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NYC Rolls Out the Red Carpet for the 45th GRAMMYS
The 45th Annual GRAMMY Awards will return to New York City next year, it was officially announced today after a weekend of rumors. On February 23, 2003, Madison Square Garden will host the event, which is expected to have an economic impact on the city estimated at $35-40 million. The awards draw a worldwide television audience in excess of 1.5 billion in addition to the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences‘s more than 20,000 members who will be at the Garden that night.
Academy President/CEO Michael Greene was joined in making the announcement by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a host of CBS, Madison Square Garden, and New York City representatives. Greene expressed his enthusiasm for bringing the awards back to New York, “our other home town” and a city that “taught the world to celebrate humanity” in the wake of September 11. Greene recalled how after just a few days in office Mayor Bloomberg, with “passion, spirit, and humility” expressed to him the importance of bringing the GRAMMYS back to New York next year.
Bloomberg thanked Greene and the Academy for their display of solidarity and spoke confidently that New York, a place that is “still the capital of culture, and certainly the capital of music,” would do everything to make “this the place you want to be.”
Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) also added his thanks for the Academy’s moral and economic support, concluding, “Welcome back. The red carpet is waiting.”
GRAMMY Fest, a month-long celebration prior to the evening’s award ceremony, will include140 community events and activities produced by music and arts organizations from the New York area.
At the conclusion of the event, pop star Marc Anthony presented Bloomberg with a guitar donated and autographed by the legendary Les Paul that was painted with a 9/11 scene by retired NYC fireman Peter Ortel. The guitar will be auctioned off and the proceeds will go to the Uniformed Firefighters Association Widows and Children Fund.
The 45th Annual GRAMMY Awards will be broadcast Sunday, February 23 from 8-11p.m. on CBS. This will mark the first time that the GRAMMYS will be broadcast on a Sunday–the night that captures the most television viewers. Leslie Moonves, CBS President/CEO, pointed out that “it all adds up to one exciting event: The music industry’s biggest showcase will be broadcast on television’s most watched night from the country’s largest city and from the world’s most famous arena.”
Nominees for the 45th Annual GRAMMY Awards will be announced in January 2003.
Off the Charts: Big Band Circa 2006
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In the pop music world it seems like the ’80s revival just won’t go away, and in classical music the 19th century still reigns supreme. But jazz is, as usual, much less predictable. It’s been half a decade since Ken Burns’s still divisive PBS documentary told us that jazz for the most part had died in the 1970s. Don’t tell that to the myriad inventive players out there who continue to stretch the genre in unprecedented new directions.
What has been one of the most surprising developments in recent years has been the resurgence of the big band as the medium of choice for a wide variety of up-and-coming musicians in the scene. But don’t expect that any of these folks blowing their horns will be decked out in zoot suits or that there will be throngs of fawning teenagers doing the lindy-hop in the background. For today’s big band innovators, the ensemble is everything from an expanded rock band to a more malleable symphony orchestra, a means by which to explore timbre with as much freewheeling abandon as melody and harmony.
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This fall, Molly, Randy, and I each spoke to three emerging big band leaders who approach this music from very different aesthetic vantage points. Darcy James Argue’s music delights the anachronism of the big band in a post-punk musical environment. Sherisse Rogers sees the big band as a melting pot for a plethora of musical styles ranging from hip-hop to Brazilian. Charles Waters is a practical avant-gardist for whom the big band has proven to be a viable means to expressing large-scale compositional ideas.
There are many other fascinating musicians out there who are exploring new approaches as well. By focusing on these three, we hope it will whet your appetite to discover the variety of exciting new work being created for big band right now. This is just a small snapshot of what is certainly not a retro movement.
– FJO
Good Vibrations: Towards a Fair Trade Standard for Live Music
Remember a time when we didn’t use the words “organic” or “sustainable” during pretty much any discussion related to cultivating resources? That time did exist, but because environmentalists won our minds, we now think about nearly all resource use in ecological metaphors. What would it take for us to have a similar evolution in thought when it comes to labor—specifically musical labor?
Digital media scholar Yochai Benkler has written about borrowing the metaphors from the ecological lexicon developed by environmental activists for mobilization in fights about culture. What metaphors can we use in music to talk about the ethical practices of our community? While it could be a cheeky rhetorical game to use the environmentalist metaphor for musical labor (musicians are the megafauna we want to give a good life in an ideal habitat), I see the most possible action in using the framework of the global fair trade movement to talk about the ethical treatment of musicians.
Fair trade deals with the ethical treatment of labor in the production and supply chain rather than the ethical sourcing of materials, so it works well for a field like music, where the primary product is good vibrations. The fair trade movement is a project 50-plus years in the making, with a core set of criteria by which to evaluate if products have been produced ethically. This system was built through the organization of producers and the education (often through marketing) of consumers, with an independent supervisory body in between. At the heart is an elaborate set of standards for monitoring and labeling so that consumers can trust that their money is actually going to support the bettering of workers’ lives.
This makes it easy for consumers to get involved—they just have to buy the ethical product to do good. Once the domain of religious communities, hippies, and anarchist collectives, fair trade ethical consumption has become widespread in Europe. A company like Sainsbury (a UK grocer) has moved from considering fair trade to be a luxury premium for those with a deep ethical urge to being the cost of doing business when it comes to some commodities (for instance they sell only fair trade bananas). By taking the high road, they set a standard by which competitors can also safely stock more expensive fair trade items.
I want to stress that this trajectory—something that came from radical activism in the 1960s—is now a mainstreamed part of capitalist logic 30 years later, and a general metaphor for how we know ourselves in the world. It has also lifted seven million people out of poverty, and as the movement grows, so does this number. This has all been done through the strength of serious organizing and education. To be fair, it has been at the expense of some of the more militant demands for trade justice. Fair trade campaigns have been criticized as being reformist, in as much as they’re only partially shifting conditions of inequality rather than wholly transforming them. Fair trade as it stands is not a revolution in the ownership of the means of production; it’s an ethical adjustment to capitalism. In short, it’s not enough, but it’s a start.
Wouldn’t music fans follow a similar path? We just need to give them large scale and systematic ways to get involved in supporting the ethical treatment of musicians, something they can understand easily and accept as a fair compromise. What mechanism can we give a listener so she will say, “Yes, I will pay more for this because I understand that the money is actually going to the musician, not to corporate profits or venue capital campaigns or CEO bonuses. Here is the money, I trust you to give it to the musician.”
The use of the fair trade framework for the music industry would imply enforcing a set of standards for wages and conditions that would allow musicians to live better lives, and that knowledge of this would allow presenters to exhibit their good ethics with a seal, which would then be rewarded by a paying public.
As with the fair trade movement itself, the idea of fair trade music has sprung up in different places and mobilized various groups, but none have thus far succeeded in gaining the mass necessary to push campaigns mainstream. As Frank J. Oteri wrote in his NewMusicBox report on the 2013 CISAC meeting, the concept of “fair trade” was brought up often as a good model for organizing by a number of people. Indeed, the Austrian Music Information Centre developed a rudimentary framework for a fair trade music campaign, which was active between 2007-2011.
In the U.S., the fair trade music movements are just beginning, and it is these that I want to focus on here. For the rest of this column I just want to deal with fair trade as it would work in live music contexts, primarily because this is where I have done some work as part of the Musicians Solidarity Council, which sought to bring a fair trade campaign to New York City. For live musicians, wages are usually the clear issue––with the argument being that musicians should be paid for the work they do, unless they have volunteered in advance to give their work for free. How much pay, when paid, and under what conditions are the questions on the table, with the number one being that some presenters simply don’t pay at all. While the wage issue is always foremost in people’s minds, I do think that working condition issues matter greatly as well; things like good sound quality, adequate performance equipment, safety, forthright scheduling, clear communication, and ease of access to venues are things that should be guaranteed by presenters and the city infrastructure surrounding them.
On the wage issue, one project taking shape is a fair trade labeling system for venues, showing concertgoers that the management has agreed to certain standards for how they treat and pay musicians. The system is voluntary for the venue, and carries the implied promise that ethical consumers will prefer their venue to non-labeled venues. This is a departure from the traditional union tactic of getting employers, often the venues, to enter into collective bargaining agreements. This is why it is interesting that AFM locals have been leaders in a new Fair Trade Music initiative, which was founded in Portland and has fledgling chapters around the United States.
One version of this labeling idea is run by AFM Local 1000, which is for traveling folk musicians. Just as in the early days of the larger fair trade movement, their campaign, Fair Trade 1000, is calling upon their idealist subset of live music venues to be the first to take the high road. Their standard is a simple one: pay at the 1000’s minimum wage scale. They’ve signed up 23 presenting organizations thus far. (This project is similar for music to what the Restaurant Opportunities Center’s “High Road” campaign does—certify restaurants that respect workers, and then promote those restaurants to ethically minded consumers).
While the folk scene does have its own local, I do think that new music could do something similar in asking employers—venues or presenting organizations—to sign onto an ethical pledge for live musicians. The conditions certainly are correct: a tight network of venues, highly educated players who all know one another, and a deep level of audience empathy. Perhaps all it would take is a group like the Noise Action Committee to come together to do the work. It would be well worth the time.
The Seattle chapter of Fair Trade Music won a victory on working conditions this March when they organized to get the city to install special parking zones outside venues. Musicians there had come together to name the negative experience of loading equipment as one thing they shared collectively, and they built a coalition to push a change through the city. (Getting a $40 ticket for a gig that paid $30 is a real thing many musicians have experienced). The result is that four clubs now have a musicians-only load-in outside the venue doors from 4-7 p.m. The Portland chapter is now working on a similar campaign. It’s easy to imagine similar groups organizing for such changes, which would have minimal negative impact on the city and would greatly help working musicians, regardless of genre.
I want to stress that I think for these campaigns to succeed, they need active gigging musicians at their core. That way they can ensure that the musicians’ needs drive the work that is being done. This is a hard thing to hear, given that working musicians are often stretched thin already, but it’s especially true for freelancers and small businesses like ensembles. You have to come together collectively to determine your common grievances and figure out the best course of action. Uniting under the fair trade model is just one way to do that. We should all keep an eye on Seattle, and perhaps those who do will end up jumpstarting something similar in their towns.
Fair Trade Music’s continued successes will necessitate that they scale up, as did the fair trade movement when it went from being about hippies buying handicrafts to supermarket chains buying millions of pounds of produce. Before that can happen, there has to be demand, which means massive public outreach and education to talk about the exploitative conditions of current labor. It needs to be full of real numbers and portray all of the steps that make each part of the supply and consumption chain complicit in the exploitation of musicians. If people can plainly see the problem, and there is a feasible solution at hand, then the work is easier done. It’s not enough to have a few good venues for those lucky enough to work in their genres or live in their communities—it has to become a standard.
Imagine playing across the U.S. and knowing that you’d have a dressing room, load-in space, decent stage equipment, and earn a living wage at every venue you played. It’s not that radical a demand. What it will take is some public honesty about what working conditions are like at venues, musicians coming together to organize and agitate, musicians and presenters considering their whole musical “environment” and not just their own immediate future needs, and lots of talk with the listeners who ultimately do fund musicians’ pay, be it through taxes or tickets. With all those things coming together, we could see a time in the future when the “Fair Trade Music” logo is as ubiquitous as the recycling logo, and the implications of that carrying through to better pay and conditions for all who play music live.
Music Educator Voices: In Unison for Education Funding
There is an education funding crisis occurring in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky at this time. Not only are students in regular academic classes affected by the lack of funding for textbooks and personnel; music students have fewer resources and limited opportunities for participation. Let’s take a look at the crisis as it is now unfolding in the state of Oklahoma.
Oklahoma has long had a reputation for entrepreneurship and “can do” attitudes. This harkens back to the beginning of statehood, as the pioneers of this resource-rich region took advantage of the Homestead Act of 1862. If a settler could stay on the land they claimed for five years and improve it, they would then own it. These people were not afraid of a challenge. They saw opportunity in investing in the land, communities, cities, churches, and schools.
Fast forward to April 2018. While the state of Oklahoma has had a heritage of strong-willed citizens, the mindset of growth and investment in community education has fallen on the legislative back burner for the last decade. A recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities states that Oklahoma has had the largest decrease in per pupil funding since 2008. School funding per child is about $1000 dollars less than ten years ago.
It seems that this is due to several state budget factors, including the decrease in oil and gas prices as well as cuts made to education after the 2008 recession that have not been restored or have been ignored. This negative growth mindset has permeated the current lack of state education funding and has exacerbated an education crisis. Oklahoma teachers, like their peers in West Virginia and Kentucky are now standing up for the respect and remuneration that they deserve.
On April 2, 2018, Oklahoma teachers walked out of their classrooms and headed for the capitol building in Oklahoma City. They walked, drove carpools, and rode in buses paid for by community dollars. In Tulsa, the state’s second largest city, teachers are marching the 110 miles to the state capitol as well to demonstrate their solidarity and the seriousness of this issue.
What kind of an impact is this education crisis having on music classrooms in the state? In talking with several teachers in the trenches, they shared their frustration over the lack of funds and are distressed at seeing the negative impact on student learning. Music educators shared that they can no longer “just work harder” to make up for oversized classes and the lack of resources. Stephanie Abell, the choral director at Norman High School spoke of the consequences of diminishing school funds. “The students feel slighted,” Abell acknowledged. “They know the teachers are doing the best they can, but they know it is inequitable. When I talk to my seniors, they tell me that their large class sizes are overwhelming. They need more time from their teachers, but when the teacher has 160 students that’s pretty hard. My freshman son is in the ninth grade and in three advanced classes and one regular class. He only has one textbook for AP Human Geography. The other classes don’t have textbooks because there is no money for them. The teacher walkout is coming at a crucial time for music educators, as this is during our state music competition. I talked to my 59-member chorale and told them that the walkout may prevent us from going this year. Nobody balked at it, and the students said this is more important than any contest.”
Oversized classrooms are affecting student learning in music theory classes. Cameron Burton is in his fourth year as high school band director in Choctaw. Burton describes that in his jazz theory class, the more students that he has, the less he can differentiate instruction for students. “That becomes a big issue. In music theory, lessons are based on analytical and critical thinking skills. If you are not able to assist students one on one, as is the norm in smaller classes, the students in crowded classrooms are directly affected by not developing their musical understanding of key concepts.”
Classroom overcrowding is seen in the elementary schools as well. Melanie Drummond, an elementary music specialist from Sallisaw, Oklahoma wrote this comment in a letter to Oklahoma legislators, “In order to allow our homeroom teachers planning time, I teach two classrooms of students in rotating shifts all day. The reason our PE teacher and I have this schedule is because we don’t have adequate funding to add other ‘elective’ options for our students. Because I have 35+ students in each class, my time with the students is filled with much more ‘crowd control’ than music making and it saddens me. This is saddening and stressing me out to the point that I’m seriously considering other career options besides teaching in Oklahoma.”
The impact that the current education crisis is having on specific music classroom resources is also a hot topic. Many teachers have shared that their facilities have not been updated in a decade, that class overcrowding is an issue, and that they often have to do fundraisers just to buy music for their classes. Burton explains that in his band program, due to funding cuts, the costs of music education are passed on to the students. Band students have to pay a band fee to cover costs such as transportation and audition fees that are normally covered in the general budget. “We have also eliminated extra support staff so there is no one available to drive our students to contests or festivals. We have to come up with this funding as well.”
During Brenda Mechling’s 21 year teaching tenure as choral director at Del City High, she has had countless fundraisers to supplement her music budget. “It takes away from my instructional class time to discuss the fundraiser and to collect money. Turning in money happens every day. You have to remind them daily to go sell these items. This year we have sold chocolate bars, beef sticks, candles, baked goods, tickets for concerts, had silent auction baskets, and donation buckets at Christmas concerts.” Mrs. Mechling explained that “In the past we have sold jewelry, brochure sales, grocery bags, wrapping paper, cinnamon rolls, and even braided bread. The sad part about it is that the fundraising used to be just for extra items. Now it is for music, textbooks, sound and audio equipment, and buses for school music events that used to be allocated from our general education fund. Our kids became fundraisers so that they can have the same opportunities as the previous students in our program. They became their own fundraisers for what they need. That is so sad, because this used to be given to us by the state.”
Abell said of her vocal music students: “These students have had a generation of financial cuts. For the last decade we have been told as teachers, ‘Maybe you will have funding next year.’ On top of no new funding, there have also been mid-year cuts. In Norman ISD, just a few weeks ago, we received a budget cut of $360,000. The teacher walkout is sending the message that we are at the end of our rope. As teachers, this is our last resort, but it has been an important issue for a long time. I have stretched the music budget as far as it can go. I could actually spend my music budget for the year in the first two weeks of school. We now receive about $2.50-$3.00 per student for the high school music program. This affects which activities we can allow our students to participate in. All funding which in the past came from our music budget now has to come from fundraising that I, as the music teacher, organize and manage. We even fundraise so that students may participate in All State contest auditions. Being a ‘half-time teacher and half-time fundraiser’ takes away time from instruction. I am meeting with fundraising representatives and counting money instead of preparing my students for choral performances. I have 100 more students in my music program than I had ten years ago and far less money. The low-funding crisis has also affected music educator professional development. If I go to a convention, I have to pay for that myself as there is no funding for professional development. It comes out of my pocket.”
Music educators are concerned about what the decline in education support means for the future of their students. Abell stated that “the state of Oklahoma has been affected by the declining support of education funding over the last 10-15 years. It has snowballed.”
Since the music teachers walked out of their classrooms this week, music classrooms have been silent, but educators hope their actions communicate a specific message. For her part, Abell hopes “it communicates to the world the dignity of our profession as music educators. Lately it seems that even my own students recognize the demise of teacher status as a respected profession that is worthy. They say things like, ‘We know you are a teacher; you don’t have money for that.’ I believe that like any other college-related profession, we deserve better. I also hope our actions help more of our colleagues stay in Oklahoma to teach. The last five student teachers that worked with me did not stay in Oklahoma but left to work in other states that pay more.”
Mr. Burton shares that the funding issue was addressed early on in his hiring, because the district slashed the band director position to that of a half time job and asked him if he could obtain alternative certification in another high school subject in order to be hired as a full time employee. “I was hired as half music teacher and half math teacher. I teach 3 math classes and 3 music classes. My professional development has to be split between these two subjects and I am worried that I will end up being a jack of all trades and master of none.”
My own university music education students have commented on the poor infrastructure and facilities that they see in their observations of elementary and secondary schools in Oklahoma.
Emily Wright stated, “In some schools I have visited, the facilities are often not clean. Tiles in ceilings are falling down. There is roof damage, leaking and molding in some schools.” Other students have commented on the lack of resources that impact student music learning such as choir rooms with no risers, lack of funding for accompanists, and a lack of sheet music and updated technology. One of my students noted that an elementary music teacher was given a $15.00 check for school supplies which was meant to last the whole year. Burton notes that there are no resources for new instruments and students have to again pay for any instrument repairs. “We aren’t doing any instrument repairs.”
Tess Moseley, a senior music education student at Oklahoma Christian University shares her concerns about the teacher walkout and how it is impacting her student-teaching semester. “I have nowhere to student teach, as both of my sites are participating in the walkout. I don’t know if I will be able to receive my certification in time to teach next year. This is a complex situation…the walkout is beneficial because it is fighting for our first-year teaching salary. At the same time, I’ve spent four years with thousands of dollars in student loans, and I may not be able to do what I’ve worked so hard for until later…I hope for the best in this walkout, as stressful and necessary as it is.”
School administrators are affected by the education crisis by stretching personnel resources beyond the norm. There are fewer counselors and resource officers, and teacher turnover is an epidemic. Abell noted, “My principal shared that it is difficult to have 28 new teachers every year. When one fourth of the staff turns over every year, the stability of a school suffers.”
Brenda Mechling shares that she believes walking out is important but that the ongoing conversations with legislators are key. “In the past few days, just being present at the capitol is the best I could do. If you don’t get to the capitol right at 7:30 a.m. to stand in line, you don’t get in to see a legislator because the lines are too long. During my spring break, I visited my legislators two separate times. I left cards that stated my concerns and contact information. I was not contacted with a follow up communication from either one of my legislators.”
Burton summarizes his frustration in saying that the current funding situation in Oklahoma schools allows us to maintain, but not to move forward. “It is the biggest frustration of all.
It’s asking multiple music programs to be average. We would never ask our students to be just average. We want much for them. Actually, what teachers are asking the legislature for now will just bring us up to average! This walk out was necessary because nothing else has worked since I graduated high school ten years ago. I believe that if it takes the teachers to get this problem solved, then I say go for it. It is time for our state to take care of it. By ignoring the education funding crisis, this neglected issue is affecting the future of the state.”
Brenda Mechling shares that she would like to have the full 50 minutes to teach and not have to use 15 minutes of instruction daily to fundraise for needed instructional supplies and music. “Oh my gosh, that would touch my heart, then I could really have more music making opportunities with my students. These kids are not getting the same education as they were when I first started 21 years ago.”
This week as teachers have met with legislators, media and community leaders, their voices are being heard in a different kind of chorus. Hopefully, the unity that Oklahoma teachers are showing to the world will result in school funding reform. If so, music education in Oklahoma will crescendo and grow past the grand pause that has occurred the last decade.
Underscoring How Human and Relatable Immigrants Actually Are
I don’t think of myself as the type that gambles with the rent money, yet that’s exactly what I felt like I was doing during tech week of the live, online, remote song cycle I recently produced called Swell. The riskiness of the endeavor, which was funded by the Mayor’s Office of the City of New York along with assistance for ASL interpretation from A.R.T.-NY, didn’t become clear until one night in tech when the internet was bucking wildly and we couldn’t sync the audio feeds coming from various corners of the country the way we’d successfully done during the past two weeks of staging rehearsals. It occurred to me that choosing such an unpredictable medium for a live, remote production whose subject was very dear to me may not have been the most clear-eyed decision.
A few years in the making, Swell began with an encounter with a piece of Nathalie Joachim’s that hearkened back to a trip she’d taken to her mother country of Haiti. Listening to her, I began wanting to make work like that, work that transported me to another place and to another way of life. It made me immensely nostalgic for my own island of origin, Taiwan. After that experience, it became my mission to find composers who identified as immigrants/children of immigrants, ask them if they’d be willing to write a song about some aspect of that experience, and on top of that, ask if they’d be open to collaborating with me on the lyrics. (At the time, I’d been writing lyrics for about three years and working with a couple of different composers; I was enamored with what music could do to enhance text and could see no reason to stop.)
It took a while to track down composers in New York who fit the criteria, and who were also comfortable with new music. I remember explaining the idea for the song cycle to one composer from Israel that I’d approached, and afterward he had a pained look on his face. He asked, “What if I didn’t immigrate to escape war or poverty?” My immediate reply was that that was ideal, because not every immigrant’s experience involves fleeing horrific circumstances. He wound up writing perhaps the cycle’s most well-loved earworm. Another composer decided to set his memory piece at a breakneck tempo, because he wanted to emphasize the humor in the song, as well as play with the fact that not every immigrant from Mexico has the same journey, literally or figuratively, to the U.S.
As it turned out, my definition of new music was fairly broad, and by the time I’d found ten composers, the song cycle included electronics, pop-inflected sounds, opera, opera lite, atonality—it was all marvelous as far as I was concerned. I loved, too, that each composer had (sometimes vastly) different musical backgrounds and training. They were all accomplished, yet they’d entered the field from different directions, meeting finally at this project. In summer of 2019, I was offered a two-day workshop at HERE in New York to test out the concept. The workshop presentation utilized three singers, three instrumentalists, projections, a little bit of lighting design, a smaller amount of set design, and music stands because nobody could be expected to be off-book. I’d paid everyone out of my savings, which at the time added up to a few thousand dollars—it was my emergency fund, and being offered space to present this work on very short notice seemed like the perfect emergency. In naming the song cycle, I arrived at a term that evoked both turbulent seas (and sea-crossings), and voices rising in unison.
The workshop of Swell coincided with the weekend that ICE began conducting mass raids at the behest of then President Trump. It was an eerie coincidence, as the raids were originally scheduled to occur the weekend prior, but had been postponed for one week. So, while people who looked and sounded like us—people who came from immigrant families—were being taken from their homes, we presented a song cycle underscoring how human and relatable immigrants actually were. Our show wasn’t exactly a solution to what was happening, but it was a place where people could, and did, gather in solidarity against it. Fast forward to March 17, 2021, when Swell opened for a five-day, live, online run, after being given the green light to convert its originally intended, fully staged, in-person production into a virtual one. That night, as we finished up our first post-show production meeting, news of a shooting spree in Atlanta appeared in my feed. It wasn’t being called a hate crime, but it looked at least like a violent act that grew partly out of racist thinking and misogynistic ideas. The following day, I was asked how I was doing and whether there was anything people could do to help. The only answer that made sense to me was to ask people to watch the show. As it happened, half our composers were of Asian descent. I felt, and continue to feel, that the show kept me buoyed during a time when it would otherwise have been easy to succumb to fear and anxiety. I made the show’s comp code available to the public, which was a decision I could make easily as producer. It felt to me like everyone, for different reasons, could use our show at that moment.
Aside from the piece itself being moving, there was the undeniable fact that thirty artists contributed to it in some way. That thirty individuals helped to make what amounted to an online experiment, during a pandemic, while getting paid, is inspiring in and of itself. What I think made it such a powerful antidote to the race-based hate and violence toward Asians/Asian Americans, is the community we created over the course of making the show. Although every rehearsal and every meeting took place virtually, we maintained a kind and supportive ethos, even as we were attempting something highly stressful with a considerable chance of failure. It was important to me, especially early on, to have as much individual time with everyone as possible. Along with talking about the music, I swapped life stories with the music director (whom I hadn’t worked with before). I walked the performers through setting up their lights and green screens, and gave them as much time as they needed to get comfortable with the equipment and with me. I found this early getting-to-know-each-other period crucial for buffering the stressors that would inevitably come later in the process, such as scheduling snafus, tech week, and the sundry unpredictable surprises that crop up, which producers tackle on a regular basis.
It’s generally assumed that I regard Swell as my baby. Though this is true, it’s also true that I regard every project of mine as my baby. In theater, I’ve found that producing one’s work is the surest way of seeing that work in the world. In music (or more aptly, music-theater) which I’m newer to, an artist who produces their own work, let alone produces the work of others, seems something of a unicorn. At its core, producing is a time-consuming, stress-inducing, sleep-depriving job, and requires a set of skills that, if one doesn’t already possess them, one must be open to acquiring. Having done it, I can say my favorite things about producing have nothing to do with seeing the work realized. Instead, what I most enjoy are the problem-solving aspect and the power of paying artists. Every day I worked on Swell seemed to present a new challenge, and every day ended, if I was lucky, with a creative solution. Apart from that, nothing gives me as much joy as sending money directly to an artist for making their art. It was almost as if every time I hit ‘send’ I was paying myself.
One of the accomplishments that came out of Swell that I will take to my grave is that many of the composers (perhaps all?) had the chance to write about themselves in a way they’d never been asked to before. This again, was a difference between this world and the theater world. In theater, writers are often pressed to write about what they know, and while the intentions behind this remain well-meaning, for BIPOC writers this can sometimes feel restrictive or worse, extractive. Yet for composers who had never been given the chance to consider their heritage or their personal stories in the context of making work, they came away from Swell with a sense of self and a sense of purpose they hadn’t known they were missing. The other accomplishment of which I’m exceedingly proud is the ability to provide ASL interpretation for the show. What is meaningful to me about this is that for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, music can feel like an activity that belongs only to the hearing. Making this production accessible, with dynamic visuals, captioning, and a separate window for ASL interpretation (as large as the window for the show, if one chose to make it so on their computer screen) to a community that is not typically served, particularly when it comes to sound-based work, was revelatory. Suddenly it made sense to think of Swell as a work of art, rather than a work of sound.
When we finally got Swell up and running, the same butterflies that attend an in-person show came swarming in. I saw people in the audience I knew, and there were names I recognized. It felt so live, and because of that it was scary. Every night we had different things to contend with, sometimes software related, often internet related. At the end of one night that went particularly well, the applause (via chat) was instantaneous, and my phone and email blew up with messages of awe and appreciation. As with in-person performances, one night like that is almost enough to erase all the imperfections that, to the maker, seem so glaring. If I had known from the beginning what putting Swell online entailed, I think I would have gone ahead and done it anyway.
Third Coast Percussion: The Collaborative Process
In the first couple of weeks following the global lock down, we hadn’t completely figured out how we were going to produce the extensive NewMusicBox Cover conversations that we launch on the first day of every month—we were too busy finishing up work on our talk with Nathalie Joachim which we were lucky enough to record just a week before all this began. But we knew that these in-depth conversations about new music were something we had to keep going somehow, especially since the next one was slated for May 1, the 21st anniversary of the launch of this publication online. What to do? So much of what has made these conversations so exciting is the intimacy, empathy, and camaraderie that emerges from an in-person encounter, often in the homes of the people with whom we are talking. But we’re also well aware that this method of recording these talks also comes with limitations. There are tons of exciting people making fascinating music all over this country whom we have wanted to feature on these pages, but we’ve usually been limited to folks who either live in the greater New York Tri-State area, are a possible day trip along the Northeastern Corridor in either direction, or have come to NYC for a performance (and those talks are obviously not at home and so run the risk of feeling less personal).
I’ve long been a fan of Third Coast Percussion which marks its 15th anniversary this year and I’ve been eager to talk with their four members for quite some time about their collaborations with Augusta Read Thomas, David T. Little, Donnacha Dennehy, Philip Glass, and more recently Devonté Hynes (a.k.a. Blood Orange) and JLin, as well as their own compositions. (I’m particularly enamored with TCP member David Skidmore’s immersive Common Patterns in Uncommon Time.) However, TCP is based in Chicago and is constantly touring around the country, so the dots never connected.
Then very soon after concerts started getting cancelled all over the country and we all began sheltering in place, TCP started presenting live stream concerts on their YouTube channel which were really motivational, particularly their second one on March 28 which—in addition to featuring the amazing pieces written for them by Glass, Hynes, and JLin, plus an awesome original by TCP’s Peter Martin—was a fundraiser for the New Music Solidary Fund which New Music USA administers. So I just had to figure out a way to make them the May 2020 NewMusicBox Cover somehow! Thanks to the Zoom platform and the fact that each of these four guys—Dave, Peter, Robert Dillon, and Sean Connors—was tech savvy enough to record themselves separately with microphones and camcorders, we were able to record a substantive conversation online from five different locations that looks and feels almost like we were all together… almost.
We talked about a very wide range of topics. They started off by sharing stories about how TCP introduces audiences to percussion instruments and how they each came to devote their lives to making music. Then we engaged in a heady series of dos and don’ts for writing and performing percussion music. After that, we spent a long time exploring some details of the staggering range of music they have nurtured from an extraordinarily wide range of creators including in-depth commentary about some of their own original compositions. Finally, we had a heart to heart about what they all have been doing to cope in these unprecedented and uncertain times that everyone has been thrust into. I hope you find what they each had to say as poignant and inspirational as I have.
[Ed. note: To accommodate a broad range of experiential modalities, we’ve included audio links for the entire conversation as well as a complete text transcription. Click on “Read the Full Transcript” and you will also be rewarded with a few video clips from the talk and well as several performances! To facilitate access, both the audio and the text have been divided into four discrete sections, each of which is self-contained, in order to make the experience somewhat more manageable since the total discussion ran a little over 100 minutes. We encourage you to bookmark this page in your browser and return to it multiple times rather than going through all of it in one go, unless you’re extremely intrepid! – FJO]
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