It’s a snow day, so I’m at home, not dealing with the snow yet but instead dealing with a non-draining washing machine. This seems like a very sit-com predicament, something that you would certainly see on The Mary Tyler Moore show, but with better lighting. The fact that I had to use my French Press coffee carafe to empty out the machine made it comic enough to make it into that TV genre, anyway, except for the 1970’s part.
The MTM connection of course springs to mind because of all of the tributes written after the actress’s recent passing – lots of clips in the feed about the theme song (not my personal favorite – my personal preference was for the theme from the other sit-com our family watched right after MTM, the B0b Newhart Show), her wardrobe, her physical comedy skills, etc. But many of the tributes aimed more at the assemblage of people thrown together in the MTM show – in what we now think of as a workplace comedy, where the workplace is essentially home.
My workplace community, like those of many musicians, expands and contracts depending on the immediate performance or teaching situation. A festival in a remote town? A clinic at a regional venue? An artists’ colony of individuals doing their individual things in individual studios? My regular office for the fall and spring semesters, and everyone who shows up there?
Some people within the community change their roles – performers you meet in one place pop up again somewhere else, colleagues take on different specialties, students eventually become teachers themselves, etc. The “workplace” can seem pretty large when these changes expand your own community contacts. But, in comparison with lots of other fields, the workplace of classically-trained musicians is small.
The world of contemporary music in particular is really small, and very divided by the interests (or aesthetics, if you want to be fancy) of those in that world. Just this week I was reminded of this after speaking with two Maine musicians from different subcultures within classical music, musicians who work within an hour of each other. Neither musician knew much about the other’s circle of colleagues, in spite of having some musical friends in common (Maine being kind of a small community itself, that’s not so unusual).
But some people manage to maintain connections across wide swaths of the new music community – one group like this is Transient Canvas. I’ve been involved with this duo in various ways – as a festival host, as a fellow performer, and as a composer. They have made a point of being open to all kinds of composers and their different styles, even while they maintain a unique duo (bass clarinet and marimba) without a past repertoire to draw on. They recently finished documenting a January concert where they premiered a piece of mine, and the video came out really well:
What you don’t see is the fact that people braved a REALLY cold night in Somerville to come see them play, and that the people at the show were not from any one single slice of the Boston new music crowd.
They’ll be coming to Lewiston in May to play the same piece, but they have a very full schedule all around the place, so check out their website to see where you can hear them live. Don’t miss your chance to see some of the linchpins in our small-but-also-large community.
beth wiemann 