[The brief essay below is the curatorial statement I wrote for Ear Taxi Festival 2021, which took place from Sept. 15 to Oct. 4, 2021 in Chicago]
The history and present of Chicago new and experimental musics is as complex, nuanced, non-linear, and fraught as that of the city itself. The word “sprawling” comes to mind; Chicago’s music is irregular, improvisatory, incomplete, unlikely; while it interacts with them, it ultimately evades traditional genre markers. (Sometimes I stubbornly insist on using the cumbersome word “musics” rather than the more friendly and familiar term “music.”) These musics are truly diverse, and in multiple senses of this loaded and often unsatisfying term. I want us to eschew a seductive but false (and potential dangerous) universality, and for us to be ever-aware that we’re dealing with a multiplicity of traditions that are both interrelated and autonomous, a sort of musical Venn diagram.
As a festival, Ear Taxi does not and simply cannot claim to be a comprehensive representation of all Chicago musics. However, it does hope to be as inclusive as we can manage with the resources we have available—to “HEAR CHICAGO” as our 2021 Mission Statement exhorts—and we strive to create unlikely encounters. Quite simply, we want you to bump up against some local music, music by your cultural peers, music about your location and of your life—in short, your music—that you may nevertheless not have come upon otherwise. We hope you will discover some things that are familiar and comfortable, that are new and surprising, that are nonsensical and zany, and—perhaps most importantly—that are challenging and disruptive.
Speaking of which: in the face of all this genuine positivity, the inspiring people we collaborate with, the remarkable work being made here, we also need some real talk. Let me speak here only from my personal positionality. I’m a white cis-male from the South who works largely in a field that is often called—depending on who you ask—contemporary classical music or new music (and these are heavily litigated terms). This field is a branch of, or maybe historically descended from, the US classical music industry, which is among the most imperialist and oppressive fields in contemporary culture. If US culture were on trial, charged with being what bell hooks calls the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” the classical music industry would be Exhibit A. Classical music institutions are supported by generational wealth of the sort systematically denied to Black citizens in the US for the entire history of the nation. Classical music requires highly specialized training that is expensive, and therefore primarily available to white people from an upper- or middle-class background. Asian-Americans also show up in these spaces, but they are often caricatured and typecast (including physical stereotypes regarding their suitability to certain instruments) via the racist and de-humanizing discourse of the “model minority,” which, in our field, simply re-centers whiteness. In addition to being associated with economic status, this exclusionary training privileges a highly specific kind of virtuosity and instills submissive attitudes towards authority (whether the conductor, the score, the composer, the private teacher, etc.), in addition to habituating a perfectionism that can lead to pathological self-loathing. It is also ableist; there are many great musicians with disabilities (including deaf musicians), however, the nuances of their experiences are rarely centered. And while there are scholars doing excellent work in the fields of music and disabilities studies, the discriminatory social practices disabled musicians face in all kinds of various environments—educational, recreational, professional—are not a common part of our discourse.
Simultaneously, our industry under-compensates musical workers of all races (include lower- and lower-middle-class white people) who are not associated with high-status institutions. Within higher education, schools of music, departments of music, conservatories, etc. tend mostly to be schools of classical music (though many have jazz programs as well, normally less well-funded) without, as Loren Kajikawa has written (1), naming and owning their colonialist exclusion of other modes of knowledge and expression. The hierarchical, privileged, and patriarchal structures of these institutions not only enable abusers to have long careers that mostly avoid accountability but protect and reward them. Schools of music, concert halls, and other musical institutions are located on land stolen from Native people that these institutions mostly do not even take the very bare-minimum step of acknowledging.
However, as George E. Lewis has written (2), “the primary remit of new music and new noises [is] to declare that change is possible.” Elsewhere (3), Lewis quotes Caribbean authors Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant in support of what Lewis describes as the “condition of créolité” by which 21st century music finds itself marked: “[we] will be torn between several languages, several histories, caught in the torrential ambiguity of a mosaic identity. To present creative depth, one must perceive that identity in all its complexity. He or she will be in the situation of a Creole” (4) (In Praise of Creoleness, p. 112). Lewis goes on to say (p. 446) that “[t]he mobile musical subject becomes reconfigured in ways that pluralism cannot hear, resulting in new musical forms that exceed the limitations of postmodern pastiche.” Indeed pluralism cannot hear this. We reflexively double down on exclusionary historical practices, reify contingent procedures, stubbornly holding onto neoliberal logics of the “marketplace of ideas,” hide behind a putatively objective (but in fact subjective, often arbitrary) quality metric in music; but these are all choices to deny, erase, and misunderstand the complexities and contradictions of lived experience. It’s not merely that our old spaces need to make room for voices the classical music industry has othered and excluded (especially Black voices), though this is certainly necessary—and we probably need some redistributive and reparatory processes for that. It is that we need to engage in a project of creating liberatory spaces for future musicians and our future selves. Every music these days reflects what Lewis calls a “mosaic identity,” and embracing and holding multiple meanings simultaneously is a step towards freedom.
Artist Samson Young puts it less grandly but more snappily: writing in a different context (5), he describes a particular cultural item as “a communal invention, a strange [...] but beautiful glitch that we share;” this sure sounds a lot like the music in my world. I’m looking for beautiful glitches—accidental truths, productively disruptive mistakes, the truly unexpected—in Ear Taxi Festival 2021, and I hope you’ll find some with me. Maybe they’ll be the glitches that facilitate some change. We must keep in mind, though: we’re talking about glitches, and this doesn’t imply a facile solutionism that sees easy or technocratic fixes to complex problems. To further parse Lewis’s statement, we’re still at the point where we’re making the declaration that change is possible—my sense is that we’re only seeing the beginnings of actual change itself. We all have healing to do, and that takes time.
Speaking of complex problems, by way of ending, I want to acknowledge a necessary incompleteness and imperfection. To be honest with you, this statement has gone through several iterations. I’ve updated it as my thinking has changed, as I’ve learned, as I’ve made new connections, formed new relationships, and become a better listener. I don’t plan on arriving at a finalized version of this, and will continue to change it as I grow. Feel free to check out previous versions here. I also invite any feedback (michael@newmusicchicago.org) on the current version of this statement by way of holding myself to my communities—I have made mistakes and I will make surely continue to make them.
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(1) Kajikawa, Loren. "7. The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in US Schools and Departments of Music." In Seeing Race Again, pp. 155-174. University of California Press, 2019.
(2) Lewis, George: “Interview.” In Cassidy, Aaron, and Aaron Einbond. Noise in and as Music, p. 121. University of Huddersfield Press, 2013.
(3) Lewis, George, “The Situation of a Creole.” In Clarke, David. "Defining twentieth-and twenty-first-century music." Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 3, pp. 442-446 (2017).
(4) Bernabé, Jean; Chamoiseau, Patrick; and Confiant, Raphael. Éloge De La Créolité, trans. M. B. Taleb-Khyar (édition bilingue français/anglais), p. 112. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
(5) Citation coming: this is part a text in an exhibition of his work I saw at the University of Edinburgh in August, 2019.