Exercises in Community Music-Making
written by Kyle Tieman-Strauss
2019 GLFCAM Fortuna Calvo-Roth Fellow, Cycle 11
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about location-specific art, spurred by the recent book How To Do Nothing by writer and artist Jenny Odell. By that I don’t mean installation art, but rather the idea of making art rooted in one’s specific environs—creating projects collaboratively and embracing your local community’s ethos, rather than trying to find currency in the globalized vacuum of late capitalism. Over the better part of the last 8 years, I’ve been finding, celebrating, tying together a community surrounding contemporary music created in my hometown, New York. When I was a student at NYU, I started a still-running contemporary music festival called Pulsing & Shaking, the idea of which was to celebrate New Music created in New York. Later, I founded and am the artistic director of a group called Echo Chamber, which commissions composers mostly from our local NY-based network. What I’ve found is that it’s more interesting to live life very specifically here, and from that impulse a more candid artistic process results.
To me, the best kind of music-making is enveloped in one’s community; no matter where you live—big city or rural town—you can find pockets of wild, outrageous music, and if you can’t, you can mind-trick your friends into creating one with you. Contrary to the traditional mythology of the composer, music doesn’t just happen by sheer force of one’s own skill; beyond writing the notes and the rhythms, music exists for me in the space created by the collaborative, interpretive work of bringing a new piece into the world.
Nothing is more exciting than the workshop and rehearsal process; I love hearing from performers what they bring to a piece I’ve written, based on their own training and local ethos, and nothing gives me more gratification than presenting a finished piece of music that all of us have contributed to in some way. (This is what makes GLFCAM so special; as opposed to the usual process, composers and performers have the luxury of a workshop several months ahead of the premiere, where we really get to dig into both the technical aspects of writing for instruments, as well as the core of the musical argument we’re trying to make.)
I became friends with Aeryn Santillan (Cycles 5 and 11) when we did our master’s degrees at New York University a few years ago. They wrote in this space last year about the DIY punk scene in their hometown Chicago, and what they gained from it. “Having grown up within the DIY subculture, I have always creatively found a way to make musical projects happen through collaboration… I believe collaboration is the most valuable way to engage and build strong communities.” New York’s contemporary music universe has experienced, over the last 30 years, a renaissance of community spirit. Long gone is the idea that composers are held on a solitary pedestal (probably on the Upper West Side, probably at a conservatory).
Instead, I think the majority of composers in New York feel, as I do, a need to serve as cheerleaders for the music of our entire community (not just our own)—the composers, the New Music performance specialists, and the producers and institutions that have taken to doing contemporary music, no matter the “genre,” at a high level. The result is, I hope, a music that feels more genuine, more innately linked to our immediate surroundings, and in a way at odds with the daily masochism of social media.
Therein lies the magic of writing music, for me. It’s also what make Gabriela’s work in creating GLFCAM so important—over five days, we knit together an ad hoc community in rural Boonville, CA, bringing together composers and performers from all corners of the earth to find that space, together, between the notes, where the music happens. But GLFCAM isn’t just about the composer-fellows’ music; it’s a masterclass in finding and growing those patches of wild music in one’s own community. Gabriela certainly has done that. I got a small frisson of pleasure at the idea of Tony Arnold singing a piece by Georges Aperghis in a rural high school cafeteria. What’s more outrageous, and contrary to the prevailing notion of contemporary music as the boogey-man of classical music, is that the people who packed that cafeteria probably had no idea who Aperghis is, but they loved the music all the same.
In a way, then, GLFCAM is a bit of a mind-trick of Gabriela’s own design. Composers lured 2.5 hours away from the Bay Area to the Anderson Valley—great, an opportunity to write something new for talented players!—planning to come away with valuable lessons about being a professional composer. We indeed got plenty of that, Gabriela being something of a lodestar for emerging composers. But we also travelled home as better musical citizens, cozened into participating in an exercise in community music-making that revealed the inherent beauty in collaboratively creating art.
On the plane back to New York in a jet-lagged, sleep-deprived haze, I kept thinking about this idea of location-specific art, and how the most engaging musical experiences I’ve had have always been intensely personal, local experiences. I was thinking about the love I felt that first season of Pulsing & Shaking in seeing all of this New York-based music presented at once, and indeed the joy of scheming a new project with my local network of New Music conspirators. Confronting the constant need to be very online, and at the risk of sounding crunchy granola, I find now more than ever that the most rewarding art—much as the most rewarding life—exists right here, right where you find yourself.
Kyle Tieman-Strauss (b. 1994) is a composer of music for stages and headphones, as well as a passionate advocate for contemporary music. His music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles such as ETHEL; Bearthoven; JACK Quartet; Conduit; Manhattan Saxophone Quartet; Cadillac Moon Ensemble; and the NYU Symphony Orchestra, where he held residencies in 2013-2014 and 2016-2017. Learn more from Kyle’s bio page.