Kent Cultural Alliance Artist Residency
Chestertown, Maryland, June 22-August 2, 2025
Welcome to CRAZY MAKING
This collection of work is about the process of coming to terms, even if temporarily, with climate change. During my time here, I have met, talked with, and interviewed over a dozen ecologists, artists, farmers, and residents. Their grappling with the future is difficult. So is mine and yours. It’s not enough that science tells us the world is ending and art tells us that is sad. We can’t forfeit the future to despair, we must organize. These works are about how music might organize us, how we need to organize each other, and how those already doing the work are heroes in a world full of dissociation. This work is crazy-making. But not forever.
Learn how to organize!
Read Secrets of a Successful Organizer and buy it from Labor Notes
Get involved in community organizing for the environment!
Eastern Shore Land Conservancy
Talk to your damn neighbors! If they have bad politics, that’s on all of us to fix!
Info about the Works
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Crazy Making
Paper, pencil, yarn, and pins
Crazy Making is the amalgam of my thinking and making while here in Chestertown. Make music about “CLIMATE”? That’s been crazy-making. It’s so big, it’s so diverse, any one issue seems too big, and then there’s so damn many. Where do you start? How do you finish? My works here are about organizing, but it doesn’t mean they are organized. It’s a mess, all of it. These sketches are me thinking out loud, composing, drafting, contemplating weird analogies, losing hope, trying to draw (literally) new hopes, and – frankly – thinking it is all a bit funny as well. Unlike Pepe Silvia, this conspiracy is real, it’s all encompassing, and we’re all implicated
Integrated into the web are some of Marty Two Bulls Jr.’s sketches, as he and I spent a lot of this residency contemplating these questions together as our processes evolved.
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Description text goes hereFlimsy Hopes
Bucket of Chester River Water, jug of fresh water, Maryland State Code 26.08.11., contact microphones, amplification, yarn, hooks, clamps, some cups, and a few loose screws
Flimsy Hopes is a doomsday water clock that drips salinated ocean water into the freshwater supply below, separated only by the flimsy paper of regulations meant to protect us. It can’t.
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Wood (thanks to Bob Ortiz!), acrylic, mirror film, and a hidden message on some paper
When I was interviewing Caitlin Fisher from the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy she told me that one of her favorite quotes was from a farmer she knew who said “Food grows better with your shadow on the soil.” It’s true – we have to show up and cast our shadow on each other and the future.
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Sounds from the Future
Raw and processed audio recordings
Early in my time here, I asked folks to record their responses to the following prompt: “Think about the year 2075. Who do you know that will be alive then? What will their world look like? Is that ok?” I’ve taken their responses and present them here with different amounts of sonic “entropy” (e.g. I mixed them with noise, reverb, and field recordings), to simulate recordings from 2075 and 2125. What do you think – is 2075 going to be ok?
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Lies We Tell Ourselves About the Future
Voice, Flute, Violin, Melodica, Cello, paper, and pencils
This is a set of guided improvisations based on the prompt “Think about the year 2075. Who do you know that will be alive then? What will their world look like? Is that ok?” that had multiple responses during an artist presentation early in the residency. The transcribed texts are set for a mixed ensemble of musicians from the Philly-based opera company ENAensemble. We developed a framework for improvising on each text which then ends with a fully-composed ‘prayer’ at the end – not unlike the ‘amen’ tag at the end of liturgical music.
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Sketches from Secrets of a Successful Future
Voice, Flute, String Quartet, electronics, paper, and pencil
What if music could teach us how to organize? How to fight back, how to talk to one another to build real power, to make a plan, to win that plan, and to not leave the concert hall feeling despondent? What if it also gave voice to those on the frontlines of climate change? This work will try to do that as each movement will teach each step of the organizing model, through the voices, stories, and dreams of the ecologists, conservationists, policy advocates, farmers, and artists who are actually working to save the world. They organize every day, it’s time for us to join them, celebrate their work, and learn to do it ourselves. Premiere TBD.
Tongue River Artist Residency
Dayton, Wyoming - July 1-30, 2024
Project
“Tongue River Music” is a piece for voice, flute, string quartet, and pre-recorded electronics. The work is in multiple movements, setting field recordings, recorded interviews with locals, and improvisations done by myself, Chelsea Meynig (flute), and Emily Denham (violin) for the ensemble.
During my time in Dayton, I conducted interviews with locals in Dayton, Ranchester, and Sheridan about their relationship to water, how that relationship has changed overtime, and what they think about how it might change in the future. The piece, as a whole, is about the different ways we engage with water: as a natural force, as a substance of childlike wonder, joy, and fear, and as an economic force. I weave excerpts of the interviews together as a kind of backing track at various moments in the piece where folks have talked most poignantly about their memories of the Tongue River and how it has changed over the years. The Tongue River starts in the Bighorn Mountains at three different headwaters and ends in a confluence with the Yellowstone River in Montana. The field recordings trace the length of the river and also include recorded improvisations me and Chelsea Meynig made along the river at various locations.
After completing the initial residency, Chelsea and I spent a week in Casper, Wyoming, with violinist Emily Denham, to workshop some of the initial musical ideas and materials. Together, these initial sketches and workshopped materials, along with the over 20 hours of recorded interviews and 15 hours of field recordings, this piece is aims to capture something about Dayton — and Wyoming more broadly — that I, as a composer briefly passing through, cannot capture solely on my own.
What’s next?
Through ENAensemble and the Plastic Club of Philadelphia, we are working to present a premiere of the work in mid-April 2025 in Center City Philadelphia. Beyond that, we are looking at ways to bring the final work back to Wyoming for a performance in Sheridan in mid-2026.
Pine Meadow Ranch Artist Residency
Sisters, Oregon — July 18-August 14, 2024
The Project
This residency started as a project to collaborate with a local chef to design a menu and write accompanying music using scientific techniques developed in the Crossmodalism Lab at Oxford University. This resulted in a suite of music for cello, recorded and live processed electronics, and “Irrigation Flute” that was performed at the Pine Meadow Ranch during the residency. The theme of that year’s residency was “Food and Agriculture” and I was interested in making music about the infrastructure of agriculture. The field recordings for the Dinner Suite trace the water from the ranch’s creek through the pump station and out the pivot sprinkler. I recorded the cows, the bees, the wind in the trees, the sounds of agricultural equipment, and the sounds of cooking. I then built an “Irrigation Flute” — a sound sculpture that dispersed sounds along the long table everyone was eating from, repurposing old irrigation pipe with strategically drilled holes to “tune” the flute’s timbre while pumping music in either end via loudspeakers.
The Dinner Music Suite is in four movements:
Salad Music — featuring recordings of the irrigation system, from creek to pump to sprinklers.
Salmon Music — featuring a poem about salmon spawning by Brigette McConville (who shared the poem with me for this performance) of Salmon King Fisheries, a Native Owned Business from the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon.
Dessert Music — featuring the sounds of bees and cows, the creators of the desserts we had that night.
Space Music — using the overtone series to ‘evaporate’ the music into space. Everyone was asked to lay in the field behind the table and stare at the Milky Way while digesting their dinner.
With the performance happening relatively early into my time there, I then worked through some long-pressing issues in my music making. The end result was the start of a larger project of recording interviews with people who worked at the ranch. While the topics we covered ended up all over the place, each conversation started with questions about the worker’s relationship to food and water.