DIANE BELL
pieces.
While scream therapy isn’t a formal psychological treatment for mental health disorders or trauma, screaming is a component of meditation therapy believed to alleviate tension and mental blocks.
At Uppsala University in Sweden, students have a decades-old tradition of opening their dorm windows at 10 p.m., leaning out and screaming to relieve tension.
Between October 2020 and Jan. 21, 2021, N.Y. elementary school teacher Chris Gollmar set up a hotline called “Just Scream!” He invited callers to scream for as long and as loud as they wanted to relieve stress. More than 150,000 recordings were left.
In 2021, The New York Times published a multimedia series on overburdened parents and set up a Primal Scream Line inviting mothers in need of venting, yelling or crying due to the stress of the pandemic to let out their emotions for one minute in the hope of getting some closure.
Tierra, a classically trained avant garde musician, only performs compositions by living composers nowadays to give their work exposure. One of them is her husband, pianist and composer Chetan Tierra.
Of the seven musical works on tonight’s program, some are world premieres.
Four were written specifically for her by musician friends. Two were by Italian composers. A third was featured in a voice memo from 2010 that she discovered over the holiday when cleaning out old phone messages.
It was from a colleague, composer Jo Verdis, of Texas, when they were students studying together at a music and dance conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium.
“I pushed the play button and beautiful, joyous music poured out, and I couldn’t stop playing it. It made me so happy,” Tierra says. So, she called Verdis and asked for the rest of the piece, but her friend informed her she never finished it.
With Tierra’s encouragement, Verdis completed it within a month so Tierra could play it in tonight’s concert. It’s called, “Gaudium,” the Latin word for joy.
Tierra, the daughter of musician parents, began playing piano at age 6 in her hometown of Commerce, Texas. “Piano was a means to my emotional expression,” she says. “I don’t know myself without the piano. We are merged into one.”
She went on to major in music at Baylor University, then received her master’s degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Cliburn contest winner, Antonio Pompa-Baldi. That is where she met fellow student and husband-to-be Chetan Tierra.
The couple moved to San Diego in 2010 on a f luke. They took a break from classical music and, indulging their passion for rock music, formed two rock bands, The Mosaic Quartet and Skyterra, which won a “best new artist” San Diego Music Award in 2017.
The couple opted to relocate in San Diego because one of their band members divided his work time between Boston and San Diego, so the Tierras, who were living in Cleveland, opted for San Diego, finding a home in Clairemont. “We fell in love with San Diego,” Tierra says.
They co-founded the San Diego Piano Academy in 2017 and since have expanded to 164 students and nine instructors.
These days, Tierra only uses scream therapy occasionally — if she feels she needs to release frustration. “I drive down the street and scream in my car. Our dog got very concerned when I was doing it in the house.”
But she endorses it, along with meditation, because the last three years have tested us as humans.
“We’re all here now harboring resentment, anger, frustration, sadness, grief,” she says. “Under the surface, we’re all struggling, but what are we doing about our own well-being?”
The intention of her concert is to proactively promote healing and hope through her selection of music.