Tag: community

Imagining Community at Bang on a Can’s First Marathon

Bang on a Can poster
What is a community in new music? A panel of musicologists attempted to answer this question at the second annual New Music Gathering last January. Community might be manifested in an experimental commune, in the practices of minimalist music, in the radical identity politics of an opera, or in the labor of administrators and institutions. Rather than provide a singular answer to what a new music community might be, our panel provided many. Over the coming weeks, you can read our examinations of new music and community from a variety of historical and ethnographic perspectives. We are very grateful to NewMusicBox for hosting this weekly series, to the organizers of New Music Gathering for sponsoring a thought-provoking conference, and to our home institutions for supporting our research.—Will Robin

“Your ideology cannot write the music for you,” declared composer David Lang in a 1988 Letter to the Editor, published in the New York Times. Lang was responding to a profile of composer Charles Wuorinen, in which the elder serialist railed against the dangers of populism, minimalism, and multiculturalism. In a strong rebuke, Lang chastised Wuorinen for his doctrinaire attitude and the stranglehold that serialism had maintained on American composition. He wrote:

We must recognize that a composer’s world is divided into two major activities: writing the music and associating with those who think and write similarly. Such associations may consider themselves schools of musical thought, and members may be proud of their membership, and they may actually believe that their way of composing is the only legitimate way. It is easy to see that if such a school gets in power it might try to remake the musical world in its own image.[1]

Lang signed his letter “Artistic director, Bang on a Can Festival, New York, N.Y.” A month before it was published, Lang and his colleagues Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe had curated the second annual Bang on a Can marathon on the Lower East Side. And in the twenty-eight years since that letter, Bang on a Can has grown into a multi-faceted umbrella organization that sponsors marathon concerts, an All-Stars ensemble, and the Cantaloupe record label, not to mention a summer festival, marching band, commissioning fund, and State Department partnership. The expansion of Bang on a Can—from its first scrappy marathon in SoHo in 1987 to its presence at Brookfield Place near One World Trade Center today—is remarkable in an age of arts austerity. And the Pulitzer Prizes awarded to Lang in 2008 and Julia Wolfe in 2015 might confirm that it is a movement, if not a school, currently in power; one could similarly argue that Bang on a Can has remade the musical world in its own image.

What might that image be? From the beginnings of Bang on a Can, the collective emphasized community. If for Wuorinen, serialism represented the only legitimate way of composing, then for Lang and his colleagues, community might have represented the only legitimate way of being a composer. The “About” section of the organization’s website declares “Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found.” Or, as Wolfe told an interviewer in 1995:

When David Lang, Michael Gordon, and I found ourselves in New York in 1986, we didn’t see an exciting outlet for our music. Things were very polarized—academic music uptown, with audiences filled with new music specialists, a very critical atmosphere, and everyone in tuxes, and downtown, another uniform, black t-shirts and another serious pretension. Neither side was really fun, and there was a whole new generation of composers who didn’t fit in anywhere.

We wanted to provide a place for new music in society. It wasn’t like other art. People knew who the new painters were, the writers, the filmmakers. But music was perceived as this really elitist thing—academic, clever, scientific, inaccessible. Nobody cared if people came to the concerts. And the music reflected that. It got so removed from life. It was important to us to find a new audience.

So we decided to make a happening. As a joke, we called it the First Annual Bang on a Can Festival. We didn’t think there’d be another one. We put pieces together that were really strong and belonged to different ideologies or not to any ideology, defying category, falling between the cracks.[2]

It is worth examining, then, how exactly that communal ethos came about. If you’ve kept up with our NewMusicBox series, you have already read about several ways in which community is enacted in new music: in the activities of experimental collectives, in the privileging of listening practices, in the aesthetics of avant-garde operas, and in the labor of administrators. Equally essential to the construction of community is the creation of a shared history: a rhetoric and a narrative about who the community is, and what its values are. And in order to create a new kind of community, Bang on a Can had to overplay its hand. Community had to be performed; it was not enough to bring people or musical styles together, they had to be continually emphasized, made a part of the story and eventually the history of the institution.

Bang on a Can’s first marathon, at the Exit Art gallery in SoHo in May 1987, represents an origin point for the kind of community that the founding composers sought to build. So for this essay on new music and community, I’d like to briefly meditate on one particular time slot in that marathon, which has played a perhaps oversized role in the history of Bang on a Can. At 11 p.m., Milton Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer is followed by Steve Reich’s Four Organs–total serialism juxtaposed with early minimalism, uptown next to downtown.

Bang on a Can program

The music of the first Bang on a Can marathon was, as a whole, fairly eclectic: John Cage’s Ryoanji and George Crumb’s Black Angels, Igor Stravinsky’s Agon and Pauline Oliveros’s Tuning Meditation, Lee Hyla’s In Double Light and Lois V Vierk’s Manhattan Cascade. But Reich next to Babbitt wasn’t just a natural result of this mixing of musical styles; it represented a strategic move, one that constructed a specific mission for the nascent organization. In a New York Times review of the 1987 marathon, critic Bernard Holland observed that “the program was arranged with contrast in mind. Thus, as the organizers note with satisfaction, Milton Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer rubbed shoulders with Steve Reich’s Four Organs.”[3] [Emphasis mine.] Bang on a Can not only placed these pieces into juxtaposition, they performed that juxtaposition, making it unmistakable to their audiences. Babbitt himself was certainly aware of his odd-duck status at the concert, as archival audio of his introduction to the Vision and Prayer performance reveals. Following healthy applause, Babbitt slyly remarks:

I’m delighted to hear that my reputation hasn’t penetrated this far downtown, even though I went to school right around the corner. The quiet little piece of mine which you’re about to hear, Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesized tape, is almost certainly the oldest piece on the program – I say almost certainly because we have no chronologies on the program, but I’m almost certain because it’s almost certainly written before many of the composers on the program were born.[4]

And for the Bang on a Can directors, the Reich/Babbitt juxtaposition also had aesthetic implications. As Wolfe put it in 1995, she and her cohort sought out music that fell between the cracks. But they also attempted to program music that they felt represented strongly disparate idioms. In her 2012 dissertation, Wolfe describes the Reich/Babbitt encounter—or non-encounter—of 1987:

Reich entered as Babbitt left, or possibly Babbitt left as Reich entered. There was clearly no interest in meeting on either side. At that point, to our knowledge, no one had programmed the music of Milton Babbitt and Steve Reich on the same event. Babbitt and Reich represented two very different points of view, American Modernism and American Minimalism, or what was called Uptown and Downtown. When Babbitt introduced his piece he joked, “sorry I got here late, but I got lost––Iʼve never been this far downtown before.” At that first marathon concert we embraced this clash of disparate philosophies. We wanted contrasting musics––powerful in their own right regardless of style or aesthetic.[5]

Wolfe titled her dissertation “Embracing the Clash,” and that early “clash” became an all-encompassing metaphor for Bang on a Can, extending out into its programming of non-Western music, rock, and free improvisation. Indeed, the word “eclectic” has clung to the institution more closely than perhaps any other descriptor (the first marathon was billed as an “eclectic supermix,” a phrase that has endured in the organization’s marketing). It is also striking that Wolfe recalls Babbitt as having said that he had never been that far downtown, given that—as Babbitt actually remarked in his introduction—he went to school right around the corner. But the downtown of the 1930s, when Babbitt attended NYU, was quite different from that of the 1980s; it is unsurprising that, in associating Babbitt with the uptown world for which he was later known, Wolfe assumed the composer’s geographical purview did not include SoHo.

The Reich/Babbitt juxtaposition, though, wasn’t only about clashing. It was about resolution: imagining a new kind of new music community, one that would bring together two disparate scenes. As Lang told Kyle Gann in 1993:

When we started BoaC, we looked around and the concerts we saw weren’t exciting. If you went to hear Speculum Musicae, there was invariably one composer doing great stuff in an ugly language, and the others were bad composers working in the same ugly language. Same thing Downtown: there’d be a free, sonic piece by a really good composer and a bad sonic piece right behind it. Pieces were being grouped by ideology, not quality. We thought, “What would happen if you had the best academic piece, the best static piece, the best minimalist piece, the best improv piece, whatever, all next to each other?” At the first festival we played Milton Babbitt’s Vision and Prayer next to Steve Reich’s Four Organs. Musicians knew that if they liked one they weren’t supposed to like the other, but the audience didn’t know that.[6]

Stepping past ideologies, placing oneself not only not within an uptown or downtown camp, but also beyond any squabbles between them, became a core mythos of Bang on a Can. It’s notable that neither the Reich nor the Babbitt was released on the early Bang on a Can albums on the CRI label, which drew from live recordings of the marathons; thirty-five minutes of music within a twelve-hour concert became essential to the history of the institution, not as a tangible sonic document but as a story. Programming Reich alongside Babbitt imagined a musical world in which uptown and downtown were irrelevant, a community that Bang on a Can went on to create in its image.

Bang on a Can poster

Many factors contributed to a sense of community at the early Bang on a Can marathons: a cohort of Yale graduates, beer for sale in the back, composers informally introducing their pieces, the motto “Come and go as you like, or stay all day.” But symbolic gestures create communities as well. And this is, in a way, an ideology, if not the pernicious kind that Lang suggests about Wuorinen. Ideology is part of what constructs communities, sustains them, and keeps them together. The ideology of Wuorinen foregrounded a narrow conception of art music as privileged above other styles and genres, what Lang called in his Letter to the Editor “rooting out dissent with the ardor of holy warriors on a serial jihad”; the ideology of Bang on a Can is that of, as its website declares, “building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders.”[7]


will robin

Will Robin

William Robin is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Two days ago, he defended his dissertation “A Scene Without A Name: Indie Classical and American New Music in the Twenty-First Century,” and in the fall he will begin an appointment as assistant professor of musicology at the University of Maryland. In spring 2015, the Journal of Musicology published his article “Traveling with Ancient Music: Intellectual and Transatlantic Currents in American Psalmody Reform,” which reassesses the Europeanization of American sacred music at the turn of the 19th century by examining the impact of transatlantic travel. Robin is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and received an ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2014 for the NewMusicBox article “Shape Notes, Billings, and American Modernisms.”



1. David Lang, “Body Count,” New York Times, 26 June 1988.


2. Julia Wolfe, quoted in program brochure for Great Performers at Lincoln Center Bang on a Can All-Stars, 15 March 1995.


3. Bernard Holland, “Music: The Bang on a Can Festival,” New York Times, 14 May 1987. Emphasis mine.


4. Milton Babbitt, spoken introduction at Bang on a Can Festival, 11 May 1987. Author’s transcription of archival audio materials from WNYC archives, printed with permission of WNYC.


5. Wolfe, “Embracing the Clash” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012),


6. Lang, quoted in Kyle Gann, “After Ugly Music,” Village Voice, 1 June 1993.


7. Lang, “Body Count”; Bang on a Can, “About Us,” http://bangonacan.org/about_us.

Forging Institutional Networks through BAM’s Next Wave Festival

Brooklyn Academy of Music
What is a community in new music? A panel of musicologists attempted to answer this question at the second annual New Music Gathering last January. Community might be manifested in an experimental commune, in the practices of minimalist music, in the radical identity politics of an opera, or in the labor of administrators and institutions. Rather than provide a singular answer to what a new music community might be, our panel provided many. Over the coming weeks, you can read our examinations of new music and community from a variety of historical and ethnographic perspectives. We are very grateful to NewMusicBox for hosting this weekly series, to the organizers of New Music Gathering for sponsoring a thought-provoking conference, and to our home institutions for supporting our research.—Will Robin

A 1982 advertisement for Cutty Sark whiskey placed Philip Glass above a scotch on the rocks. Composers aren’t the usual suspects for hard liquor ads, so why is Glass here? Glass recently admitted in his memoir that he agreed to do the ad because he needed the money ($15,000) to fund making the orchestra parts for his opera Akhnaten (1983).[1] Still, a more intriguing question remains: why would the image of Glass appeal to the target consumer of Cutty Sark whiskey? A brief biography in the ad reads, “Success hasn’t made Glass any less of a maverick.” Like the designers of this ad, critics and scholars generally view Glass as the sole agent of his popularity, operating outside of traditional musical institutions as an iconoclastic “American maverick.”[2]

Glass Cutty Sark ad

It is true that Glass had achieved considerable fame working independently of the university, which was the main “institution” for contemporary composers at the time. The ad plays to this familiar image of Glass as a self-made man. Glass rose to fame by his bootstraps: he worked as a taxi driver and plumber to pay the bills. His minimalist music first attracted attention in a subculture of 1960s New York avant-garde artists and audiences, the inhabitants of the lofts and galleries of lower Manhattan. Perhaps the quintessential example of Glass’s maverick persona was when he and theater designer/director Robert Wilson rented out the Metropolitan Opera House on its off nights for the 1976 United States premiere of Einstein on the Beach. Beyond the Cutty Sark ad, numerous biographies of Glass memorialize these aspects of his career and perpetuate the idea that Glass rose to fame on his own without institutional support.

In a previous article in this series, Ryan Ebright noted the crucial roles of Glass’s collaborators in seminal works like Satyagraha. Attributing Glass’s success entirely to his creative iconoclasm also ignores the substantial community of impresarios and patrons who have influenced his work and reception history. Just as the whiskey company co-opted Glass’s image, in the 1980s an emergent network of U.S. arts administrators from presenting institutions such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and funding organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation used Glass as the poster child for their own set of concerns. These administrators expressed concern with the scarcity of new American operas and the stagnation of standard repertory in major opera houses of the United States. They were further troubled by the fact that American composers like Glass were receiving more attention in Europe; Glass’s first real opera commissions—Satyagraha (1980) and Akhnaten (1984)—came from state-sponsored opera houses in the Netherlands and Germany. These administrators devised a solution that borrowed from the vital world of avant-garde music theater, and in so doing generated an institutional support system that sustained Glass’s opera career throughout the 1980s and beyond.

Harvey Lichtenstein

Harvey Lichtenstein (Photo by Catherine Noren)

One of the key impresarios who reshaped the American operatic landscape was Harvey Lichtenstein at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). When Lichtenstein became executive director of BAM in 1967, he refashioned it into a principal center for contemporary dance, music, and theater in the U.S. His undertakings culminated in the Next Wave Festival, an annual two-month program of experimental performances that made him a leading impresario of the avant-garde. One of the most successful offerings of the first Next Wave series in 1981 was the American premiere of Satyagraha by Glass. This production was not a singular engagement; over the years, Lichtenstein consistently promoted Glass, lauding him as a crossover artist whose output could reach a wider audience than the conservative fare offered by traditional opera companies.

Between October and December of 1982, Lichtenstein met with prospective Next Wave funders. He proposed that the festival be the nucleus for a national production program involving multiple presenting organizations. Tours of new large-scale works would expose areas outside of New York to the work of American experimental artists—in particular, those who emerged from the Downtown New York scene. United by their belief in the potential of the American experimental music theater vanguard, the Next Wave meetings stimulated conversation between representatives from corporate, national, and private funding entities and Downtown-affiliated artists and administrators.

1983 Next Wave poster

Image courtesy BAM Hamm Archives

Funding meeting minutes from the BAM Hamm archives offer a glimpse of these pivotal administrative discussions. Meeting attendees included representatives from the National Endowment for the Arts, AT&T, the Rockefeller Foundation, Warner Communications, the Ford Foundation, and presenting organizations—Artpark, Walker Art Center, the Spoleto Festival, and UC Berkeley Arts and Lectures. Guest speakers were Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson. Also present were two key players in the Downtown arts scene: Roselee Goldberg, director of communications for Diane von Furstenberg, Inc. and former director of performances at The Kitchen; and Tim Carr, a Next Wave program consultant who also worked for The Kitchen. Indeed, The Kitchen, a smaller, independent organization, had been a hub for avant-garde music, allowing composers like Glass to organize their own concerts and hosting its own festival, New Music New York, in 1979. The fact that Lichtenstein hired Kitchen personnel to help design BAM programming was a testament to his commitment to the creative output of the Downtown scene. Under Lichtenstein’s direction, Downtown administrators and artists strategized with corporate and other major funders how to amplify Downtown vanguard works in mainstream institutions and festivals like BAM.

Together, the meeting attendees discussed the difficulties in presenting large-scale works in the United States. Although the Next Wave proposal included a wide range of artistic genres, meeting participants tended to draw attention to emerging forms of opera and music theater—especially those represented by Glass. During the meetings, Glass narrated the history of his large-scale works, all of which premiered in Europe and had only received U.S. exposure in New York. He described the issues artists faced when producing new works with U.S. opera companies: a mentality set against new works, which he believed was an educational problem.[3] Lee Gillespie, a director of the National Opera Institute, agreed with Glass’s assessment and urged a strong promotional campaign for new works, citing statistics that the average age of most opera-goers was fifty-three years old and that they mainly connected to 19th-century opera repertoire.[4] The meeting participants believed that active institutional support—not simply money, but the advocacy of influential impresarios, staff, and, eventually, adventurous audiences—was crucial to the survival of new work. For this reason, the Next Wave program had an outreach component: educational materials and symposia for touring productions.

The meeting attendees also agreed that the complexity of innovative large-scale works required new linkages among presenting institutions, artists, and corporations to facilitate the productions. Anne Alexander, staff manager of AT&T, noted that the cooperation of multiple philanthropic organizations was necessary to realize these works in the manner they deserved. After the final meeting, Howard Klein, arts director for the Rockefeller Foundation, indicated that he was prepared to support the program, but its scale required a consortium of funders to sustain it. Other major funders then joined in. Altogether, by 1984, BAM raised about $1.1 million in public and private sponsors. For a complete accounting of the contributions, see below.[5]

  • Rockefeller Foundation $250,000
  • Ford Foundation 100,000
  • The Howard Gilman Foundation 100,000
  • National Endowment for the Arts 200,000
  • National Endowment for the Humanities 40,000
  • Warner Communications Inc. 50,000
  • AT&T 50,000
  • Dayton-Hudson Foundation 12,500
  • Producers Council 50,000
  • CIGNA 25,000
  • WilliWear Ltd. 33,000
  • Pew Trust 50,000
  • Walker Art Center 40,000

In this way, Lichtenstein was instrumental in coordinating an institutional network to support American experimental music. Although this network tended not to include more traditional arts organizations like university music departments and the Metropolitan Opera, its existence nuances the “maverick” label that has so often been attached to musical experimentalists like Glass. Glass was both a poster child for the future of American opera in funding meeting discussions and a staple in BAM programming. Throughout the 1980s, Glass’s operas were featured more often than any other opera or music-theater composer. Perhaps Glass owed whatever moneys he made from the Cutty Sark ad not to his creative iconoclasm alone, but also to his ability to find supportive collaborators—especially in the form of arts administrators.


Sasha Metcalf

Sasha Metcalf

Sasha Metcalf recently completed her Ph.D. in musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is now a lecturer in the writing program. Her research examines how institutions and impresarios have shaped the history of late 20th-century American music.



1. Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir (New York: Liveright, 2015), 281-2.


2. For representative scholarship on the American maverick tradition, see Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004). The American maverick narrative also pervades publicity materials for Michael Tilson Thomas’s American Mavericks Festival. See American Mavericks: Home, http://americanmavericks.org/ (accessed September 7, 2015).


3. Next Wave Patron Council Meeting Minutes, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, October 1, 1982, BAM Hamm Archives.


4. Ibid.


5. The Next Wave Production and Touring Fund Proposal, January 26, 1984, BAM Hamm Archives.

“People Power”—The Communal Ethos of Satyagraha

Occupy Wall Street protesters gathered outside on Lincoln Center Plaza
What is a community in new music? A panel of musicologists attempted to answer this question at the second annual New Music Gathering last January. Community might be manifested in an experimental commune, in the practices of minimalist music, in the radical identity politics of an opera, or in the labor of administrators and institutions. Rather than provide a singular answer to what a new music community might be, our panel provided many. Over the coming weeks, you can read our examinations of new music and community from a variety of historical and ethnographic perspectives. We are very grateful to NewMusicBox for hosting this weekly series, to the organizers of New Music Gathering for sponsoring a thought-provoking conference, and to our home institutions for supporting our research.—Will Robin

In the chilly night air of December 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters gathered outside on Lincoln Center Plaza. Inside the nearby Metropolitan Opera House, the third act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha drew to a close as the character of Mahatma Gandhi proclaimed: “When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age…for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again.” Shortly thereafter, Glass led the Occupy demonstrators in a recitation of these same words. Driving home the link between OWS and the opera, a man exhorted departing patrons to cross the police barricades and join the crowd of activists. “What would Gandhi do?” he bellowed. “It’s a real life play! The opera is your life! Your life is the opera Satyagraha!”

“What would Gandhi do?” Although rhetorical in nature, the question nevertheless hints at an ethos that animates both Satyagraha and the OWS movement: community.

The cultivation of community is fundamental to new music, as other essays in this series demonstrate. Community as an ideal takes various forms, from Bang on a Can’s conscious programming of antithetical musical styles to implicit critiques of traditional musical authorship in collectives such as Pulsa and the Theater of Eternal Music. In these, community finds expression through social practice. But how does this communal ethos actually translate into music (as one audience member asked at the recent New Music Gathering)? In Satyagraha, this value is encoded both musically and dramatically. Moreover, community informs not only the relations between artistic collaborators, but also extends to the audience.

Writing for an NEA review of American opera in 1988, Glass dismissed what he called “simple authorship,” which might be understood with reference to the fact that operas are almost always identified simply by their composer: Bizet’s Carmen, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Glass’s Satyagraha. (In reality, the authorship of most operas is more complicated.) Referencing the 1980s influx of experimental artists into the opera world—a transformation brought out in part by a network of risk-taking impresarios and philanthropic institutions—Glass championed a complex model of authorship:

One of the big differences between the Italian tradition of repertory opera and the contemporary tradition—mostly people younger than myself and myself—is that this tends to be group work. You can use the word collaboration…

That’s simply the way we work. I come from a tradition of group theater work…This is the contemporary tradition of theater, which has only just begun to be practiced in the world of opera.

…We’re looking at a real revolution—a revolution in methods of working, collaborative ways of working, ways pieces are produced and ways they ask the audience to perceive them.[1]

Glass’s first commissioned opera, Satyagraha, was the product of this collaborative ideal.

Less than a month after Einstein on the Beach appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in November 1976, Glass had partnered with writer and artist Constance DeJong, a friend from SoHo, for his new project. Within a year or so, Robert Israel—another SoHo acquaintance who happened to be serving a three-year residency at the commissioning institution, the Netherlands Opera—joined Glass and DeJong. Although Glass had the initial idea for the opera’s subject, together these three developed the primary components of the opera—music, text, image. (Movement would come at a later stage via director David Pountney.)

Borrowing a strategy from various mid-century avant-garde theater collectives, Glass, DeJong, and Israel decided that image and movement should carry the weight of the non-linear, episodic narrative of Gandhi’s South African years. In a move that shifted authority away from traditional operatic narrative devices of words and music, DeJong constructed the Sanskrit libretto using excerpts from the Bhagavad-Gita, while Glass composed in a newly developed post-minimalist style that resists narrative and representation.[2] In de-familiarizing text and music, the collaborators worked to destabilize conventional operatic notions of authorship. Under this aesthetic, no single element dominates the theatrical discourse, rendering meaning ambivalent.

This, according to Glass’s understanding of Cage’s maxim, leaves room for the audience to “complete” the work. By bringing together the parallel layers of music, image, movement, and text in their subjective (yet communal) experiences of Satyagraha, spectators join in the process of authorship. They derive their own meanings at different points of the opera, and in doing so become part of a larger community.

Satyagraha expresses community through its internal features as well. Both music and dramaturgy foreground the collective human element necessary for the realization of Gandhi’s non-violent civil disobedience. Although the opera is nominally about Gandhi, the focus lies more on the communities he fostered. This shift in emphasis took shape over the course of multiple drafts of the plot—one of the earliest of which consisted of twelve chronological scenes. In a 2014 interview, DeJong recalled this development:

At some point, everything crystallized and changed when the interest became not on biography but on the genesis of non-violent civil disobedience…now, not only was the subject vaguely interesting, it was superbly interesting and relevant, and it was about an idea and not a person. And that really mattered to me. Then, soon, the opera really became about the continuity of an idea…

The first page of Constance DeJong’s second outline of <em>Satyagraha</em>.

The first page of Constance DeJong’s second outline of Satyagraha.

Musically, this communal ethos meant that the solo vocal virtuosity typical of much opera was discarded in favor of small ensemble and large choral numbers. The chorus shoulders four out of the seven scenes, leading Glass to characterize Satyagraha as “practically a choral opera.” DeJong stresses the importance of the chorus in starker terms:

If you have a political movement, you have to have people. A real central character to Satyagraha is the chorus. They’re not there supporting the soloists, which is a very unusual feature of an opera. They have those big scenes, the most dramatic scenes, actually, in the first and second act. They function as a character. The dimension that brings to the opera musically is huge.

Dramaturgically, DeJong, Glass, and Israel focus attention on episodes from Gandhi’s South African sojourn that demonstrate the power of community. The opera’s second scene, for instance, reenacts the formation of Tolstoy Farm in 1910, a co-operative commonwealth that served as the headquarters of Gandhi’s South African campaign.

Scene Structure of <em>Satyagraha</em>

Scene Structure of Satyagraha

In an overt testament to their own experiences of communal action, the collaborators chose to have Martin Luther King, Jr. serve as a historical “witness” to the culminating final scene, which represents Gandhi’s 1913 Newcastle March. In a 2014 interview, Israel reflected that the decision to link Gandhi with MLK “couldn’t have happened without young people having been involved in Civil Rights, in concern about the war.” Israel’s wife was one such young person, having served as an activist in 1960s Alabama.

As if to emphasize the importance of collective action, Glass positioned the chorus at the musical center of the final act. Moreover, what is implicit in Gandhi’s closing lines—the reference to reincarnation—becomes explicit in the opera’s staging, as time and space bleed together. In the premiere production, over the course of the final scene Alabama state troopers removed members of Gandhi’s satyagraha army—i.e., the chorus—from the stage, until Gandhi and King were left alone. In the closing moments of the opera, the satyagraha army appeared in the starry night sky behind King, thus visually transferring the idea of non-violent civil disobedience across time and space from turn-of-the-century South Africa to the United States at mid-century.

Production photo of <em>Satyagraha</em>, 1980

Production photo of Satyagraha, 1980

The music of Satyagraha participates in this transfer as well, albeit in a less concrete way. In the opening and throughout most of the Act III, Glass employs a chaconne that slides between two harmonic poles: F minor to E major.

harmony example

In the final section of the act, however, this relationship between F and E undergoes a transformation which, when heard in the context of the third act mise-en-scène, suggests the transfer of Gandhi’s ideals and legacy to King. Once Gandhi and King remain alone onstage, a harmonic transformation crystallizes beneath Gandhi’s repetitions of a rising Phrygian scale on E. The F minor of the opening chaconne evolves into F major; E major becomes an implied E minor. Only in the concluding two measures does the ambiguity of the E minor clarify into C major—virtue is set on her seat again, the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice.

harmony example 2

When Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott reimagined the opera for the ENO–Met co-production in 2007–08 (revised in 2011–12), the emphasis on collective action took on a modified form that later resonated with the Occupy movement. In this rendering, members of the Improbable Theatre Company share the symbolic mantle of satyagraha with the chorus. Garbed in the muted, earthy costumes of a lower socio-economic caste, the so-called Skills Ensemble stands in deliberate contrast to the perceived opulence of the operatic genre. Throughout they remain a continuous but silent presence, creating and manipulating huge puppets, changing the sets, and assuming the roles of Tolstoy, Tagore, and King. Crouch’s reasoning was straightforward: “We wanted to create transformations using people rather than big stage machinery.”

The symbolic role of the Skills Ensemble is most apparent in the closing act, where the temporal blending of the 1913 Newcastle March and the Civil Rights movement extends into the present, as police in contemporary riot gear descend on Gandhi’s comrades. At the opera’s conclusion, the stagehands alone remain on stage with Gandhi and King. This reimagining of the voiceless, lower-caste stagehands—the embodied means of production, the 99%—as the embodiment of satyagraha offers a poignant reflection of pressing 21st-century concerns over rising inequality and political disenfranchisement.

“What would Gandhi do?” Foster community, because ideas ultimately rely on people, much as new music depends on a vibrant network of committed performers, composers, presenters, collaborators, and audiences. In Satyagraha, this communal ethos emerges musically, dramaturgically, and in the acts of creation and audience reception. “Gandhi’s leadership,” Crouch pointed out, “was obviously massively important, but what he achieved was done through people power.”


Ryan Ebright

Ryan Ebright is an instructor in musicology at Bowling Green State University. His research focuses on music for the voice, stage, and screen, with an emphasis on 20th- & 21st-century opera, minimalism, and 19th-century Lieder. His current book project, Making American Opera for the Modern Age, centers on opera in the U.S. after Einstein on the Beach.


1. Philip Glass, “Philip Glass. Composer. New York City,” ARTSREVIEW 5, no. 1: America’s Opera, ed. Dodie Kazanjian (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 1988), 18.


2. See, for instance, Timothy Johnson, “Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique?” Musical Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Winter): 742–44.

Communal Experimentalism in the Sixties: The Pulsa Group

Serge Tcherepnin, brainwave experiments at Harmony Ranch, 1970
What is a community in new music? A panel of musicologists attempted to answer this question at the second annual New Music Gathering last January. Community might be manifested in an experimental commune, in the practices of minimalist music, in the radical identity politics of an opera, or in the labor of administrators and institutions. Rather than provide a singular answer to what a new music community might be, our panel provided many. Over the coming weeks, you can read our examinations of new music and community from a variety of historical and ethnographic perspectives. We are very grateful to NewMusicBox for hosting this weekly series, to the organizers of New Music Gathering for sponsoring a thought-provoking conference, and to our home institutions for supporting our research.—Will Robin

Countless forms of experimental music took place communally in the sixties, but much of that music eludes our histories of American experimentalism. Many groups didn’t produce scores or recordings or even hold formal events or concerts; many people didn’t assemble officially as “groups.” When we do reflect upon communal experimental music, we might recall well-known ensembles like the Theater of Eternal Music/Dream Syndicate and the Sonic Arts Union, or slightly less-known groups like USCO and Group 212. These ensembles were communal to different degrees and at various stages of music making—from the collaborative creation of works to each individual’s prominence within an ensemble to the eventual ownership of compositions and recordings. One collaborative group that sought to both live their lives and make their music communally was the collective Pulsa. As a group dedicated to exploring “perceptible wave energies” through light and sound, Pulsa created art and music that not only made group collaborations audible and palpable, but they also reminded their audiences and participants—through light and sound—that actions have effects.

Pulsa, Harmony Ranch, Oxford Connecticut, ca. 1969

Pulsa, Harmony Ranch, Oxford Connecticut, ca. 1969 (source)

Pulsa participated in a massive communalist movement in the United States. Between 1967 and 1970, tens of thousands of Americans turned away from outward political action and went “back to the land,” joining what historian Fred Turner has called the “New Communalist” movement. Unlike the more explicitly political New Left, many of these New Communalists believed that the revolution wasn’t outwardly political but inwardly transformative—a revolution attained through interpersonal relationships and experiments with consciousness. Although many who joined communes eschewed electronics and large-scale technologies, a certain strand of this movement embraced small-scale tech like strobe lights, amplifiers, and slide projectors, along with bodily technologies like yoga, meditation, and hallucinogens. Pulsa was thoroughly plugged into this techno-powered back-to-the-land movement.

Pulsa was thoroughly plugged into this techno-powered back-to-the-land movement.

The Whole Earth Catalog—called by Todd Gitlin a “Sears catalog” for the sixties counterculture—is an eclectic artifact of the time period. This catalog incorporated, among hundreds of other things, pamphlets on how to build a teepee, a yurt, or a geodesic dome; tips on organic farming, mountaineering, and hitchhiking—practical information for going “back to the land.” But the catalog also included blurbs about books on cybernetics and early systems theory; advertisements for tape recorders, Moog synthesizers, and John Cage’s most recent books Silence and A Year from Monday. The catalog also featured an ad for the art and science organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), of which Pulsa formed the New Haven E.A.T. Local Chapter.

Founded in 1966 and active through 1973, Pulsa was an experimental collective based in Oxford, Connecticut. The group consisted of 7-10 people working in various disciplines, including painting, architecture, film, music, electronic engineering, psychology, mathematics, and computer programming. They lived together communally on a property called Harmony Ranch, and they also organized events at a downtown New Haven loft where, over the years, they hosted La Monte Young, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Serge Tcherepnin, Richard Teitelbaum, and many others.*

In their essay “Notes on Group Process,” Pulsa—who always published collectively—described their central objective as developing “techniques for controlling perceptible wave energies.” Despite the varying specializations of its members, Pulsa aimed for each individual to be familiar with every dimension of a project to allow for the “complete interchangeability of roles.” By 1969, Pulsa was collaborating with a neuro-physiologist, attempting to model their working processes on the parallel processes of the human brain, which was “capable of simultaneously performing a variety of interactive operations.”

Pulsa described gardening as equal in significance to their more public projects and further emphasized the symbiotic relationship between their creative and agricultural work.

In working with wave energies, part of Pulsa’s work dealt with often invisible or inaudible materials like heat, sound, and light. For instance, in early 1970, Pulsa held an installation in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art’s Outdoor Sculpture Garden. In the MoMA garden, Pulsa aimed to gather “environmental information,” including sound, light, movement, and heat, using microphones, infrared sensors, and photocells. They then fed that information back into the garden using strobe lights, infrared heaters, and loudspeakers. Pulsa’s installation persisted 24 hours a day for two months, in the winter of early 1970, so even in the middle of the night, a strong gust of wind, the headlights of a passing car, or falling snow would trigger a response within the garden. And since Pulsa’s MoMA garden was receptive to heat, the mere presence of a body walking through the garden would be detected by infrared sensors and responded to with strobe lights and loudspeakers.

Pulsa Installation for Spaces Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden, NYC, 1970

Pulsa Installation for Spaces Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden, NYC, 1970 (source)

Beyond their larger installations, the majority of Pulsa’s work took place at their commune, where they could experiment with wave energies in everyday life, including tending to their farm at Harmony Ranch. In an essay from György Kepes’s collection Arts of the Environment, Pulsa described gardening as equal in significance to their more public projects and further emphasized the symbiotic relationship between their creative and agricultural work.

We grow many kinds of vegetables organically on the farm. Out of a half-acre garden we grew enough vegetables to feed ourselves, supply our neighbors, and barter with organic food stores. Agriculture provides information about long-term growth rhythms and is comparable in scale and as an energy to Pulsa’s other art works.

One of Pulsa’s main investigations with wave energies was conducted through brainwave experiments. In these experiments, participants would attach electrodes to their forehead and receive sound or light feedback when they achieved a certain frequency, most often an alpha state (around 8 to 12 Hz). Energies like brainwaves typically go undetected in day-to-day life, but by transducing it into sound and light, people could hear and see these energies. Such experiments, though, were not concerts or even formal events; they took place most often gathered around a circle at Harmony Ranch.

Serge Tcherepnin, brainwave experiments at Harmony Ranch, 1970

Serge Tcherepnin, brainwave experiments at Harmony Ranch, 1970 (source)

Pulsa’s experiments worked towards making wave energies more tangible and served as a reminder that when you make music—let alone move or breath or plant a garden—you affect the world around you. Although Pulsa’s example is perhaps an extreme one, it’s also a useful one. Pulsa’s work attested to the myriad ways that human beings are entangled—with each other and with environments—and you can hear this involvement; you can hear community through sound. Pulsa created a musical community that privileged not just the people within it but the sound and energy that sustained them.



* Members of Pulsa have uploaded numerous documents, including photos, event reviews, programs, and essays to achive.org.


Kerry O'Brien

Kerry O’Brien

Kerry O’Brien is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Indiana University and a percussionist with Nief-Norf. Her current research examines postwar experimentalism, media studies, and countercultural spirituality. O’Brien lives in Seattle where she is finishing a dissertation titled “Wireless Experimentalism: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), 1966-1971.” Her work has been supported by grants from the Presser Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the Paul Sacher Foundation, and an American Fellowship from the American Association of University Women.

Manifesting Community in Early Minimalism

Steel discs
What is a community in new music? A panel of musicologists attempted to answer this question at the second annual New Music Gathering last January. Community might be manifested in an experimental commune, in the practices of minimalist music, in the radical identity politics of an opera, or in the labor of administrators and institutions. Rather than provide a singular answer to what a new music community might be, our panel provided many. Over the coming weeks, you can read our examinations of new music and community from a variety of historical and ethnographic perspectives. We are very grateful to NewMusicBox for hosting this weekly series, to the organizers of New Music Gathering for sponsoring a thought-provoking conference, and to our home institutions for supporting our research.—Will Robin

What could minimalism possibly have to do with community?

Community is not one of the words typically included in descriptions of minimalism. It does not take its place alongside austere or process or repetition, nor does it fit into the formalist “family similarities” listed in the recent Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, including drone, repetition, stasis, audible structures, pure tunings, and so on.[1]

Indeed, more often than community, minimalism had to do with conflict. Kyle Gann, in a 1998 piece for The Village Voice called “Minimalism Isn’t Pretty,” writes, “By the time minimalism emerged as a public phenomenon in 1973, it was squeaky clean and spruced up for company… Before its emergence, however, minimalism was a nameless, cantankerous Downtown movement of many composers and musicians.” He continues, “So many minds collaborated that it was not always possible to tell who introduced what innovation. In fact, the original minimalism scene so bristled with tension that it virtually exploded, and when the smoke cleared, newcomers Reich and Glass just happened to be the only ones left standing.”[2] Likewise Branden Joseph argues that “the history of minimalist music is, to a surprising degree, a history of authorship disputes.”[3]

So perhaps dispute and tension are more accurate descriptions of minimalist social relations. Nevertheless, an important point remains: scene-based tensions and disputes occur specifically because there is a community. Disagreement occurs within a commons; it takes place on a stage constructed and articulated through community relationships and sense-making.

Disagreement occurs within a commons; it takes place on a stage constructed and articulated through community relationships and sense-making.

In the case of minimalism, eventual authorial disputes were the result of a long series of close collaborative engagements. Anyone familiar with the historical foundations of the “aesthetic, style, or technique”[4] can draw up a list: during the late 1950s at UC Berkeley, the relationship between La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Terry Jennings, and Dennis Johnson are all closely tied up with, among other pieces, Young’s Trio for Strings, Riley’s Concert for Two Pianos and Tape Recorders, and Johnson’s November. In 1964, Steve Reich helped Terry Riley organize the performers for the premiere of In C in San Francisco; he also introduced the pulsing Cs that create the work’s rhythmic grid and, as Terry Riley told Robert Carl, kept hippies out of their rehearsal space.[5] In December of that same year, on the other side of the continent, Young, Tony Conrad, John Cale, and Marian Zazeela were performing their first concerts under the collective name The Theatre of Eternal Music. A short time later, Reich moved back to New York where, in 1967, he became reacquainted with his Juilliard colleague Philip Glass, leading the two to work together for several productive years (including a couple of European tours) during which they developed pieces such as Pendulum Music, Four Organs, Phase Patterns, Two Pages, Music in Fifths, Music with Changing Parts, and more. The examples could continue, though I imagine many readers of this site are well aware of these early instances of collaboration. What’s important is that the subsequent disputes that resulted from these periods of collaboration—between Young and Conrad, Riley and Reich, Reich and Glass, and later Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, as noted by Joseph—frequently overshadow and seemingly negate the original fact of community for many writers on minimalism. That is, the focal point becomes the inevitably failure of collaboration in art music, rather than the results it produces.

What if we consider instead the early foundations of community among the minimalists? What was it that pushed them to collaborate in the first place? Under what principle of community were these collaborations possible? If there can be no dispute between parties that have nothing in common, then the answer to these questions is best found in the years prior to dispute. We can look in particular to early pieces of minimalist writing—particularly by examining what was manifest in a few early minimalist manifestos.

What was it that pushed them to collaborate in the first place? Under what principle of community were these collaborations possible?

The best known of these is surely Steve Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process” (1968).[6] While many musicologists have focused on Reich’s claims about process, and subsequently analyzed his works with close attention to the relative “purity” of the process in each piece, different portions of the essay strike me as more important. Reich’s focus is less on the technical application, and more on its perceptibility: “I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” He continues, “to facilitate closely detailed listening a musical process should happen extremely gradually.” There is a clear hierarchical relationship between the two terms: it’s not that gradual processes should be audible, it’s that gradual processes are the means towards the end of making structure audible. Listening and perceptibility are prioritized, with process as the means of actualizing the goal. And listening remains dominant when Reich makes his central historical claim. He points out that both Cagean chance and the serialism of Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen—musics thought of as the opposing poles of the compositional spectrum when he was writing in 1968—share one principle of commonality: “the compositional process and the sounding music have no audible connection.” For all their differences technically and stylistically, Reich offers a simple though powerful critique that finds in these opposites a shared, underlying principle. Again: disagreements construct the stage of their own appearance; the terms of their dispute.

From this commonality, Reich sets out his primary goal, which gradual process appears to be the most functional means of achieving: “a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.” Reich argues for an egalitarian practice of music-making in which the composer joins the audience in listening to a plainly audible structure such that he or she, as he quotes James Tenney saying, “isn’t privy to anything.” Indeed, Reich writes this egalitarian listening into Pendulum Music (1968), which he composed alongside his manifesto. Several scholars have noted the relationship between the two, pointing to Pendulum Music as the height of a “pure” gradual process in Reich’s music, and criticized Reich for never having followed up on this rigorous, impersonal austerity.[7] No one, however, has drawn any relevance from the score for Pendulum Music directing the performers to “sit down to watch and listen to the process along with the audience.”[8] That is, scholarship highlights Pendulum Music as a supposedly isolated example of a pure, formalist process, rather than acknowledging how pure process allows the composer and performers to join the audience as one listening community. In all listening together differently, it constructs the perfect stage for dispute.

Reich was not alone though; the manifesto seems to have been deemed an appropriate genre by the minimalists for simultaneously outlining their critiques of contemporary compositional practice and supplementing it with their own ideas. A lesser-known manifesto written by Tony Conrad in the summer of 1965 appeared later that year in the journal Film Culture. Conrad gained enough attention for his film The Flicker that the journal dedicated several pages to him, including his own written manifesto about his work with Young, John Cale, and Marian Zazeela. Titled “Inside the Dream Syndicate,” the first-person plural essay outlines the group’s manifestation of compositional collectivism:

Film Culture

The title “The Obsidian Ocelot…” is the one the group used throughout much of 1965 in concert programs. Throughout the essay the twenty-five-year-old Conrad writes in a style somewhere between, on the one hand, quasi-scientific music theory journals of the time like Die Reihe and, on the other, ecstatic, mid-1960s, stream of consciousness political critique. He writes, “Noises are not ever pitchless, to say the least. Pitched pulses, palpitating beyond rhythm and cascading the cochlea with a galaxy of synchronized partials, reopen the awareness of the sine tone—the element of combinatorial hearing.”[9] More importantly, the essay is peppered with collectivized statements of purpose, framed around listening, tuning, and performance practice: “We don’t touch the 5th harmonic… [because] 7 sounds to us as clear as vulgar 5 once did”; “Our music is… droningly mon[o]tonal, not even being built on a scale at all, but out of a single chord or cluster of more or less tonically related partials” which introduce a “a synchronous pulse-beat.” He argues for the “genius of conglomerate action” in that it “raises the overall harmonic operative level beyond what is rationally controllable” by a single author. On their performance practice, he writes, “The string fingerer fights to find the right spot to press a motionless digit for months before noticing the demands of the right arm for microscopic fingerboard digit rockings, compensating periodically for the tiny variations in string tension with each change of bow.” As a result of this collective, long-duration practice, “we fail to have consciousness of [timbral] changes: the voices sound like something else, the violin is the echo of the saxophone, the viola is by day frightening rock ‘n’ roll orchestra [referring to Cale’s work in the Velvet Underground], by night the sawmill.” Because they are “the first generation with tape, with proper amplification,” the necessary technological changes are in place to “break down the dictatorial sonority barriers erected by the master instruments of the cultures.”

Both composers outline their compositional practice in opposition to existing “dictatorial sonority barriers” for Conrad and “secrets of structure” for Reich. In both cases, an appropriate response is formulated to work against those practices, whether it be the use of pure tunings, amplification, and drone for The Theatre of Eternal Music, or gradual and audible process for Reich. Similarly, both focus on moving away from the singular, privileged composer in favour of a music in which, on the one hand, a collective of droning performers can lose track of their own performance as each instrument begins to “sound like something else,” or, on the other, a desire to write a music in which the composer sits down and listens with the audience. Further, both highlight the centrality of listening as a means of breaking down the singular privileges of authorship: whether it be Conrad’s attention to the pitches internal to noise through “combinatorial hearing” or Reich in his central concern that the connection between process and sound be plainly recognizable through listening.

We can perhaps consider one earlier piece of pre-minimalist writing mentioned by La Monte Young in his “Lecture 1960”:

When Dennis Johnson and I were staying at Richard Maxfield’s apartment in New York, we discussed the amount of choice that a composer retained in a composition that used chance or indeterminacy. We generally agreed that the composer was always left with some choices of one sort or another. At the very least, he had to decide what chances he would take or what he would leave to indeterminacy in his composition. [Later] at my apartment in Berkeley Dennis mentioned that he had been thinking of what we had discussed in New York and that he had discovered a piece which was entirely indeterminacy [sic] and left the composer out of it. I asked, “What is it?” He tore off a piece of paper and wrote something on it. Then he handed it to me. It said, “LISTEN.”[10]

Johnson’s piece of paper inscribed “LISTEN,” if we can consider it a manifesto, might be the shortest example of that genre across any artistic or political movement. Nevertheless, it points to the central concern developed by many of the people who would come to be called minimalists a decade later: prioritizing listening over writing is the dominant means of moving beyond the Cagean challenge to authorship. It seems that many of the impulses that define how we think of minimalism—drone, stasis, pure tunings, audibility of structure, process, repetition—developed as means of enacting a non-coercive compositional authority, a way of composing music in which no one has privileged knowledge of the structure. That these features all developed long before 1973 when Gann argues minimalism appeared “spruced up and ready for company,” points all the more to the fact that the sound of minimalism was developed as part of a community that, like any other, was equally open to collaboration and to dispute. The complex problem is this: while minimalism was still cantankerous and nameless, the composers were writing from within a collaborative community; it only took on its historical image as a “pretty” style of repetitive diatonicism once musicologists turned away from the complexity of collaboration, accepting instead the inevitability of dispute.


[1] Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll Ap Siôn, editors, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music. (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 4-6.

[2] Kyle Gann, “Minimalism Isn’t Pretty” in Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 203-7.

[3] Branden Joseph, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage (New York: Verso, 2011), 37.

[4] Timothy Johnson, “Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique?” Musical Quarterly 78/4 (1994), 742-773.

[5] Robert Carl, Terry Riley’s In C (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 44.

[6] Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 34-6.

[7] See, for example: Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983), 54; Keith Potter, Four Musical Minimalists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 175; K. Robert Schwarz, Minimalists (London: Phaidon,. 1996), 227; Edward Strickland, Minimalism: Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 198; Sumanth Gopinath, “Contraband Children: The Politics of Race and Liberation in the Music of Steve Reich, 1965-1966” (PhD Dissertation, Yale University 2005), 59 (footnote 78); and Ross Cole, “‘Sound Effects, (OK Music)’: Steve Reich and the Visual Arts in New York City, 1966-1968” in Twentieth-Century Music 11/2 (2014), 239.

[8] See Reich (2002), 31.

[9] All quotes from this paragraph from Tony Conrad, “Inside the Dream Syndicate”, Film Culture 41 (1966), 1-8.

[10] La Monte Young, “Lecture 1960” The Tulane Drama Review 10/2 (1965), 73-83.


Patrick Nickleson

Patrick Nickleson is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of Toronto. His dissertation–supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada—focuses on the politics of authorship, collaboration, and dispute in early minimalism.

New Music and Place: Creating Community

An invisible thread ties people together—by profession, by socio-economics, by ideology, by ethnicity, by gender, by interests, and by place. This could all be stratified further. Even within music, we tend to align by instrument family and/or by genre. We co-exist along many of these threads. The threads wound together create community.

Physical communities are shaped by the ecosystems in which they grow into existence. Our landscape shapes our perception of the world, and thereby our culture. The infrastructure and architecture reflects the environment, climate, and the people who have built lives in a place over time. Local museums overflow with objects of our collective past redefined as shared identity. The community thread connects us with a common understanding, language (lingo), memories, and shared experiences. It is this shared sense of place that is fostering the creation of new works that evoke the complex landscapes, histories, and cultural heritage of ensembles and their communities.

For many in the Southwest, lack of water is the pervasive reality. In January 2016, the Downey Symphony Orchestra premiered To Dust, a water war requiem for string orchestra and multimedia created by composer Bryan Curt Kostors. The piece shares the story of the decimation of the 110-square-mile Owens Valley Lake, northeast of Los Angeles. In 1913, the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed, diverting the water to the growing city. Today the lake is nearly dry, and its remaining sediment creates one of the highest levels of toxic pollution in the country.

In Georgia, composer Steven Landis composed Thronateeska for the 50th anniversary of the state’s Albany Symphony. The Flint River is a vital artery in western Georgia. Premiered in February 2015, Landis had percussionists use actual pieces of flint rhythmically to symbolize historic Creek people chipping away at the rock to create tools.

Some may argue that place-based music written in the present can “color the complexion of places,” but we can be richer for it. Since places, like music, are dynamic, they continually transition and are experienced over time. New associations and memories can broaden our perceived definition of place and spark imagination and new ways of seeing—and hearing. Donald Rosenberg writes “in commissioning portraits of their regions, orchestras are…exploring topics vital to their communities.”

Communities are also re-exploring their past and commemorating milestones through new music. To recognize Boise Idaho’s 150th Anniversary in 2013, the Philharmonic commissioned Idaho composer Jim Cockey to write Sacred Land: A Tribute to the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes. The Dallas Symphony looked to composer Steven Stucky and librettist Gene Scheer to commemorate Lyndon Johnson’s birth 100 years before. In September 2008, the DSO premiered August 4, 1964 focusing on one of the most controversial days in Johnson’s presidency.

Most exciting is to see how the various community threads are weaving fresh patterns into our places. New music is being created that connects with our cultural heritage and reflects the cultural diversity within our communities. In central Illinois, the Heritage Ensemble brings the rich musical literature of the African American experience to a wider audience. The Seattle Symphony works to build cultural understanding through the creation of new music with local tribal nations through the Native Lands Project.

Thai born composer Narong Prangcharoen, a resident composer at the Pacific Symphony, researched Orange County, California, for a year to compose Beyond Land and Ocean. While he explored, talked to residents, and listened to the sounds of the waves, Disneyland, and mission San Juan Capistrano and nearly 60 other locations, the Pacific Symphony sought contributions from the public, who sent in personal stories, images, recordings, and other artifacts. Prangcharoen describes the work, premiered in September 2015, as a celebration of diversity and how that diversity somehow unites us.”

Likewise, composer Tod Machover immersed himself in the city of Detroit beginning in 2014. Integrating sounds of its industrial, social, and cultural history, he also collected conversations with people across all walks of life. Many are integrated into the performance of Symphony in D on stage. Speaking about the piece, Machover said, “having a project that is a kind of forum for people to be able to express themselves and to meet each other is wonderful. It can’t possibly be the ultimate story of Detroit, but it will allow people to rally around a narrative of their city.”

Previously, I stated that composing about place and its engagement with geographic, cultural, and human history advocates on several levels. Specifically music that we create about, for, and with a community can itself act as an advocate for these places. By integrating the thread of community, new music can advocate within places as well, to the people who live here and share an understanding of the place they call home.

Space Matters: A Call for Community Action

Microphone on stage

Microphone on stage

Carnegie Hall. Covent Garden. The Louvre. Yankee Stadium. Notre Dame Cathedral. No doubt, venue matters. Watching baseball in Yankee Stadium is a completely different experience compared to watching a game at the local high school. A concert in Disney Hall is a different experience than at the downtown proscenium theater. Hearing a rock band in an arena is different than at the club down the street.

For thousands of years, we have built grand structures to honor what we deem most important—the temples of Greece, the Roman coliseum, the capitol building, and the concert hall. We have been consuming music in opulent European-style churches, gilded halls, and luxurious salons for hundreds of years. These settings lift up and support a musical art form built upon the shoulders of wealthy aristocrats and the social elite. These locations helped to elevate the music of the Western art tradition.

But times have changed. Symphonies now struggle to pack houses as their core demographic yearning for Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms has aged. Subsequent generations of symphony goers raised on electrified music are accustomed to the related changes in music venues—from huge sports arenas to intimate jazz clubs. In recent years, we have witnessed musicians producing concerts in even more nontraditional spaces—from suburban living rooms to dance studios. An even younger audience is increasingly more accustomed to an internet experience, and we’ve already seen live webcasting become a part of our space equation.

This quest for new spaces is valid and important but is not without challenge. The biggest obstacle for new music is the price tag. Traditional halls are extremely expensive to rent and often come with a high degree of associated labor expenses and financial risk. The typical individual composer, performer, or small organization has an uphill battle in finding traditional spaces that are affordable and available. Many of us also want to find spaces that are flexible and where a sense of intimacy can be created. To find this, we often look at multi-purpose venues that are not necessarily designed for acoustic music. This can create a wonderful atmosphere and intimacy with the performers but can be challenging when it comes to acoustic quality, location familiarity, and the need for additional equipment (lighting, pianos, percussion loading). We are also often competing for access with other groups such as the theater companies and dance troupes that typically use these spaces. Still others are crossing genre lines and performing in traditional jazz and rock venues to mixed results.

I have been getting the message for quite some time now that the new, adventurous, artistic music of today needs a new kind of concert hall that can lift up the sounds, honor the audience experience in the artistic process, and frame the work of a community of fearless music makers.   The bottom line: we need more dedicated spaces for music of the 21st century.

Nationally we are seeing this need met with a couple of different models. Venues like Le Poisson Rouge, Redcat, and National Sawdust are unique, dedicated music spaces outfitted with the latest technology that are hip, fun, and quality places to listen. But these are rare and special places. Privately owned venues provide an enterprising option for access to music but most need to make sure that the financial bottom line is always the first consideration. All too often, clubs are unwilling to take chances on new or developing shows, and we need more spaces to create access for all artists.

The artist consortium models like iBeam (Brooklyn), The Center for New Music (San Francisco), and Exapno (Brooklyn) are brilliant models that provide access to rehearsal and performance spaces, share resources, and build audiences using their collective power. Across the country we can work together to create more venues that honor the music and help audiences engage. Even now I am involved with creating a much needed physical space here in Seattle and know that much work lies ahead. Ultimately, the difficulty of pulling off this model is why it will be hard to scale this nationally—creating partnerships, finding adequate physical space, the time equity required, and the financial risk are just some of the barriers.

Every once in a while, we get a developer with vision (and often a financial incentive) to build into their plans a public performance space. The Seattle area has had several developers independently commit to taking this on and they have brought us 12th Ave Arts and Resonance Hall at Soma Towers. While these spaces are much appreciated, they are still not enough to impact the whole city, and there are few cities in the world that are experiencing the level of rapid growth and development that Seattle is. What more developers need is an incentive and a mandate.

Nationally, 28 of our state government’s have a Percent for Art program that funds public art at a percentage of the total cost for all new federal building projects. Many municipalities also have city ordinances that require new buildings to spend a percentage (usually around 1%) on art for the public benefit. We must work together as advocates to demonstrate the importance of contemporary performing space as well and find a way to sell the need for such support to a larger public.

Our formal symphony venues will continue to honor the standard Western European repertoire of the past, but we have grown beyond the 19th century-style hall. Our cities are changing rapidly and it’s time to pick up the cutting-edge contemporary performance space as a platform to honor the values of our society in the same way we continue to fund libraries in a digital age. With our collective action, I think it is easily within our grasp to begin to create a new kind of concert hall for the 21st century—bringing in new audiences, inspiring new generations through art and music, and building stronger communities. This is doable. This is my call to action.

An Ode to Community

Speaking Together

Speaking Together

Community is a beautiful thing. It’s been on my mind so much lately, and in such positive ways, that I’ll sometimes find myself in a dreamy state, unable to focus on concrete tasks because I’m so verklempt about everything that this word means to me and the important roles it plays in my life.

I’ve also been asking myself questions that delve a bit deeper into the personal importance of community. Step into my head and think about how these apply to you: First of all, what does community mean? To me, it’s a like-minded group of people who socialize at scheduled OR spontaneous times to share experiences, grow, engage, encourage, challenge, empower, and support one another in verbal or nonverbal ways.

Furthermore, which communities do I belong to? Why are they important to me? What is my role in each one? Does community mean the same thing to me as to other people? What value do they add to my life? How can I impact my fellow community members in positive ways? Though I’m a part of many communities, I realize now that I’ve spent much of my life simply existing and participating in them, but not fully appreciating the innumerable facets of beauty and possibility that they offer.

Various sectors of the Seattle classical and contemporary music community—a big web of talented, daring, artistic people—have been a part of my life since 2008. Initially, I was immersed in graduate school at the University of Washington School of Music, which has many communities within itself. After graduation, it was time to break out of the school bubble and into the “real world” for new performance opportunities. From there, I played with the Seattle Modern Orchestra, newly founded in 2010 by my classmates Julia Tai and Jeremy Jolley, which sparked a bit of a renaissance for Seattle’s new music scene. SMO has since grown significantly and is getting a lot of attention for reaching younger audiences with new music, sometimes in unorthodox venues.

Along the way, Second Inversion (a bit of history in my previous post) has been trying to cultivate and connect the new music community in Seattle and become the “hub.” It seemed like a tall order at first, but one by one, we’ve made connections with composers, performers, and presenters. Our tactics have been straightforward: streaming music and interviews by local artists, live broadcasting select concerts from Town Hall and the UW World Series, co-presenting concerts, and engaging with new music concert-goers by handing out magnets with our logo and spreading our gospel. KING FM’s Community Advisory Board meetings are quarterly open forums for anyone from the community to come and talk about anything they want. Since April 2015, I’ve facilitated the meetings and steered the topics toward new music, and core attendees have been many of these composers, performers, and presenters. Simply getting everyone together in a room for roundtables on a regular basis has made us feel more connected, supported, and open to collaboration.

For example, during a brainstorming session about new ways we can all support one another, the idea of a monthly flyer with new music concert listings for each ensemble to share in their programs emerged. The hope is that audiences will cross-pollinate by gaining awareness of other similar events in an “if you like this, you’ll like these” kind of way. At the end of the meeting, Shaya Lyon of the Live Music Project asked me if Second Inversion would like to collaborate on this, I said yes, and we made it happen. We’re printing and distributing it to the performing ensembles, community boards, and coffee shops all over Seattle, and posting it digitally on our websites and social outlets. We include events ranging from the Seattle Symphony’s [untitled] series to the Racer Sessions (a weekly showcase of original music with a jam session based on the concepts in the opening presentation) to community orchestras delving into new music.

That leads me to a related tangent, because I want to debunk the blanket identity that “community orchestra” often has:  unprofessional, hodgepodge, low-quality, and unworthy. When I realized I didn’t want to be a professional flutist, the thought of playing in a “community orchestra” was a little bit unsettling. Would I be disrespected by fellow musicians who are forging ahead with regular paid gigs and contracted orchestra jobs? I’m ashamed now that I even had those thoughts because of my participation in the Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra, which truly puts the community in community orchestra. Not only do we play our hearts out and deliver excellent performances to 400-600 people at Town Hall Seattle three times per year, we socialize far beyond the small talk and catch-up at weekly Monday rehearsals. A trek to Pies & Pints to share some pitchers, tots, chicken fingers, and extended conversation is a ritual that makes Monday a little less dreadful for most of us.

Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra // Rehearsal 2/15/16

A photo posted by Shaya Lyon (@pickleshy) on

This big pot of warm, cozy thought soup is thanks to the 2016 New Music Gathering at the Peabody Conservatory, an event that this year focused on the ideologies, configurations, and cultivation of communities. Composers Danny Felsenfeld, Matt Marks, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Lainie Fefferman, and Jascha Narveson organized this face-to-face meeting space for composers, performers, and advocates of new music to mingle, discuss, perform, and encourage one another. Hundreds of people attended and broke out into sessions to discuss scheduled topics like Music and Community Building, How Large Scale Projects Inspire Community, Virtual Communities in New Music, Building New New Music Communities, and more. It was inspiring to learn about projects from nationwide community leaders on the panels, ask them questions, and think of local applications in Seattle, but what struck me the most about NMG2016 was how naturally this group of people meshed with one another in the hallways, at meals, while moving a gamelan, and at the watering holes until the wee hours. It felt like a summer camp where I got to meet a whole bunch of pen pals (e-mail and Twitter contacts) in person for the first time.  My favorite sentiment from the entire conference was from ICE saxophonist Ryan Muncy who described community as a group of peers, equals, with different roles but no hierarchy (artist vs. donor vs. audience member). That simple, humble reminder of humanity is so beautiful and universally applicable.

It’s been about six weeks since NMG and I still feel energized and rejuvenated by these fresh perspectives, and it’s made me more consciously grateful for the new music community in Seattle. Not only do I feel more strongly rooted as a community member, I’m starting to feel more comfortable as a leader and more confident that Second Inversion is truly making a difference. We are only one piece of the puzzle, but I’m more and more hopeful we can be a hub for new music not just in the Northwest, but for the whole West Coast and beyond.

Maintaining a Creative Life: New Orleans Edition

My first reaction to the prospect of writing about the contemporary music scene in New Orleans was: what scene? New Orleans does not have a new music scene, at least not in the way that New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago does. Even Minneapolis has some brilliant post-post-jazz, and Omaha has a small but burgeoning community accumulating a critical mass around Amanda DeBoer Bartlett’s eclectic Omaha Under the Radar festival. In comparison, New Orleans is a new music desert, a fact laden with irony given its deep musical roots. There are certainly a few oases here—the improvisation series at the Blue Nile and the recently-established Versipel New Music come to mind—but they are just that: isolated activities within a landscape largely devoid of new music features.

So why do I, as a composer, live here?

New Orleans became my home through a mixture of circumstances. My wife is from here, and we both leapt at the opportunity for her to return when she received a solidly funded offer for graduate school. Moving to a place with familiarity and family made it easier to transition back to the States from England, where we had been living, and the city’s affordability allowed me to comfortably continue putting composition at the center of my time commitments. Over time, these practical advantages were surpassed by the intangibles of place and culture—the food, the neighborhoods, the people, all the nooks and crannies that define a city for its inhabitants. I developed a strong connection to New Orleans and now preach its merits at every opportunity. An international acquaintance once quipped that my passport must be Louisiana specific. His reasoning was sound.

My Big Life Question has thus become how to lead my artistic life in a city I love but a city that lacks obvious support and outlets for the music I am passionate about. It is not a matter of  having the means to showcase my own artistic output within my zip code, but rather about keeping new music front and center in my daily life without mechanisms that keep it there for me. There are no general answers to this problem: each is individual- and context-specific, and it is a life-long process. Here are some of the steps I have gone through, both internally and externally, in an effort to resolve this question for myself.

Sketches and NOLA

What Do I Want from Where I Live?

I often say that New Orleans checks all the boxes of my ideal home, save a music-related job and an established new music community. That is a lot of checked boxes. I have to ask myself: would the trade off required to get those music boxes easily checked—namely moving—be worth it? Having experienced the other side of the coin, where placing music first determined where and how and with whom I lived, I can comfortably answer no, not for me, at least not at this time. I would rather work with what I have.

Part of working with what I have is understanding how I want to earn an income and what I want out of a job beyond money. This has not been an easy process, but it has given me some valuable insights. For example, realizing how much I valued job stability contributed to my accepting an ongoing position as an elementary school teaching assistant over a temporary assignment filling in for a composition professor on sabbatical. It was a difficult decision to choose work outside of my apparent field, but in practice the elementary school position offered me many things that the university position did not: increased job security, a steady wage, and the hours to continue spending time composing. This made it seem the more desirable choice, and one that facilitates and complements my compositional pursuits, rather than veers away from them. It was not a purely practical decision, however: I immensely enjoy the work. Working with children requires flexibility, patience, and humility that I can only hope feed into my music. And it is just such this interrelation between my life as a musician and my life otherwise that building an artistic life in New Orleans continues to promote.

Redefining What Applies to My Art

When I was studying as a percussionist, I practiced four to six hours a day, seven days a week. Less than five felt like slacking; less than four was cause for self-flagellation. Family, friends, love interests, school, eating, and sleeping were all secondary to my pathological need to log these hours. This narrow understanding of what came first in my life was both unhealthy and unimaginative.

I first approached composition with the same attitude of punching a time card, but composing resisted this mentality. It lacked the physical component that enabled the rote labor allowed in practicing an instrument. Composing’s demand for acuity and introspection required a more fluid understanding of my artistic labor: I learned to allow for playful wanderings of the mind along tangents, and judged the success of my creative work sessions less quantitatively. I still log my hours obsessively, but also understand composing is not the same as manufacturing widgets. My once single-minded pursuit of instantly gratifying output has been replaced by broader inclusiveness as to what constitutes my creative work.

I have consequently sought to understand my non-artistic interests artistically. Sports, for example, have progressed from a cursory fascination to a lens through which I can better understand my art. Musical virtuosity has for me been redefined from a showcasing of control to a pursuit of personal boundaries, like the athlete’s. Just as an athlete’s exceptional abilities sublimate and their failures humanize, musical virtuosity can be a means for laying bare the soul rather than erecting an artifice of perfection.

In the same spirit, my appreciation for New Orleans’ famous fusion of cultures—architectural, culinary, and otherwise—has developed alongside a broadening in my musical language. I have become increasingly inclusive with the sounds and events that make their way into my work. While these changes have run parallel rather than unfolded causally, I do believe a certain influence through osmosis has taken place. This influence has been cultural if not specifically musical. I once eschewed certain basic musical elements wholesale. Consonance, for example, was a harmonic characteristic that I struggled to take ownership of: rightly or wrongly, I felt unable to integrate strongly consonant intervals into my music. But in recent years I have endeavored to find a role for such intervals in my work, and their strengthening presence has in turn opened up unanticipated directions. These days it is not uncommon for, say, a major triad to unexpectedly surface while I am composing. And importantly, I find myself more willing to entertain its place in the piece than I was in the past. I would like to think that this move away from musical puritanism is at least partly a response to the celebration of diversity that is my adopted home’s hallmark. I understand New Orleans’ ideal as a celebration of diversity that maintains uniqueness, and I certainly aspire to evermore sparkling individuality in my music from one moment to the next.Connecting my non-musical experiences and interests to my artistic motives like this has enabled me to synthesize facets of my daily life into artistic directions and musical material. This has helped me to keep art central in my daily life in an environment that often lacks more obvious means of doing so.

Community Building

As a recovering hermit, I am constantly grateful for music’s social dimensions. I love how being a composer requires me to work with others to realize my artistic visions. The dialogue, both concurrences and disagreements, enriches my work in a way that working alone could not. It allows me to benefit from others’ unique perspectives, interests, and knowledge, and for me to share my own. Such collaboration is increasingly the lifeblood of my artistic practice.

The lack of a preexisting new music community in New Orleans has been one of the biggest difficulties in my establishing a creative life here. There are obvious ways to mitigate this remotely—email and Skype are a composer-in-exile’s best friend—and I have worked to extend technology’s opportunities. For example, I curate an online arts periodical, FOCI Words, which features a variety of content from contributors throughout the world. Soliciting entries is an easy way to start and sustain conversations about music, creativity, social issues, and whatever else is on the minds of artists I deeply respect. The end product often spurs further conversation and debate through social media. Undertaking this project has the dual advantage of perpetuating my connections to the global new music family, and keeping me regularly listening to, thinking about, and discussing music with others.

NOLA visiting artists

An exhibit from ANODE, a series of performances, discussions, exhibits and events curated by the author.

Closer to home, I find myself making similar efforts to keep the conversations going. Many of these are simple—coffee, dinner, board games, disc golf with the few musicians in my field who do live in the area. I have learned over time that taking the afternoon off to just talk music with a friend is worth it, a hard-won lesson given my zeal to punch that time card. These social moments are integral and would often not happen if I did not prioritize them. So, I do so.

I also curate a small concert series. I have been overwhelmed by the eagerness of some very accomplished musicians to travel here for less-than-ideal compensation and perform for less-than-ideal sized crowds, all for the sake of furthering our work together (and consuming some phenomenal New Orleans food along the way). Bringing musicians I respect into town is a wonderful, uplifting way to connect the broader music community to my home life. The lack of obvious venues means I have to be creative, fostering relationships with local institutions and scenes that can bear fruit down the road. Many of my concerts have taken place in spaces more regularly devoted to visual art, because these are the venues that exist here. I have also gotten involved with poets, who have a more widely established community in New Orleans. This has led not only to stimulating conversations across mediums, but also to the prospect of new projects on down the road. This process and its unexpected fruits all further establish a creative lifestyle.

Schulmeister visit

Bassist Kathryn Schulmeister visits New Orleans for ANODE, curated by the author (far right).

Postscript

These are just some of the ways that living in a city where new music is especially uncommon has pushed me to alter my lifestyle and my approach to both community and creativity. It has helped me realize the significance of collaboration and conversation in my creative endeavors, and led me to understand my non-artistic interests in light of my artistic ones. It is not a smooth or linear process, but it is a gratifying one.

And it is one I am not alone in. I am grateful to my numerous colleagues across the country who are in a similar position. Our regular exchange of ideas, be they growth strategies, coping strategies, or just airing grievances, has helped my pursuit to foster a contemporary music community at home. It has also lessened my sense of isolation in the interim. Connecting to others engaged in such a process provides a vital reminder that I am a part of the larger new music community regardless of where I reside. And for that I am thankful.

***
Ray Evanoff - PhotoRay Evanoff is a composer whose work is heavily influenced by his extended collaborations and personal relationships with the musicians he writes for. He has been performed and commissioned by contemporary music specialists across Europe and North America, including Ensembles Apparat, Dal Niente, Distractfold, and SurPlus, Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, Liam Hockley, Mabel Kwan, Kevin McFarland, and Samuel Stoll. He writes unreasonable music while still trying to be a reasonable person. Clearly, he lives in New Orleans.

Advice from Strangers: The Craft of Community

symphony hall

Illustration by Anouk Moulliet

Advice from Strangers explores shared challenges in the industries of new music and technology. This column is third in the series.

It is 10 p.m. Five hundred ticket-holders file into the concert hall to hear exciting contemporary works. They await the opening notes, they hear the performance. They are enthusiastic. They clap. They file out. They go home, check the mail, pay the babysitter, turn on the TV.

I am one of them. I have just recycled my program notes, kicked off my shoes. I am posting photos from the concert on Instagram.

Is this audience my community? Is it anyone’s community?

I don’t know.

What I do know, with relative confidence, is that an audience is not necessarily a community. And that goes for all kinds of audiences: the million-strong user base of a popular website, consumers of a chef’s fine cuisine, a Twitter following, a political following, the readers of this blog.

Community vs. group

Community requires connection. Without interpersonal relationships, a community is just a group.

Community requires generosity. Without an element of giving, it is hard to imagine members being invested in the collective and future well-being of the group.

Community requires space. Without a place (virtual, physical) in which people can connect and contribute, it will be much more difficult for these things to take place.

In tech, as in music, groups have their place. But it is community that brings our creations to life and extends them far beyond what we are capable of on our own. Communities champion our efforts to new and dissenting audiences, make our work more meaningful through their experiences, and expose new truths about our work to ourselves, so that we can do more and better and different

The reverse is also true: our creations bring communities to life, by connecting like-minded people and providing them with a space in which to safely explore their interests and passions.

So: How do we get from group to community? If an audience is not a community, how do we go about turning it into one?

Music-makers and techies are constantly crafting communities. Here’s how we do it.

Nurture connections

“A successful concert of my music isn’t just about the music,” says composer and performer Dean Rosenthal. “It’s about generating interest in each other and the traditions we inherit. It’s important for me as composer to create an environment that is conducive to connecting a community in the context of the concert. I do that by writing music that (hopefully) speaks to my audience on an emotional level, and by explaining a little bit about it: where it comes from, what inspires it, maybe even how it’s composed, and lastly why I chose to write it.”

“For digital products, the times when I’ve seen community work well are when the product itself was useful for the community,” says Kiesha Garrison, senior business development manager at Microsoft. “The people who were fans of the product became a support group for each other and came to rely on each other.”

The key here was that the focus wasn’t on engaging with their brand or with their content. This company started with the fact that there were going to be certain topics that the members of its community were all going to find meaningful–topics for like-minded people to discuss among themselves.

“It never felt like business,” says Garrison. “It felt valuable to have additional perspectives from people who were doing something I was doing. So many like-minded people to tap into at one time.”

Find a juicy juxtaposition

There are people who compartmentalize their friend circles: work, personal, and family do not intermix. I am not one of those people. Intersections are fertile ground for connections. They attract a curious and multifaceted crowd.

“The community organizer is masterful at maneuvering the intersection, the edge where two systems come together,” says Ashara Ekundayo, co-founder and chief creative officer of ImpactHub Oakland. “They could be two ecosystems, two ways of thinking. They could be opposites, juxtaposed. The point is to look at the unique juiciness that exists at the intersection. Where the shore hits the ocean, there’s that cool little line with all the sea crabs and the shells… or where the road meets the forest, there’s all the stuff on the sides: trash, money, watches, all the stuff that comes out of the forest. It’s cool! So think: What are the two most odd things I can try to put together? And not only that: who wants to come and listen to it? Who is it appealing to?”

Who indeed? Enter the audience, ye flotsam and jetsam.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CHECKLIST
1. Does your community have a space to convene and converse? Open a Twitter or Instagram account and share content your target community will be interested in. It doesn’t have to be about you or your work; it does have to be relevant to the community.

2. Are you encouraging connection and conversation within the community? Introduce two like-minded people in your community who don’t know each other. Suggest coffee or a collaboration.

3. How are you serving the community? Think about what your community needs and brainstorm a few ways to help provide it.

Try audience-centered design

“Try opening your next performance by saying, ‘I made this for you.’ How does that change your connection with the audience?” writes mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen in her exploration of the performer-audience relationship.

Composers and performers are in a unique position to impact directly, and in real time, how an audience relates to their work. Even the simplest acknowledgement of the audience at the start of a concert is an acknowledgement of coexistence.

In tech, we don’t often get to physically stand alongside our products as they go forth into the world–but when we design interfaces in a way that considers our users’ needs, it sends a similar message: I made this for you.

Human-centered design is the idea that we can design a system to support its users’ existing beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors rather than requiring them to adapt to the system. It’s a key principle in user-interface design, where the goal is to create user-friendly experiences for people with a wide range of abilities and limitations. Designers try to take into consideration that any given encounter with the software might be a person’s first or fiftieth.

New music, it seems at first glance, would strive to do just the opposite! Atonal. No obvious rhythm. Difficult to relate to. Devoid of context. Not. User. Friendly.

“Truly new music is intentionally subverting the mainstream voice,” says Adam Fong, co-founder of the Center for New Music (C4NM) in San Francisco. “It’s contrarian by nature: ‘There’s a new thing I’m going to create, and it’s going to be different.’”

And yet, or perhaps because of that fact, our contemporary composers are asking themselves: What does the audience need in order to have a meaningful experience?

“Ultimately, we all connect to music on a personal level and the listener has their own response that an artist has nothing to do with, aside from providing the music,” says Rosenthal. “I write the music I want to hear that isn’t being written, and that inspiration helps me bring enthusiasm to the concerts. But the music has to connect in way that could go well beyond me.”

“I think about writing music that engages and interests people,” says one Seattle composer. “If there is already an audience for that ensemble, then I think about writing in a way appropriate for that audience. Or perhaps the performer or ensemble and I think together about what kind of event or context we want to create. I wouldn’t write something simply because I think it is what an audience wants to hear, but I always try to write something that is both true to what I want, and that I think would be interesting to the expected audience.”

Composers are in the lucky position of considering at least two audiences: the one that will hear his or her work, and the one that will perform it.

“Under the best of circumstances, you’re composing for a person,” says composer Daniel Felsenfeld. “When I write a piece for a musician, I put names in the score, not roles–because I believe in writing not just to people’s strengths but also to their frailties.”

At the risk of over-composering this section, I’ll share one more voice, because I find the emphasis on collaboration so very inspiring:

“I’ve found that openly acknowledging the role performers and audience members play in the formulation of a musical work’s meaning helps to develop an engaged and cohesive community,” says composer Garrett Schumann. “Composers, as members of a community, depend on the cooperation of performers and listeners to achieve their ultimate goal of creating meaningful music. If composers remind themselves that they (most often) need someone else to play their music and (always) need someone else to listen to their music in order for it have meaning, then they will not act as if creating meaningful art is a singular endeavor.”

Give of yourself

New music folks revel in service.

“I’m in a constant state of trying to build community around new music,” says Ihnen. “I do it by trying to serve the new music community and the life and culture of a city with my performance.”

“Do service,” says Felsenfeld. “Start concerts, plan events, beg collaborations, reach out to people.”

Felsenfeld does all of these things. His work as a composer is a long sequence of collaborations; he organizes and curates concerts and has co-founded the New Music Gathering.

Felsenfeld and his colleagues brought the three-day conference into being this year when they realized they had no place to formally get together with their community and talk about pressing matters. They designed a framework that would support more than just networking, by establishing clear rules to guide their planning.

“We wanted to keep our roles in it pure. We are volunteers; we have none of our music played. We weren’t there to shill on behalf of our own work, nor will we be in subsequent years. There was no commerce, nothing to buy, no pressure to sell. And there were no built-in competitions–you could not show up and lose something… In short, the only thing we stand to gain from the entire show is the community we build.”

We can build new communities, and we can strengthen existing ones. The San Francisco new music community existed before the Center for New Music did. Fong and his colleagues saw potential in the community, and set out to help it become more efficient, grow better artistically by its own judgment, and tackle its own problems so it could be healthy and vibrant.

Whither service in tech?

Despite how deeply community-oriented many technologies are, and despite the fact that companies often sponsor community service programs for their employees, “service” is not a word that comes up when I ask tech colleagues about their experiences in community-building. I doubt it’s a matter of personality; they are upstanding and conscientious people, even altruistic at heart, and not just in it for the money.

The fact is that there is service in the tech industry, whether it’s volunteering for a civic coding project, providing space for community gatherings after hours, building software to help with disaster recovery, or just running a neighborhood website. I wonder why we don’t see these contributions as service.

Offer a vision of what is possible

“To create a more positive and connected future for our communities, we must be willing to trade their problems for their possibilities,” writes Peter Block in Communities.

Communities are future-oriented. If we want to build strong communities where members serve generously, we must help each other discover what it is we each have to offer–and what we can become–and then enable that to happen.

“Young people do what they see,” says Ekundayo. “If you look like them, then you being there–and them seeing you–activates something in them. When you see another human do something you thought wasn’t possible, you say: ‘Oh, this is possible!’ Imagine what would happen if you took the next step and told them, ‘After I’m done with my performance, you can meet me backstage and I will teach you for an hour.’ Maybe you teach one person, maybe you teach a group of people. What happens if you commit to spending not one but five hours with them, one hour a week for the next five weeks?”

She pauses. “What happens if you go over to a music school and teach there?”

“It’s a community-support effort–introducing singer friends to new repertoire that may suit them, or helping each other out with particularly tricky phrases,” says Soprano Hillary LaBonte. “I try to be as good a representative of new music to my colleagues as I am to non-musicians.”

So many things are available to us that don’t seem accessible until someone shows us they’re possible.

Show up

Be present in the community you are building–as a member of it, not an outsider.

“We are interrelated and interconnected,” says Ekundayo. “Every human being on this planet. Being engaged in your community means showing up for it, and you have to acknowledge that we’re connected. If you think you’re different, you can’t show up.”

Not only is being present the best way to be alert to the changing needs of the community, but it’s a powerful form of support. There’s nothing like showing up at someone’s performance to make it clear that what they’re doing matters to you.

“We support each other by re-posting projects on social media, spreading the buzz, generally spreading the love,” says a flutist friend. “And when I have time, I am usually at my friends’ gigs. I like to keep updated with what people are doing, and face time is very important to the new music community. It not only helps sustain my personal presence in the community, but it also helps sustain the community.”

Service is integral to community. Investing time and skills keeps us accountable for and invested in the wellbeing of the collective. The members of an engaged community care so much about the thread that connects them that they are willing and glad to give of their time and energy to participate and keep it all going.

Design purposeful spaces

“Communities are built of purposeful action,” says Fong. “Are you creating a space for learning, or for interacting? Is it a one-way discourse, or more of a round table?”

According to Block, every room we occupy serves as a metaphor for the larger community that we want to create. Our task is to rearrange the room to meet our intention to build relatedness, accountability, and commitment. A concert space, Facebook feed, Meetup gathering–the way these spaces are set up, who is in the room with us, and even how we know them–this is all configured by someone.

As a builder of community, you get to choose who you want in the room–and how you intend to use the space will inform that decision. Consider who you’re trying to serve and what their needs are. Then design virtual or physical spaces to meet those needs.


At the most operational and practical level, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together? – Peter Block, Community


The Center for New Music is designed for casual interaction in a single room of shared space, so artists can talk and be creative together. By day it’s a coworking space; at night it transforms into an event venue.

The model seems to be working: even during grant season, a time of high stress and competition, the co-working space sees members working together on applications supportively and collaboratively.

“The most effective way of building community is to give people a space where they can try new things, experiment, and be fairly well-insulated from financial and critical pressures,” says Fong. “That allows them to do creative work primarily for themselves, their friends, and people who care about the music. We serve as host and matchmaker, connecting musicians, ensembles, institutions and resources; then we let the art grow organically from there.”

Composer Judah Adashi writes passionately about the importance of designing concert spaces for communal experience.

“Turning a performance into an inviting, communal experience goes beyond the concert itself,” he says, and as artistic director of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series he is in the perfect role to carefully craft that experience. Each show in the series opens with a pre-concert conversation and is followed by a wine reception. The event continues with an after-party at a local cafe–where they play a bonus “track.”

“It’s not an afterthought,” says Adashi. “It’s part of the plan.”

Equal access

“Being a community builder is being someone who is hopefully committed to illuminating and cultivating opportunities for equity in the group,” says Ekundayo. “Provide access in as many ways as possible.”

When we go to a lecture or concert, our purpose is to listen to an exceptional work–and the rooms that host those one-way conversations are designed to optimize the listening experience, with the audience facing the presenter.

Two-way conversations are more likely to emerge around a round table. When we’re on an equal plane, our expectations shift: we expect everyone to bring contributions, behave constructively, and treat each other like peers.

The performance space at the C4NM is one long, narrow room. There’s no raised platform; audience and performer are literally on the same level. “It’s hard for the audience to not interact with the performer!” exclaims Fong. And this overcomes barriers.

What happens when composer, performer, and listener interact as equals?

“I am frequently stunned by what the people who play my pieces are able to reveal about my music’s meaning,” says Garrett Schumann. “I profit unquestionably from the things performers bring to my music, which I cannot imagine. I also learn a great deal from what my listeners find in, ascribe to, and take away from my music… these interactions represent the kind of basic community all art requires.”

The digital amplifier

Being physically present isn’t something people can do all the time.

“People’s lives are increasingly full of things they want to do, and even in a thriving, successful community, getting everyone to show up at any given event is just as difficult as always. So we’re looking into what it would mean to build an online community,” says Fong of the C4NM.

The thing about online communication is its accessibility. Public conversations can be seen by anyone. Archived conversations live on forever. There is vast potential for amplification.

“Successful bands are emphasizing digital communications, perhaps even more so than emphasizing people showing up at concerts,” says Fong. “In San Francisco, there’s been a greater acceptance that your work may only be heard in digital form. People generally accept now that the accelerated success–the snowball effect–is going to happen in the digital space and not in person.”

Digital exposure also provides communities with a visible heartbeat.

“People are attracted to communities with activity. Make that activity happen!” says Michael Snoyman, director of engineering at software development company FP Complete. Create public forums for discussion on Reddit, Stack Overflow, Quora, and IRC. Be a resource: put industry-relevant information on your website, and cross reference it regularly. Create group mailing lists–and strive to keep those conversations addressed to the collective.

Luckily, we don’t have to choose between physical spaces and digital spaces. Both industries regularly augment meaningful face-to-face encounters with digital ones, creating vast, rich, and exciting spaces that encompass all that both have to offer.

A computer science graduate student at UMass Amherst recently told me how she used the momentum of an in-person encounter to build a community in the digital realm. While in Vienna for a conference, she gathered a small group interested in a specific (but unrelated) research area, and then created a mailing list for that topic. A week later, 30 people had joined the list–and she hadn’t yet tapped into her entire network of researchers.

Musicians regularly use social media to share snippets of rehearsals and other behind-the-scenes videos, welcoming listeners into the preparation process. Audiences connect–as communities!–on these channels, anticipation builds, and suddenly the performance is extended in both time and space.

It is our privilege, as community-builders, to think about which conversations we want to take place, who should be in the room for those conversations, and what tools they will need to make these interactions meaningful and productive. The success of our communities hinges on how effectively the spaces we craft–physical or digital–support that intent.

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Writing about community for a community is an odd thing, not only because you, reader, are already part of a thriving community (it’s how we found each other), but because the writing itself is an act of community-building. It connects people and ideas in service of our collective well-being, and hopefully creates a space for continued conversation within and between our two communities.

At the heart of it, the point of community is to connect with our fellow humans in a meaningful way.

“Meet for coffee. Get to know one another on a real (and not just a professional ‘what can you do for me?’) level,” urges Felsenfeld. “You don’t just get to show up with your good ideas and foist–you get conversations going, and that is the path to making things better.”

Next week: trust.