What could community and imagination in music making look like? Laurie Spiegel’s reflections on the 70s and earlier decades, recorded in 2014, offer some clues, even for a very different time today.
This comes from New York’s wonderful New Music Box (and New Music USA). For all the negative things we would correctly say about the USA right now, I miss the prolific activities of these organizations – we could use more like that, even in hyperactive Berlin. Here’s the video, produced by Molly Sheridan and Alexandra Gardner:
“Music is about emotion …
but also about structure, I love structure.”
There’s the terrific full interview by the one and only Frank Oteri which you’ll also want to check out:
Laurie Spiegel: Grassroots Technologist
But I want to return to what Spiegel says in the interview. She’s musing on the value of shared studios:
“One of the things that I think made the 70s a really special period was that electronic instruments were too expensive for most people to own. But for a lot of us, the way to get access to electronic instruments was through shared studios. So there was community; there were interactions between people.”
“… [people] commented on each other’s work, helped each other with their work. How would I get it to do this? …as opposed to everyone sitting by themself in their room with their computer.”
This is worth highlighting because a) I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the 1970s and the fairly limited access folks had to technology, but b) there are ways of creating exactly this kind of space now! And in fact, as much as we focus on analog versus digital or tactile hardware versus software, this distinction – having a shared space – may be what really helped inform the earlier epoch in music making.
There are physical spaces, for one. I’ve talked at length about the Beirut Synthesizer Center and how it came to be a healing place for Lebanon following the port blast. Beirut was inspired by Prague’s synth lending library, which, in turn, was inspired by a project in Portland, Oregon, S1 Synth Library. (And for the record, they’ve started events again following the so-called “ceasefire” in the fall, even if the chaos part has certainly not let up.)
See:
Here’s how Synth Library Prague, run by Mary C, describes itself in a manifesto of sorts:
Space for sharing, creating, discussing, experimenting, learning and unlearning not only in the field of sound and electronic music.
Space filled with amazing instruments, books, and other resources run by artists and curators, who are committed to creating welcoming space for everyone to learn, share, collaborate as equals and to trigger change – with respect, care and thoughtfulness. It is a place to start and sustain, to build new relationships with sound, instruments, yourself and new fellows as well. Space to think about reasambling as a community and ways how we can trigger change together as much as it is a space to learn new technology and basic of sound and music making.
The Synth Library with all its gear should not only be attractive and at times overwhelming, it should first and foremost be liberating and supportive of many different ways how to approach it and express. Synth Library is the first sister library of S1 Synth Library in Portland.
But maybe there are ways of creating these spaces online, too, because not everyone is near a city. Sharing patches and code online – as with the livecoding scene – is able to do this over distances.
Laurie says something later in the interview that at first blush might seem to conflict with the shared or communal activity there – maybe made more apparent by the edit putting these two thoughts together. She starts with the idea of the private spaces we had, uninterrupted by smartphones and constant digital media:
“Walking home … every day, you had your mind to yourself.”
Our culture is, at this point, full of people who are focused outward and are processing incoming material all the time… making new pieces out of preexisting materials rather than starting with some sound that you begin to hear in your imagination. And I’m a little concerned about this because being able to focus inward and listen to what your own auditory wants to hear, listening for what it wants to hear, what it would generate on its own – there’s just nothing like the imagination.”
I absolutely believe in this idea – but putting this up against the first, isn’t there also the paradox that we need that space alone to process time with our own imagination, yet also that that imaginative space can be lonely? I was just listening to a Yara Asmar interview where she was talking about how much she loved screen time and games, and we got talking about Disco Elysium, which I played during the pandemic. Maybe you can even think of that alone screen-time as being like dreaming – an activity that’s alone but imaginative.
What digital spaces can do is provide that extra ability to share the imaginative space with others – if we don’t have a studio we can wander into. Having the patches stay up physically helped, but that’s the advantage of a readable code environment or visual patching in tools like Pd, Max, and VCV Rack.
I’m thinking specifically about watching Jeremy Wentworth and kyrsive regularly posting their patches. Here’s kyrsive, adding an additional discoursive environment by doing research on how people listen:
BlueSky is yet another privately-backed US megaplatform, so it’s not without problems. But it does demonstrate how powerful it can be to restore tools that let you focus on one stream of information rather than being bombarded with an algorithmically-powered mass propaganda stream all at once. And I started using online spaces for a reason, all the way back to BBSing – these shared screen communities really can be communities. Given I know people who physically can’t leave their house often because of long COVID, not to mention many more who aren’t in a pricey western megacapital, it’s a necessity.
I’m teeing up some other conversations, obviously. I hope we explore making more of those spaces. As Beirut discovered, with the chaos around, we need them now more than ever.