If we have spoken over the last couple of years you may have heard about the qualitative ethnography of foster care I’ve been creating in collaboration with Constellation Men’s Ensemble, and along with creative consultant Jamie Olah. I am thrilled to announce the score for Voices is complete, it’s turned in to Constellation, and the premiere is set for May 22 and 23, 2020 in Chicago, IL! I have written about the nascence of this project and  reflected on the growth of these ideas. Now I want to reflect on the “end” of this creative process, and the beginning of these ideas taking shape in the minds and imaginations of musicians and listeners. As I approached the end of creating the score for Voices, it became clear that the relationship I had propagated with this work opened an opportunity to find confidence, and tap in to a subtle bittersweet quality when externalizing ideas I care about deeply. 
          In every project, and every day of my life, I try to expand my own approach in an effort to learn something new. Voices was an opportunity to explore such challenges and push my creativity. Among the most valuable lessons was a deliberate choice to practice a healthy relationship with this project. Early on I decided to show respect for this work by not confronting it when I felt stressed. This meant in moments of self-doubt or anxiety about my creativity or ability to meet a deadline, I decided to address my stress before approaching creative content.
          In doing so, I realized the extent to which we trick ourselves into believing stress is a motivating force and is an essential part of productivity. I think we’re all guilty of putting on busy face, and over sharing the “amount of work we have to do” as though no one else in the world could possibly understand.  Conversations with other composers come to mind, where we share our work and express such sentiments. The common narrative paints a scenario where the excitement of musical ideas inevitably fades into an abyss of stress when faced with the practicality of actually composing the work. It sometimes feels stress is an ontological imperative in creating, and importantly, this stress needs to be tethered to the work itself.  In terms of Voices, I felt ethically uncomfortable attributing my own stress to a work that is built out of emotionally heavy stories from people’s lives. In turn, I realized that my deliberate choice to not indulge my stress opened a healthy relationship with Voices. This allowed positive emotions of gratitude and humility to fill the spaces that would have easily been occupied by anxiety. Now, in completing the score, it is clear that stress is not a necessary component of productivity, meeting a deadline, or building new work.
          That said, there will always be stress in balancing the temporal constraints around creating work with the desire to express everything! As I was feeling the approaching the deadline for this score call upon my stress, I found solace in something an undergraduate mentor shared with me nearly 10yrs ago. In recognizing I can easily revel in the weeds of ideas forever, she told me, “ You never finish Sean, you just stop.” The reality is, we will never finish, we will always just stop- in all aspects of our lives, and life in general. The humbling reality is that our life’s work will never be “finished,” at least not alone. In building a healthy relationship with Voices, I can trust it will reach others and build meaningful ideas and strong emotions through their imaginations. While I could pause time for the rest of my life to “finish” Voices, I doubt I would feel happy or fulfilled in that decision. Our time, our worth, our creativity, and our lives are multi-dimensional, multivalent, and totally fascinating. And they only happen once. And for me, stress and anxiety are not an integral part of that experience. And I have to believe these lessons I learned in creating Voices translate far beyond this work. But for now, I’m going to stare in the face all the work I want to accomplish and enjoy taking a break, and telling those longing and attention grabbing faces that they can wait their turn.

          Thanks for reading.    

          Love,

         -Sean

​In February 2019, I began a project as part of the Closets Are for Clothes concert that premiered in June. In collaboration with violinist John Heffernan, I created an electroacoustic piece called the emergent character of Identity. The piece was created through a series of improvisations and conversations revolving around emotionally salient memories from John and my own distinct processes of coming-out. To expand on the ideas of this piece, I have decided to create a series of duets that explore the multivalence of LGBTQ identity formation/discovery/communication with several different artists. The goal is to present these pieces in a concert, coinciding with National Coming Out Day in October.
 

Clarinetist Alex Hecker and I plan to explore the physical embodiment of musicking, as a metaphoric representation of the connection/disconnection between our own physical bodies and our identities. Our goal is to find sounds that represent different emotional states, by improvising around challenging topics that remind us of specific memories, or times in our lives’ when we felt less “in our bodies.” The goal is two-fold, to remind ourselves, and others, that physicality is an important manifestation of our identities; and that physical movement is inseparable from concepts of sound and music.  This, what musicologists call carnal musicology, is a growing field that deserves more recognition. Check out Elizabeth LeGuin for more!!

Social psychologist Chris Petsko (aka my husband) wants to explore the intersections of intimacy and love as an identity forming space. Delving into the discomforts of intimacy as reflection of our lack of self-love, we will hopefully embody sounds that deeply represent our relation to one another, as well as those around us. For us, our love really extends beyond the confines of our relationship, and this has become a part of the love and intimacy we share with one another. To really unravel these deep emotions, I want to explore early relationships we both have with religion, and how this relationship stymied our own intimate expressions as developing gay men. But beyond this suppression, there is a spiritual wonder inherent within religious philosophy that has helped us gain a well-rounded sense-of-self. This dichotomy, I’m sure, will lead to a lot of sounds!

Tenor Ryan Strand and I are exploring discomfort in our identity formation as a result of being labelled by others. These labels often manifest in self-hatred, and motivate all of us to ignore the parts of ourselves that need the most love. Ultimately, my hope is to find the beauty in these ignored parts of our identity, and find the sound(s) to reveal our strength in working through issues of self-consciousness.

Bass singer Kota Terrace and I are exploring eroticism (within the framework of Esther Perel’s research), as a spiritual mechanism of human connection. Our goal is to unravel how these types of connections ultimately reflect, and simultaneously reshape, our own identities. By focusing not only on our past self-discovery, but also on our present iterations of imaginative and erotic connections, we hope to find new trajectories in our own self-expression. In doing so, we hope to uncover the power and confidence that accompanies the spiritual growth of emotional and physical connection with others.

Visual artist and poet Aaron DeLee and I will explore the challenges of using language and prose in terms of truly communicating identity outwardly. By improvising with words and sounds, we hope to find a symbiotic relationship between these forms of communication in a way that delivers a deeper message in a less abstract manner. This type of improvisation is challenging. Something about working with text in the context of an improvisation feels more vulnerable (it’s similar to how only wearing shoes can leave you feeling more naked than if they were not wearing any clothes at all).
 

 
All of these improvisation sessions will be audio recorded, allowing for early sound samples to be the basis of the electronics within the final musical works. The exploration and improvisation utilized in the emergent character of Identity Series will mirror our own individual processes of recognizing/forming/discovering/communicating identity. Each improvisation will inform future sessions, until the musical objects presents itself as a communicable product.

If you would like to be involved, please let me know! This project is open-ended and I am looking to collaborate with anyone. There is no need for this series to solely be about LGBTQ individuals. I would love to work with fellow victims of assault, for example- or people who have different identity(ies) than myself.

Thanks for reading, as always-you two or three people out there J <3
-Sean

​          I am excited to announce my participation as one of three composers on the premiere project Closets Are for Clothes! Civic Orchestra Violin Fellow John Heffernan has asked composers Devin Clara Fanslow, Kelley Sheehan, and myself to curate a concert exploring intersection of LGBTQ+ experiences in tandem with new musical expression, specifically the emotionally important experience of coming out. The details of this concert are still being organized (it may include some interesting correlational data about coming out!). In the meantime, I am going to create a piece that is centered around artistic research practices, and will document the trajectory of the work on my blog!
 
Artistic Research:
          A central goal of artistic research in music is to balance creativity with critical reflection during the creation of music. Through this, the artistic product is not only an art object. By chronicling the process of creating the work, the artist discovers opportunities to add knowledge about artistic practice, and how we, as humans, use art in our lives. For this reason, concise documentation of questions, decisions, and musical ideas is necessary throughout the entire creative process.
 
Untitled Project-Recognize Sexuality, Build Confidence, Cultivate Identity:
          When John first approached me about this project, we found similarities in our early interactions with music. Practicing music (violin for John, saxophone and piano for myself) provided a sense of control and purpose in a world that didn’t seem to understand or accept us (or that we didn't seem to accept ourselves in). For this reason, I have decided to write a piece for John and myself that stems from improvisation in order to re-root ourselves in our early musical interactions. Together, we will discover emotionally compelling frameworks centered on our early experiences with music as we were beginning to engage with our sexualities as gay men. These frameworks will act as springboards that encourage our natural musical tendencies to flourish. Over time through careful transcription and reflection, these gestures will compound into a musical work.
          Furthermore, we will audio record each improvisation and use these recordings as source material for a fixed electronic track to accompany John’s violin playing and my singing.  This process of creating through improvisation is not only a vehicle through which to build the musical work. I feel it is analogous to how people recognize their identity, their sexuality, and their inner music. Throughout each of our lives, we dig deep inside, filter emotions through the communicative tools at our disposal, and build a background of sound to accompany our lives and help us build confidence. We cultivate identity within the spectrum of ideals and reality, between the pillars of improvisation and “composed” music, between electronic and acoustic sounds, and between ourselves and those around us. I see this musical work, and the process through which it will be created, as a direct reflection of recognizing sexuality, building confidence, and cultivating identity: coming out.  
 
Questions:
          A large part of artistic research is to disseminate knowledge about artistic practice by generating critical questions that open self-reflection. So I will end with my questions:
 
In terms of a musical object, how will these improvised gestures compile into a logical and coherent structure?
Will the original impetus of these gestures translate into meaningful sound outside of the improvisational context?  If not, what changed?
To what extent will improvisation get in the way of emotional expression given cultural stigmas revolving around improvised music?
In terms of collaboration, how will John and I find clarity through one another?
What type of collaboration will this become (in terms of Vera John-Steiner).
Will this work grow into something universal, or understood and felt by only a few people? Why is this the case?
 
Share any of your questions below! Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more…

          I have completed my master’s degree in music composition and have decided to reflect on the last two years by writing a series of posts to talk about my work at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) and explain how these projects will grow beyond graduation…

          V. Metaphor, Individualism, and "Social Justice" Art
 
          Every year or two I find myself going back to Charlie Kaufman’s overwhelmingly beautiful film Synecdoche, New York. In this film, theater director Caden Cotard, portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is struggling with a narcissistic therapist, a contentious divorce, and a strange disease that is deteriorating his body. In the midst of this chaos, Caden is awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship to produce an enormous original theatre piece. This piece ends up consuming Caden’s life and becomes a direct reflection of his own daily experiences. These reflections, or synecdoches, or metaphors, help Caden build a better understanding of himself. In this sense, the entire film blurs lines between art, reality, life, and humanity. It reminds me of Joseph Campbell’s notion of metaphors in mythology that reflect our inner potentials as humans.
 
 
          “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” –Joseph Campbell
 
 
      Both Synecdoche, New York and Joseph Campbell’s work can be framed as a reaction to the commodification of art since the industrial revolution.  In Joseph Campbell’s case, mythology seen as metaphor has immense potential beyond commodity and capital. This blurred line of metaphoric myth, also present in Synecdoche, New York, makes the physical existence of religious figures and events irrelevant toward the impact of the religious ideology in terms of spiritual growth. In turn, this blurs further the lines between spirituality, religion, mythology, and art. This admittedly nebulous concept of art, born from an inner humanity and drive toward creating, yet again brings concepts of creativity beyond commodity.
          This framework dredges up some important issues. For one, it beckons a reappraisal of art as a product, or as I’ve heard many times-“art-object” or “music-object.” Music in particular, seen as an ephemeral experience and collective action, has much more power toward embodying metaphor than music seen as a fixed object. The relatively recent push for “social justice art” is an attempt to enact this idea. It is important to note that many of these efforts barely scratch the surface in terms of using art and music toward solving societal problems. The second issue brought to the surface through a nebulous concept of art beyond commodity is individualism. In both Synecdoche, New York and the work of Joseph Campbell, there is an underlying individualism; the metaphors and exploration are toward self-discovery. Of course self-discovery is essential, but I think our culture, our art, and our mythology as westerners focus too heavily on individual endeavors rather than the spiritual growth of a community. Music, yet again, appraised as a collective experience, embodies both individual and communal growth. Within this framework, social justice is imbedded in the fabric of creativity, art, and music. But this can be a slippery slope. As I stated earlier, social justice endeavors in art often do not address societal problems to their full potential. It becomes easy to excuse this behavior when the virtue of creativity is framed in tandem with social advocacy. As a musical culture, we can do better than “drive by Beethoven” in marginalized neighborhoods, or having reduced ticket pricing for opera and classical music concerts. The commodification of art, and the concept of “art-objects” has contributed to the world where art and social equality are perceived as separate endeavors. While we should be careful where we draw the line of true social advocacy through art, it is important to fight the dead-end discussion about the “importance of art and creativity.”
          In author Elizabeth Gilbert’s words; we all come from an ancestral lineage of makers, of “people who made things more beautiful than they had to.” In this sense, creativity is innate in our experiences of life. But beyond the beauty of art, and even beyond aesthetics, which are often restrictive and alluring at the same time- art has the ability to show us the latent structures of our societies and inspire connection and collective action. This, in turn, moves beyond the individualistic attitudes of Joseph Campbell and Synecdoche, New York. Rather than being only a journey of self-discovery, art can be a point of connection. The nascence of creativity is about the commonality if our natures, discovering the ways we build together, and navigating our differences.
 
 
 
 

          I have completed my master’s degree in music composition! I have decided to reflect on the last two years by writing a series of posts to talk about my work at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) and explain how these projects will grow beyond graduation…
​
          IV. Music Reflects: Reflecting on Music 
 
            Today, while reflecting yet again on the seeming hopelessness and inhumanity of US immigration policy, I experienced a strange craving to listen to Vivaldi concerti. Normally when I listen to these famous and often overdone pieces I train my ear with transcription, try to decipher if the ensemble is using period instruments, or test my relative pitch and guess to which Hz frequency the A is tuned. So it struck me as a strange choice to go from our egregious political climate to music I normally consume as a technical exercise or as an apolitical backdrop. But I started to reflect on this choice and suddenly remembered that Vivaldi composed many of these pieces for children living in an orphanage.
            In this context, Vivaldi’s music became a strong advocate for the ability of ALL children, and their role toward the future. It was also a reminder that music, as something beyond the proscenium or your headphones, has a powerful and unstoppable ability to connect. The heart of these concerti at their genesis was arguably a need to look at the future through the virtuosity and creativity of homeless children living in Venice. And Venice, at that time, was a cosmopolitan trade city and the epicenter of hybridity that led to the Baroque. All of these secrets are imbedded in these concerti. And through this, the music can reflect important political tropes today.
            I have a strong desire to control the manifestation of these latent messages within the music I create. A little over a year ago I started a music project that explores the foster care system, and had a test run for this research as my graduate recital, safe, stable, loving and permanent home. The impetus for this endeavor started when I saw two of my undergraduate mentors struggle with the foster care system as foster parents. They had been fostering a baby girl for over two years, she was born addicted, the biological mother missed drug tests for several months, she had been legally abandoned by her biological parents, she had been living with my professors since she was maybe a few months old, and they wanted to adopt her. And yet, at the end of this mind-numbing and emotionally grueling case, the court ruled in favor of the biological mother permanently cutting all ties between my professors and their daughter.
          As I dug deeper into the foster care system, I quickly realized the expanse and density of the institution. The United States foster care system is extremely complex with a spectrum of triumphs, failures, and overall difficulties. To unravel and solve these problems, we first have to acknowledge that they exist on multiple levels within the system. On a broad level, there are structural issues of racism and class dynamics. Zooming in reveals problems due to the state funding structure of the system. Finally, on a case-by-case level, it seems there are an infinite number of circumstances, making it extremely difficult to ensure individual safety and success for every foster youth. For example, reunification, a federal mandate that courts make every attempt to reunify foster youth with biological family members before allowing adoption, is not successful for many foster youth as in the case of my undergraduate mentors and their daughter, who is now missing. And legislating a sweeping change based on the average would still negatively affect so many people. Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) are designed to help alleviate these problems. But even with the tireless effort of these volunteers, the system is still too large for CASA to perfectly address these difficulties.
          Poet and former foster youth, Lemn Sissay, states, “…you can define how strong a democracy is by how it treats its child, the child of the state.” By this, I think Sissay is pointing out that foster care runs latent within the structure of a democracy, and issues converge on and proliferate from this root. These issues include conversations we have or don’t have regarding abortion, education, welfare, housing, and so much more. Current political discourse does not give room for the right amount of nuance in solving these foundational issues.
          My goal for the future of this project to have music provide perspective and inspire activism toward addressing these problems. Currently I am starting to explore these ideas in the context of a multi-media oratorio or concert music documentary. This evening-length work will be inspired by both quantitative research and qualitative interviews with foster youth, foster parents, social workers, CASA volunteers, etc. The recordings of these interviews will be used as source material for electronic pieces, similar to the opening of my graduate recital. This will be a collaboration with Constellation Men’s Ensemble, and possibly other entities in Chicago and Cook County! More on that soon.
          For now, I urge you all to think deeply about the music you listen to, and how your choices reflect your surroundings, as was the case for me with Vivaldi. I also encourage you to remember the message children provide, their constant echo that becomes the future of our society. I can think of a lot of “children” who have inspired me lately.  Happy weekend.

          I have completed my master’s degree in music composition! I have decided to reflect on the last two years by writing a series of posts to talk about my work at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) and explain how these projects will grow beyond graduation…
 
III. An Artgrument for a Broader View of Music Performance
 
          In Beyond the Score musicologist Nicholas Cook outlines the various shortcomings our society has inherited in terms of how we appraise and study music. This is evidenced not only by the way(s) in which we currently study and document music, but more importantly in the ways we don’t. Likely the most exciting ‘new’ way of evaluating musical performance is the study of musician’s bodies and how their physical movements both influence and are influenced by the ‘music’. In the ninth chapter of the book, The Signifying Body, Cook takes this a step further and presents the idea that studying physicality not only enhances musical signification, it is sometimes integral toward musics communicative ability. In this sense, when we evaluate music through a narrow lens based on sound alone we potentially miss important, meaningful, and essential ideas. To demonstrate his point, Cook dives into a case study of a particularly bad sounding performance of Foxy Lady by Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.
          In this performance, 18 days before his untimely death, Jimi Hendrix has many strange gesticulations, a wardrobe malfunction, and finally a climactic ending reminiscent of a lifeless ragdoll. Cook describes his immediate reaction to the video (here) as a response to racial discomfort, “The headline act of the Isle of Wight Festival was a black artist playing for six hundred thousand white fans, the black artist who made his reputation with two white sidemen, in short, Hendrix the white man’s black man.” Hendrix’s embodiment of a ragdoll alludes to racial disparity, slavery, and lynching. In this sense, the need for broader concepts of music is clear. By studying Hendrix’s body as a part of the musical signification it becomes impossible to ignore the racial politics, subjugation, and prejudice Hendrix dealt with, and many others continue to endure today. When the performance is only appraised through sound, or as a particularly poor live performance of Foxy Lady, this important information is easily overlooked.
          Beyond this idea of studying body and physical movement as part of musical signification, Cook extends performance even further. Hendrix was not only an embodiment of the performance at the Isle of Wight, he embodied the cultural performance of racism. I wonder if the fact that this embodiment was largely ignored led to his death? I also wonder if we were even a little better at understanding the emotional weight of this type of performance, and recognized significance of music existing outside of sound-would we continue to have such intense division and misunderstanding? In this sense, I think it is no accident that we have a nearly impossible time arguing for the importance of art in modern society. Art solely as a form of entertainment does not need a broad sense of signification. But by unwrapping a few layers, it becomes easier to see why, say, embodying a character like Carmen could be problematic with today’s concepts of feminism, and harassment. Additionally, this perspective on music performance could unlock countless latent ethical issues within performing arts.
          All of this is to say, that when we narrow concepts of musical performance we are limiting its ability to communicate. I’m sure I am not alone in feeling that humans have not devised a single definition of art that feels 100% adequate, but I think we can all agree that art has a profound ability to communicate and connect disparate people, ideas, and cultures. In this current political climate of cultural division, I want to push myself and encourage others to broaden their ideas of what constitutes music, and allow it to communicate on deeper levels. In my experience, this is a genuine way to connect with more people, and build meaningful relationships across what are often arbitrary divides.
 

          I have completed my master’s degree in music composition and will reflect on the last two years by writing a series of posts about my work at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA), and explain how these projects will grow beyond graduation…
 
          II. Opera Performance as Discourse
 
          The second week of my master’s degree I was selected to compose a new opera for CCPA 2017 OperaFEST. In the first production meeting with Head of Opera Andrew Eggert and Assistant Professor of Opera and Voice Scott Gilmore I tossed around several ideas for what this opera collaboration could become. One of the ideas I presented was a meta-opera where the audience is watching people who are themselves watching an opera—an opera within an opera.
 
            Ideas grew quickly out of this framework--

• the opera these characters are watching is being protested for the way it portrays minorities and women
• their inner monologues are shedding light on real issues within the opera canon
• the goal is to have the audience reflect deeply on the ethical implications of revered cultural institutions that perform outdated and damaging stereotypes.

 
            Eventually six characters were born, each with different motivations and appraisals of the situation:

• Artistic Director
• Board Member
• Tourist
• Philanthropist
• Critic
• Conservatory Student

 
          I was able to derive separate motivations for each character from the following quote by Susan McClary, taken from foreword to Catherine Clément’s crucial book Opera, or the Undoing of Women:
 
          ...the extent to which she modeled herself after her favorite heroines when she was young; the obvious love of           opera she still maintains; her desire to transmit to her son some sense of opera that does not passively accept           the stories it articulates; and yet, of course, the recognition that ‘her kind’ are the inevitable victims of an art            form that demands submission or death of the woman for the sake of a narrative closure.
 
 
            (To watch the premiere of “…for the sake of a narrative closure” click here. Click here to view the score and libretto.)
 
          I feel extremely fortunate when anything I have created grows to have a life outside of my imagination. But “…for the sake of a narrative closure” has expanded beyond anything else I have composed to date. The premiere led to a short article on Roosevelt University’s website. This article attracted the attention of several people interested in having this piece as a part of their women and music courses as well as others interested in producing performances. Scott Skiba, Artistic Director of Cleveland Opera Theater and Director of Opera Studies at Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music (BWU), was one of these people. Scott was hoping to produce “…for the sake of a narrative closure” for the 6 women in the 2018 graduating senior class at BWU as a part of their capstone project. My only stipulation was to work together, add new sections, and change the libretto if the women felt the text did not fully represent their experiences. Together, the cast, Scott and I devised a new opening section that highlighted the sound world of the protest in relation to the controlled soundscape of an opera hall. We also created a new closing section that led directly into a conversation with the audience by having the performers break the fourth wall and ask the audience “what is opera to you?” Additionally, Scott created a profound staging where eventually each character embodies the death of a famous opera heroin, leaving the stage silent and full of dead women. The picture is clear at this point in the drama, THIS is what we have created as a society with the opera canon. 
           The performance, on May 3rd at BopStop in Cleveland, OH was profound and enlightening. In the talkback with the audience I learned a lot about the student’s perceptions of the work. Because the work is a cappella they all described a deep-seated trust they had to build with one another in comparison to other opera scenes that lean on a pianist or orchestra. They also expressed relief in learning a work that allowed them to reflect deeply on their own fears and apprehensions as graduating and aspiring opera singers. I had an opportunity to talk about my own ideas of broadening the concept of performance to be more inclusive, and getting rid of the perceived hierarchy where performers are relaying the composer’s intentions to the audience. This naturally led to a discussion about creating devised operas that signify a wider range of experiences and subjectivities. Scott and I are hoping to continue this project and create a series of short operas that explore different ethical issues regarding the opera institution. This project may happen with professional groups around the US, more on that soon! 
            Finally, if you are in the Chicago area and want to see a production of “…for the sake of a narrative closure” Thompson Street Opera is performing this as part of their Faulty Systems series in January 2019! Check here for updates!
            I want to close with the two overarching lessons I have learned from this project so far. First is an age-old adage that we cannot predict the outcome of creativity and exploration. "... for the sake of a narrative closure" started as a simple idea and grew into a concept that sheds light on important social issues both within and outside of the opera institution. The second lesson from this project is the need to broaden ideas of western music and art performance. “…for the sake of a narrative closure”  and it’s hopefully subsequent operas, are only able to tell an impactful story when the performance is seen as something that includes the generative process through devising with performers, and includes the audience with a genuine conversation about the stereotypic portrayals of women and minorities within the opera canon. Through this, the performance has a wider range of signification and allows art to do what it does best— communicate. Were this type of approach adapted to fit other performance entities, I wonder if the art world would see an erasure of ethical issues that seem to run latent within these institutions? More on this next time... thanks for reading! 
 

          ​I have completed my master’s degree in music composition! I have decided to reflect on the last two years by writing a series of posts to talk about my work at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) and explain how these projects will grow beyond graduation…
 
I. Fundamental Questions, The Origin of the Chaconne
 
          Connecting Cultures Through Music is a defining aspect of my master’s degree; it is the project I walked into school knowing I wanted to pursue. Through the Performing Social Justice Seed Grant at Roosevelt University Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) I was able to begin this ongoing project that uses music as a form of discourse to reduce intergroup conflict between refugees living in Sweden and native Swedes. This work opened a number of doors, including an invitation to present at the University of Malta School of Performing Arts Annual Conference in March 2018. It also attracted to attention of various faculty at CCPA, through whom I was awarded the Matthew Freeman Social Justice Award from the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice and Transformation. Because I began my degree program with seeds already planted for Connecting Cultures, my ideas for this project were influenced early in my master’s coursework.
            The first graduate school course was Music Style and Literature, a required seminar for all CCPA graduate students that involves a fairly intense amount of reading and discussion. The students came to class prepared to examine readings and find new ways of appraising their own musicking. Our professor, Dr. David Kjar, was particularly good at finding reading that encouraged intense discussion and highlighted the subjectivity of life, culture, and music. Throughout the course of the semester the readings became more and more reflective of issues beyond music. This fueled the class discussions, and forced me to acknowledge holes in my own thinking. One day, while discussing Suzanne G. Cuscik’s On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight, one classmate asked, “Why is the diversity of who plays in the orchestra important?” This nuclear bomb of a question sent a seemingly endless wave of discussion through the classroom.
 Collectively the class tried to answer this question, but it struck me that none of us could really address it fully.  It felt similar to times when people discuss issues of global warming, but cannot answer at the most basic level what is causing climate change. There was a sense in the room that the majority of people see some sort of importance in diversity of inclusion within classical music. These motivations were rooted in nebulous ideas of multiculturalism, inclusion, class-mobility, and post-modernist identity politics. My best answer to this question at the time was that classical music institutions could stop complaining about declining ticket sales if diversity and inclusion were truly at the heart of its mission. This discussion had an immense impact on me, and has caused me to reflect deeply on classical music in relation to its surrounding world, and find supported reasons for a multicultural approach to musicking that involves diverse representation.  
To begin understanding this issue, I embarked on a case study of the chaconne. This study demonstrated our ancestors’ ability to hijack the inherent hybridity of music and create a musical form that proliferated in unpredictable and tremendously important ways. The chaconne, taken from Incan culture in the Andes of South American and brought to Europe by Spanish conquistadors in the early 17th century, became a prominent western musical form and was a catalyst to western concepts of vertical harmony and harmonic progression. It influenced Monteverdi while he was laying the foundation for the opera canon we have today, was central to early concepts of dance and music performance in the Sun King’s court through Jean Baptiste Lully, and became a source of inspiration for none other than J.S. Bach. Additionally, the chaconne continues to have immense influence on popular and classical music today. This 400-year trajectory is a beautiful example of diversity within a music tradition. What’s more, this case study draws attention to the less-than-equitable ways diversity has historically been incorporated in western musical culture. In the case of the chaconne, half of its branch through history is missing because Spanish conquistadors cut it off at the root by obliterating the Incan culture. What type of musical hybrid could have been created if this had not been the case? And even more profound, what kind of cross-cultural conversation could that have elicited between these cultures through that music? This example calls for not only diversity in terms of musical style, but also the addition of diverse representation within music traditions.
Music is a frustratingly wonderful tool of communication.  It falls in an ambiguous liminal space, somewhere between being a nearly unrivaled communicative tool in terms of emotional expression and affect, and yet an extremely poor communicator in terms of precision and consistency. This combination of affective power and ambiguity is a huge reason the appropriative nature of the chaconne, and many other musical styles, is possible. The goal of Connecting Cultures Through Music is to take advantage of music’s unique communicative abilities, and slowly through improvisation and cultural contact build pieces of music with both diversity of style and representation. This music will hopefully be a hybrid that connects disparate groups, and reduces conflict while increasing humanization of perceived out-group members. Music, at its core, is a multicultural endeavor. Western music institutions were not created in a vacuum. If you enjoy the music of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, or any European folk music you should recognize the colonial attitudes that made that music possible. And we should learn from these mistakes of our ancestors, and create music that communicates to a wide range of people while maintaining ethical and diverse representation.
 
 

 
            Yesterday was another productive day with Lise, most of the day was a planning day to make others days happen. I large part of the day was dedicated to discussing the future of this project. Lise has been struggling to grasp the scope, I think especially the amount of time for which this project will exist in an ambivalent state without many tangible answers. Currently, this project is an idea, an hypothesis about the kind of a social tool music can become. Soon, Lise and I will have the opportunity to test these ideas and learn how people use music improvisation to communicate complex social issues. For now, all of that will have to remain a question.
          The highlight of our day was spent with Merula Swedish Choir. Lise taught the choir several different free improvisation frameworks, all of which stretched their comfort zones. It was moving to watch a group of people feel uncomfortable with their surroundings, and channel their insecurity through new and sudden music making. After rehearsal a group of us went across the street for a few drinks, where we talked and enjoyed. 
 
If you are interested in being a part of this project please send me an email!
 
Have a lovely day!
 
-Sean