I’ve taken to wearing a bandana. It hides unruly hair that hasn’t been cut since the lockdown started and double as a mask when necessary. But I noticed a slight change in my vibe when wearing it, like maybe I was part pirate or hippie or even the bad guy from Tiger King. Should I braid a few strands of hair, maybe add a holster to my pajamas? This is called mindstate drift, and it’s a symptom of the new normal we’re experiencing these strange days.
In short, we’re all getting a lot more perspective than we ever asked for – but there can be some productive benefits to a challenging time. The pause in live performance has led to some introspection about how we experience music, so I’ve created a miniseries called Curating the Concert Experience. The series is being hosted by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, my home base of artistic activities even amidst shelter-in-place.
Curating the Concert Experience explores the ways we experience music in the 21st Century, from string quartets to club shows. As composer-in-residence at the Center, I have been inspired by its huge variety of spaces and the different ways we can animate them. In addition, my work as a DJ has highly informed my approach, and my classical-club show Mercury Soul has exploded the ways musicians are staged and information is relayed.
The first episode, Curating: Intro & Programming, introduces the series and examines how we choose music and the order we present it.
Curating: Production delves into the complexities of lighting, stagecraft, and ambient information, with a special look at transforming the program book into something cinematic, engaging, and welcoming to a broad range people.
Curating: Platform looks at the entire experience of a concert, asking us to consider ways to expand the platform to include pre- and post-concert artists from different genres to bring a wider audience and create a deeper impact. In classical music we talk about concerts – but to continue to engage new listeners in new ways, we should transform our concerts into events. This segment draws from the previous two episodes to examine the ways we can enlarge a concert into a richer experience.
As we look to ways to bring classical music into living rooms digitally, we must remain focused on animating the live experience – which will always be the core of what we do. The more vibrantly we can present music onstage, with fluid production and immersive information, the better our broadcasts will look on the small screen at home. It’s the model of sports, which in anchored by the live experience but has found ways to broadcast imaginatively. We can emerge from this tough moment in creative ways.