A Showcase from the Spring 2021 Arts Workshop “Creating a Full-Length Text/Music Performance and Recording”

The Arts Workshop “Creating a Full-Length Text/Music Performance and Recording” is informed by investigations into a variety of  text/music strategies.  The spring recording/performance class is particularly focused on creating a final professional recording.  This class uses collective music improvisation and automatic poetry writing as essential processes to broaden student songwriting skills and to encourage other abstract text/music constructions. This is the second consecutive year these strategies were challenged in a uniquely difficult way. But this year, after plenty of time to get used to this bizarre situation, we weren’t caught off guard! Difficult as it was, this spring class found ways to collaborate and share their musical, lyric and conceptual ideas with each other and to support each other’s work.

Everyone in this class went into their creative explorations armed with the intelligence, ferocity and heart needed to speak to these extraordinary painful and human experiences we have all been going through.  This crazy year seems to have emboldened this wonderful group of students to do what was necessary to tell the very individual “stories” they wanted to tell, whether in collage sounds, more traditional song form, or in invented combinations of forms. The result is something quite wonderful to hear.

This playlist posted on Confluence features one piece from the full EPs or groups of songs created by each student during the course of this semester.  I feel deeply that each and every piece goes “beyond syntax” to chronicle this strange and disconcerting time. I think these pieces will resonate deeply with anyone who presses “play.”  These quarantine songs wear the blues of these strange days as well as bear witness to the emerging colors of this complicated spring.

“Beyond Quarantine” on Soundcloud

1. Chase Nenner — “That Art Thou”
2. Daniel Chronopoulos — “Track 2”
3. Lea Veloso — “why don’t we kiss”
4. Jackie Chirco — “at the tip of my tongue”
5. Nate Bradley — “1783”
6. Johnny Killman — “Hallowed be Thy Plea”
7. Chloe Parker — “Forgetting to Forget”
8. Roza Chervinsky — “Do Together”
9. Keegan Kenrick — “Spaceman2”
10. Blakley Annarino — “Olivia Song”
11. Logan Knight — “Do Re Mi (Woody Guthrie Cover)
12. Helen Hutchens — “You Sound Similar to Me”
13. Harshit Jain — “In the Name of God”
14. Sam Gerlach — “In Due Time”
15. Archduke Redcat — “Hands of God”