This-might-be-the-best-concert-for-a-piece

Realizing Unrealized Projects

A lot of our most highly funded institutions and visible organizations are dominated by quickly aging visions of making music. This stretches from professional ensembles and orchestras to the academies and conservatories where future musicians are trained.

Written By

Aaron Holloway-Nahum

While writing this series of articles on curation, I thought I should take some of my own advice, and so I’ve been corresponding with performers and composers—generally via e-mail but also in person and via Skype—to begin asking them about their unrealized projects. A couple of patterns and important ideas have emerged from these first steps into the curatorial, and they make for a nice summation—and, in some cases, counterpoint—to the ideas I’ve been exploring here.

Firstly, there’s the point that embracing curatorial ideas and practice absolutely does not mean that every piece has to become some sort of multimedia site-specific cross-arts collaboration. Just as there are plenty of fantastic artists who continue to make art by painting with paint on canvas, the concert hall remains a very important space for performers and composers to work, because that setting expounds a set of values such as deep focus and shared experience which remain some of the most revolutionary and countercultural things being said in any art form anywhere.

A photo of a chamber ensemble performance on a proscenium stage in a concert hall.

Concerts remain important.

Indeed, many composers replied to my question by pointing out that even their most basic desire to have an orchestral piece properly rehearsed and performed would be the completion of an “unrealized project.” Many had equally straightforward, generally larger-scale ambitions, such as writing for an absolutely giant percussion set-up, possibly in conjunction with the idea of an outdoor venue. Often, even at the most basic point of creation, it’s practical considerations like percussion hire and the weather that delay us from writing the music we imagine. In all of this, there are many composers whose optimal work and space is a score being interpreted by musicians in a concert.[1]

Let’s imagine, for a moment, what a curator might do with an ensemble. There would be basic things, like travelling around and being present at as many important reading sessions and concerts as possible.[2] This person would also be placed in charge of a segment of the ensemble’s time. Note that I say “time” and not “season.” A curator is not a glorified programmer of concerts. The role would not focus on “programming” or “commissioning,” but rather developing collaborative relationships between the ensemble’s performers and any number of composers and seeking to fulfill the “unrealized dreams” of all parties involved. The curator would also be seeking to present the results of these collaborations to an audience, and would equally be charged with taking time to discover the optimal form in which to do so. This might be a standard concert, but it could equally be a flash-mob of musicians, a Vimeo video, a podcast, or an app, and so on.

A performance happening outdoors in the middle of a forest with audience members standing and listening.

This might be the best concert venue for a piece

I accept that a major factor in this discussion—which I have largely omitted to date—is economics. If this all sounds a bit financially untenable, though, consider as just one current example that the Hayword Gallery in London has just opened Decision. This is an exhibition that consciously aims to immerse visitors in a series of “experimental environments” in order to “ask them to reflect on the process of decision-making,” and includes slides, a paragliding machine, and gallery staff asking attendees if they’d like to consume an unknown pill.

While I (of course) agree that new music would benefit from more money, I think that the need for more volume of funding in the system only goes so far. The other side of this coin is that a lot of our most highly funded institutions and visible organizations are dominated by quickly aging visions of making music. This stretches from professional ensembles and orchestras to the academies and conservatories where future musicians are trained.

Looking at a new generation of entrepreneurs who are making their wealth by pushing on all sorts of boundaries in their various fields, I wonder why we don’t imagine that future philanthropists will be people who desire to see artists that reflect this progressive and expansive vision of the world in their approaches to art. I literally have no idea what the musical equivalent to an exhibition like Decision would be, but I imagine it could be wildly more exciting—and attractive to audiences—than “please write us an 8-12 minute piece using the following instruments….”

Back in my informal survey of colleagues, a number of performers lamented the difficulties in finding funding to create any sort of collaborative work, be it with film makers, visual artists, or even in the theatre (opera excluded, of course). That is, I think most of us know where we’d at least start trying to find funding for that new concert piece, whereas the guidelines for a lot of these same institutions rule out any possibility of working in more unusual ways. What this also brought into focus for me was the fact that none of these other arts were at all a fundamental part of my education.[3] Again, this is not to argue that every performer and composer needs to be an expert in all art forms. As a fellow composer wisely commented:

I can’t help but wonder if there is a danger in this discourse though, that we are trying to be too much at once. For the composer to be the source of critique, critical/cultural theory and commentary, curation, and music composition—this maybe spreads us a little thin, AND makes us a little more self-conscious than is healthy? Ideally, it should be more about the music, not us.

Of course, the ultimate point of these articles is that it would be the actual existence of actual curators that could really help us advance down these paths. We want to get to a point where there are experts taking on these roles and helping us to create truly awesome work that engages across all the many possibilities we are dreaming about. In the meantime, though, those of us who create this music are already involved in asking these questions and could, I think, improve by thinking about these questions more explicitly.

For The Riot Ensemble, this has meant things like explicitly asking these questions of composers and performers as we develop projects and dream up commissions. We could do better, though. As one example, my hope is that next year these ideas will work their way into a revamped call-for-scores that will be led more by the project ideas of composers, that our concerts will build on and realize more of the dreams of our performers, and that we’ll continue to improve at using all sorts of technology as a tool to open up all areas of the process to new and interested audiences.

Personally, at least I finally sent out some of those e-mails I’ve been meaning to send out, asking my professional colleagues about their unrealized projects. I think that just asking this question—especially in a world where we’re all scrambling so hard to stay afloat—is a good first step. It’s also a fascinating one, as people have come back with all manner of interesting ideas and projects. I know I won’t be able to do so with all of them, but it’s wonderful to have started collecting these ideas, and I’m already starting to think about which ones I might be able to help bring to reality.

I hope that—for you, too—these articles will be either a beginning or an encouragement to take these ideas more seriously in all the work that you create in whatever roles you create it in. One of the great joys of this process, for me, has been meeting new musicians and organizers who are already taking steps down these paths in an astonishing variety of ways. So do keep in touch—especially if you have an unrealized project for my new collection—and let’s keep the discussion going.

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1. I really don’t mean this pejoratively in any sense. To date, I am one of them.


2. So far, this knowledge tends to rest with musicians who sit on selection panels that see a huge number of scores each year. While better than nothing, this is hardly the ideal situation to come into contact with work, and it provides virtually no opportunity for a relationship with the composer.


3. Though, admittedly, that’s not as recent as it used to be.