A special guest story written by Erica Binder
The rules of producing a chamber music concert are pretty simple.
You must find a space with a stage and some chairs, and position your audience in rows facing the performers.
You should procure a program with some variety (but not too much); maybe a fast piece to start, then a slow one, and then a long one with some variety.
When the lights go down, the talking stops and the music starts. When the lights go back up, the music stops, and everybody goes home.
This process is informed by hundreds of years of tradition, thousands of post-secondary music courses, and firmly instilled in the minds of the classically trained. But what if we tried something new?
What if we used music to encourage dialogue? What if we brought the audience into the experience of making great art? What would happen if we focused on the people then and there in the room, instead of on the composers in the program?
These were the questions on my mind when I reached out to Paige Hunter (SFU BEnv Honours, REM, 2023) and Victor Yin (SFU BA, GEOG, 2022) of the Sword Fern Collective, a youth-led climate education consultancy that provides tools to discuss climate issues and ideate climate solutions.
Our mission was to create a safe and creative space for community members to engage in climate-focused dialogue. The goal was to effectively wield instrumental music as a tool for bringing people together and encouraging conversation.
This was tricky, especially because the traditional concert experience is sort of … isolated. Audiences are expected to sit quietly and listen while the artists perform. Talking in between pieces is discouraged, and—as we all know—talking between movements is strictly forbidden.
An artist biography in the program note is often the closest any audience member will get to meeting the musicians on stage. So, how did we break this mold?
The key was thinking of the music as a medium, not a commodity. We knew we wanted the audience to feel connected to one another, to engage in critical thought, and to feel part of something bigger than themselves. These three values formed the foundation of our program.
First on the program was Pauline Oliveros’ Worldwide Tuning Meditation. Oliveros (1932 - 2016) was a powerful individualist and a pioneer of the deep listening movement. Her Tuning Meditation can be performed by any number of people, trained musicians or not, and is composed as a set of instructions:
Begin by taking a deep breath and letting it all the way out with air sound.
Listen with your mind’s ear for a tone.
On the next breath using any vowel sound, sing the note that you have silently perceived on one comfortable breath.
Listen to the whole field of sound the group is making.
Select a voice distant from you and tune as exactly as possible to the tone you are hearing from that voice …
And so on. The end product is an oscillating vocal harmony that gradually settles into tonality, made all the more effective by the reverberant ceilings and pillars of Heritage Hall (our event venue). We honestly didn’t know what would happen when we asked a room full of strangers to sing together, but (despite some initial awkwardness), Paige, Victor and I were joined by our 80+ attendees in an original performance.
Next was Caroline Shaw’s Plan and Elevation, a visceral piece depicting scenes from the grounds of a research library in Washington, DC. Another pioneer and iconoclast among contemporary composers, Shaw (1982 - ) is known for her genre-transcending and incredibly accessible compositional style.
Shaw’s music is honest and evocative, and this piece is one of the first I’d recommend to any friends dipping a toe into orchestral music. In lieu of program notes, we asked the audience to respond to what they’d heard using the following prompts:
How have you seen art be used for change?
What’s missing in your community?
What would make you feel at home?
What would motivate your neighbourhood to pursue change together?
We broke into small groups with assigned note takers to hold and record these conversations.
The final element of the program posed the biggest creative hurdle. What does it look like to meaningfully involve an audience in co-creating the art? What happens when you obscure the lines between audience and performer?
To start, we spent a few months prior to the performance collecting video clips of nature from friends, family, and our online community. A video producer friend assembled the clips into a visual approximation of sonata form, and our talented string quartet live-improvised in response to the co-created score.
What did we learn from all of this?
I learned that diverse audiences have a lot more potential to engage with instrumental chamber music than we give them credit for. My previous experiences with graphic scores had always been in the context of graduate school seminars and highbrow recitals in boutique art galleries. In this room, however, the scores were an equalizer for an audience with a huge range of musical literacy.
To that same end, we didn’t have to worry about making sure patrons had the prerequisites to ‘understand’ dissonance and aleatoric music. These elements in Shaw’s piece simply led to a richer experience—we created the shared expectation that the music would be thought-provoking, not necessarily predictable or pleasant.
There’s a lot of talk amongst arts organizations right now about teaching our audiences to enjoy what we do. I’ll be honest—I don’t love that. Collaborating with non-musicians and the not-classically-trained has shown me that there’s truly nothing wrong with the audience or the music. Barriers are formed when we suggest that there’s an incorrect way to react to the art we’re creating and an incorrect way to occupy the space in which we’re making it.
So—inspired by my new activist friends, this is the part where I make a bold call to action:
Program weird concerts. Make artistic decisions based on the disjointed string quartet movements on your breakup playlist, or your favourite group of post-modern feminist improvisers, and use your event as a platform to authentically share your passion with your audience. Work with people that think differently than you do. I believe there are many ways to simultaneously deconstruct the concert experience and honor the rich history of so-called ‘western art music’, and all of them start with welcoming more voices into artistic leadership.
If a scrappy group of youth climate activists can do it, so can you.
The Sword Fern Collective will be returning with our second installment in this series in late June. “The Art of Change, Chapter Two: Words” will feature spoken word artists and a facilitated dialogue on the topic of climate optimism. Please follow us on instagram (@swordfernco) or subscribe to our mailing list at swordfernco.substack.com for more information.
Sword Fern Collective
Sword Fern Collective is a climate education consultancy co-founded in 2023 by SFU Semester in Dialogue alumni Paige Hunter and Victor Yin. Sword Fern Collective was formed out of a love for people and planet. After educations that often focused on the despair of the climate crisis, Paige and Victor saw a need for climate change education that centres hope and compassion. The Sword Fern Collective aims to advance climate justice by providing educators and students with the tools to discuss climate issues and ideate climate solutions. Subscribe to the online newsletter at swordfernco.substack.com
Erica Binder
Erica Binder is a musician and arts producer based on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music and a Master’s degree in Business Management from the University of British Columbia, as well as a certificate in Orchestra Management from the Juilliard School. Erica’s interests lie in the role that arts and culture – especially music – plays in our relationships to each other, and she dedicates her time to supporting creative projects that promote healthier communities.