New spaces for new music: Chris Kallmyer at TEDxCalArts
[Music] I'm Chris Colm and I'm an artist that lives and works here in Los Angeles and today when I was invited to speak with you I have to say I was devastated to find out that my TED Talk the Ted Talk I had always wanted to give had already been given and it was given by a man I is no less than my arch nemesis David burn now here's the thing in all reality I actually feel a little bit more um like this about Mr burn that that he he's one of my heroes actually and and his Ted Talk in many ways is a precursor to the Ted Talk I'd like to give you today and in his talk just a little cursory explanation he describes how architecture has helped music to evolve over time that when we took music from our outdoor spaces to our indoor spaces like a cathedral something changed in the way that musicians made their work to fit that new container that new context furthermore when music went from the cathedral to the concert hall and the concert hall to God our radios and our MP3 players music changed each time for each new container that we develop new tools and new materials to access that container and this has led me to believe that perhaps our work is more of a negotiation between its Beginnings in here and how it lives out here it's this realization that's helped me to change the fundamental question that I ask myself as a musician from a focus on what I play to where I'm playing it and this journey has taken me from a life playing trumpet and orchestras the classical musician to a new way of working in new contexts new sites asking them what they want from me now this doesn't mean that I I dislike our old sites like like this concert hall for instance this is a really great example of a traditional musical venue um and it's defined um by its architecture this architecture as a matter of fact has helped to encourage a particular type of work this work has benefited from having thick walls that keep out our exterior sounds and it's benefited from having all the chairs or organized together facing a performer on a stage if you've noticed I'm your performer and I'm very well lit and you aren't you can you can hear me but I can't really hear you um in a real sense and and these are the things that define the concert hall at its worst this concert hall makes us feel distant and it's boring the art at its best the art made in this container is exciting and visceral new and fresh and the this container gives us a kind of focus to that to that work um it's that focus and that freshness that leads us to a closeness and it's within that moment of closeness between a performer and an audience that this kind of interaction and empathy happens and and it's that moment I'm interested in finding in my work uh so today I'd like to introduce you to a collection of Works um many of them come out of machine project which is a space located here in Los Angeles um this is our fearless leader Mark Allen and machine is a storefront and a collective but often times we're invited by Museum institutions to create work in their spaces um as a matter of fact in 2010 we spent an entire year at the Hammer Museum reconsidering what visitor Services might look like if artists ran it and as part of that project I created this the little William theater uh which is a theater full theater um that lives in a coat room under the stairs in the lobby of the Hammer Museum it's a traditional theater it's a prenium um and instead of seating 250 people like this theater it actually seats two um as a matter of fact the the performances the length of the performance were shrunk as well from two hours to two minutes in length we presented classical music folk music jazz cheese tastings uh poetry readings puppet shows all kinds of different stuff and finally a festival of new music that ran for three full months in this Festival we commissioned 100 brand I'm sorry we commissioned 100 composers to write 350 new works for our space and I would tell you all of this because I was committed to Bringing serious work difficult work to an unexpected new space and I want to see what would happen when we got that serious work in there and what turns out is that it wasn't so serious anymore the work was really funny and it had a lot of levity and it's that very levity and curiousness that I was Finding at the time was absent from our traditional concert spaces and this really led me to a conclusion that our new work our difficult art is not inaccessible to audiences but that our concert Halls are um the I kind of expected this conclusion but the thing I did not expect was to find how intimate the space was it was this amplifier for closeness that we had a physical proximity between one another but there was also an emotional proximity because this these performers were performing just for you that there was a sense that this this this singular Focus gave presence to their listening I began to see the little William not so much as a closet but as a dynamic container for social interactions a container that Amplified our closeness now I thought I was kind of alone in these thoughts and I I thought to be honest that um nobody else really shared them but I found there's a whole field of people called human geographers that study this kind of thing it was news to me um and they're kind of the social science branch of geography and they study really the way that our cultures use their spaces and they have a very particular way of understanding two common terms that we use all the time and the first is space space is undifferentiated open and potentially vast think like the desert it it signifies kind of a sense of Freedom so let's imagine we're all on a road trip together we're in like a 400 foot long Lincoln Continental that seeds 200 people and and we're ripping across the Mojave and we kind of have the sense of possibility there's that freedom you get when you're on a road trip and um that sense is a spaciousness it's a sense of moving through space in contrast we have place and place is enclosed place is enclosed and humanized space it's space with value it's space that gives us Comfort now notice we can turn space into place and we can give it a locus of identity an opportunity to give Focus I was curious by these ideas and I started to in a way organize them into my practice and they came to be of use to me um in this next project machine project was invited to do a uh a series of works at the Walker Arts Center in a cold January and it was like6 degrees it was so cold but despite this fact we requested the premier cold weather performance venue which is an igloo and we did two days of performances in the space with a poet a singer and myself I created in the space a small sound installation on four tea kettles that I turned into speakers which all emanated sound as well as a fifth tea kettle on which I made tea with a small camping stove we'd sit in the space drink some good like loose leaf oolong and um hang out and the thing is is you might notice these are not the typical materials for a musician I'm going back on my tradition all the stuff I learned as a trumpet player I'm not using and the thing is I'm I I started to find with this project that these new contexts needed new tools that I developed a philosophy about making work that was in congruent with the stuff that I always used like my horn so I began to experiment with tools and one that I've settled on um that I use often is technology um though oftentimes it's not apparent in the work this is uh a small space that plays soothing calming ambient music to parents it's located in a children's museum it was temporary and it's called the ambient den of child catharsis and recycled screaming and this project was cool because there was this Den that was really blissed out and very cool and then there was this microphone and if I'm to talk about the technology I can tell you it's a piece of generative algorithmic computer composition and if I'm to tell you about the piece and you're to experience the piece all you get is this microphone in that space and I like that a lot um I also tend to collect a lot of things I collect objects I collect recording um CU I am really interested in sound um and for a time I was living in the desert on the rim of Death Valley in a small ghost town called riy um riy was a boom and bus town in the early 1900s um where they mined out a lot of gold and when the ore ran out so did the residents so Left Behind were a bunch of bombed out buildings as well as um trash just tons of trash um bottles cans old pieces of stove and went hiking the land looking at the old mining sites and found that this omnipresent wind passing through the land was the only thing that um I was really interested in so I collected all these bottles and hung them on the fence to catch the wind they create a dense drone when the wind is present and when there's no wind the bottles weit in this next work um I was living in excuse me in this next work I was living in Northern California um and I was just blown away by the L of the Marin headin totally defined by its geology so I I began to collect these rocks and recordings of the places in which I found them so you can hear birds and those are recordings of the Eucalyptus Grove where most of these were found I like these rocks they stop and start um and they almost perform which brings me to my next tool I really still think of myself as a performer and I love performance but the thing is is that performance is by nature a confrontational tool it's perhaps our most confrontational tool our bodies in space commanding attention saying I'm worthy just like you're worthy and I want want you to pay attention to me in the things I have to say and I like that it's just that I find confrontation really annoying sometimes um and I don't feel like we always need to be confrontational so I like to give people the option if they'd like to be confronted or not in other works you can literally pick up a guitarist like a library book and check them out for a time for a zip through the Galleries at the Hammer Museum and um he's just like a library book like I said except that he's alive and he plays he he plays music into your earphones these are personalized improvised soundtracks to your experience looking at art often when we change the context of performance it opens us up to new audiences or perhaps when we change the context it asks things of us as a performer perhaps to make a different type of work the thing that I find powerful in this case is that through performance we can give people something that they didn't know that they needed I like that with that in mind everyone reach down under your chairs on the right side of your chairs to the right with your right hand you'll find a small box and I want you to sit this box in your lap don't shake it it's got a piece of cheese inside of it and I want to tell you a few things about this cheese as a cheese Monger I'm a secret cheese Monger this cheese is made by the C cowg creamy in Northern California and it's called Devil's Gulch and it's a cheese that's made with pasteurized cows milk from John TNA Dairy now it's pasteurized so ladies if you're pregnant congratulations and um number two you can eat this it's okay it's pasteurized um so I should tell you the cheese has dried red peppers heirloom peppers on top and the peppers give it a bit of a sweet and Smoky flavor I also find that this cheese is quite bright uh almost like a citrus quality like grapefruit like I said it's a whole milk cheese so it's rich but it's not too rich it's Rich because it's made with Jersey cow milk which is high in butterfat so now I want to tell you some things about this cheese as a musician I made recordings of every place where this cheese has been I have I would like to play for you a small two-minute concert that includes recordings of John TNA's Farm where the cows live of his cows eating Alfalfa but also of um the birds in his trees I'd like to play for you recording Su Conley from cowgirl crey who's making cheese letting curd drain and Cheese's age and furthermore I'd like to play for you a few notes on the trumpet and the Chimes that are my impressions of the cheese I may separate these things like one you know one's monger and one's musician but this is really truly a project that's come out of my interests and by the way um you get to meet John on the video screen John's cows in just a moment so so if everyone would like to open your box we can start the tasting right [Music] now [Music] for for [Music] [Music] thank [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you thank you now I've really prized my collaborations with people outside of my idiom and in working with Sue and John in particular they've helped me to feel like part of the family in the LA in the um San Francisco Dairy community and the last project I want to tell you about today machine project was invited back to the Walker somehow and we ended up back in the space on that same field but this time in the summer so it's a hot humid time of the year and in researching for an event on this land I found out that min Apolis has a real love affair with lawn care and as one of the curators put it there that in Minneapolis your lawn is your welcome mat so I created a project called the American lawn and ways to cut it a three-part musical score for the lawn adjacent to the Walker and the first part were two Amplified sheep sheep were America's first lawnmowers the second part were these two rideon mowers that make this really wondrous drone and I composed music in tune with the these two particular mowers um one at 111 Herz and one at 103 and the music was then strapped to these um gigantic speakers and played um for for people listening the third part was a mobile mower Orchestra a group of community real mower enthusiasts who who mowed the lawn with with a real Joy um and we covered their mowers in bells and let them choreograph the piece themselves and the interesting thing is that the sound of this piece was like it was a jangly drony austere piece of music but the vibe of this piece was more like the state fair and I loved this this type of collaboration I had with that Community now I'm interested in the collaboration I'm interested in the work but I'm even more interested in what happens that time that moment the next week when these people pull their mower out again and they they look at it and they handle it and they start to mow their grass and I wonder what happens in that moment so I so I hope that in investigating our sites our places and our daily activities that I can come to a better understanding of who we are and where we live and that in making works and new contexts new containers for performance that new modes come forth and new collabor ations that point to our communities and the things that connect us so thank you very much