldn't be in denial like a lot of people are in because they don't know better."

Wing continued to work, however, often taking her laptop computer and a stuffed dog with her to chemotherapy treatments. The week before her death, with the cancer now spread to her lungs and brain, but her mind still intact, her goal was to work at least 90 minutes a day. She did so until July 17 when she finished the last piece of the opera.

The work was Wing's most important achievement as a composer, said her father, William H. Wing, and his longtime companion Jacqueline Sharkey.

"It's done. I can't believe it, it's really done,'" her father recalls Wing saying as she struggled to breathe. By Friday July 18, she had deteriorated a little more but managed to file an interview about the opera with Gracia.

By Saturday she was unable to take her medicine because she could not swallow, her father said. She died that night, but not before hearing a taped rehearsal of the play and commenting, "Now I can really say that I am a composer."

As resident composer of the off-Broadway Inverse Theater and one of its founders, Wing had composed scores for five of its plays, including "Othello" and "Midnight Brainwash Revival," but this was by far her most prominent work.

She created many great works during her short time on earth, including writing, art, music and short films. Among her short films were "Candy & Dwayne," "Villanelle," "Pop Tart" and "The Long Road Back," some of which were filmed in Tucson. Her musical works include "Habe Keine Angst," "Burnt Ember," "Lost My Mission" and "Burnt Woman."

"It was important to Jessica to try as many different things as she could, and Jessica wasn't afraid to try," her father said. She had many talents and interests and her next project was always on the horizon.

Maybe the most constant thing about Jessica was her music, said her brother Ben Wing, of Tucson. From piano lessons to her thrash-punk band Turgid Miasma of Existence, her after-college electronica group Weird Blinking Lights (the initials produced her own label Warm-Blooded Love), and her post-college job as a sound engineer, there was always music, Ben Wing said.

Her musical talent was first recognized in the fourth grade after a test of Jessica's musical abilities registered off the scale.

"I was told by the teacher that I had some kind of musical prodigy or genius on my hands and so I owed it to the world not to let it go to waste," William Wing said. However, young Jessica did not like to practice and could not read music, but could play by ear. So she often got out of practicing by conning her teachers into playing the piece first, her father says with a chuckle.

Throughout elementary school, Wing was a gifted student, her mother said, but she had no interest in attending private academic schools. Instead, she studied modern dance and music at Utterback Magnet school, where she received encouragement in her artistic abilities.

She went on to attend University High and graduated in 1988. She excelled in many academic areas, including earning a perfect score on her math SAT, Schneider said. She went on to Bryn Mawr College, an exclusive women's school in Pennsylvania, for a year, before transferring to Stanford University, where she graduated in 1992 with an honors degree in modern thought and literature.

"She just blossomed in all directions," her father, a University of Arizona physicist said, adding that she wanted to explore the full range of human existence, and so experimented with everything. She delved into making films that dealt with the humorous side of life though some of her musical compositions were quite dark.

Michelle Welborn, a friend of Wing's since junior high school said, "I loved seeing her. It was like living vicariously through her. Every time she came back to Tucson she had something new to share. She was constantly immersing herself in something new. She was looking constantly for a new experience, different than what she had experienced before."

Wing always maintained an analytical mind-set and was able to pick out what she thought was the best tidbit or lesson from an experience, Welborn added.

In San Francisco, Wing wrote articles on music and culture for Wired magazine. She posed in a corset and gothed-out clothing for Dark Garden, a corset-maker in San Francisco. And she spent five years as a sound engineer in a rock music studio. In her free time she taught herself guitar and Web site design.

"In many ways she was very much like me," her brother Ben said, "always forging her own path in life and making it up as she went along, rather than following anything preordained.

"One of her greatest assets was she was extremely open-minded and constantly seeking out new subcultures and interests." She was variously a punk, hippie, raver and goth, Ben Wing said.

Oscar Fowler, a computer programmer in Tucson and good friend of Wing's since 1991, said she appreciated subtle qualities in people and was never stereotypical.

"If she was going to plant a garden, she would never plant roses. She'd have to plant some exotic flower," he said.

In 1997, Wing moved to New York to attend film school at Columbia University. She supported herself as a Web designer until she became ill. She lacked only her final project to get her degree when she died.

Her boyfriend of four years, Damian Volpe, a professional sound recorder in the film industry, and some of her fellow Columbia students, plan to edit her final project "Icarus and Aria," and present it next Spring at a film festival sponsored by Columbia.

She worked in spite of her illness and suffered her cancer with great dignity, friends said. She didn't like to dwell on it, and instead focused on enjoying life as she did before her illness. About a month before her death, during a visit with her father, they spoke of mortality.

"I told her how sad I felt and I had trouble keeping from crying," William Wing said. "She said, 'I used to cry a lot, but you can't spend all of your life doing it. Just don't do it.'" Her wish was that those she loved would "live life vibrantly," he said.

She also would have wanted her opera judged on its own merit and not the hype surrounding her death, Volpe said.

"The real story is about a young woman who is really incredibly filled with life, who bizarrely and horribly contracted an illness that she struggled against with great dignity," he said.

"She had a great love of the bizarre and exotic, which manifested itself in her private life and choice of friends, whom I think she loved for their faults as much as in spite of them," Volpe said.

It didn't matter if she was composing, cooking or gardening, he said. She approached every interest with characteristic zeal.

"I don't think she discriminated too much about the medium, since she lived her life itself as art."