Today I'm going to be telling you about a ridiculously successful program series that

we've been doing at the Main Library in Cincinnati for the last 2 and a half years. It's

called Experimental Music at the Library. Which is exactly what the name suggests.

On the third Wednesday of each month I invite musicians and performance artists,

and as of recently poets, to come into the library and make weird, often beautiful,

sometimes jarring noises. The performances are always out in the open, usually just

a few feet away from the Mysteries and General Fiction.

This is from one of our first performances in September 2012. That's the noise duo

Early Tunnels with Jon Lorenz on saxophone & electronics and Pete Fosco on guitar

& electronics. At the beginning of the series I wanted to push the envelope a little bit

just to get a feel for what works best. Since then I've learned to ask performers to

"scale to the space". In this case, I didn't. It was very loud. It's important to establish

limits, right?

The space where the musicians usually perform overlooks a busy downtown

intersection, which makes for a frequently interesting synchronicity between the

performers and people walking by.

You can see here just how close to the collection the performances are. That's Eddy

Kwon playing his violin. His day job is leading a free youth orchestra, and all his

students and their families came. Which was amaaaazing!

This is our other space, out in the lobby, which we use for larger scale performances

or when they need to use the piano. Everything you see is balancing on a trampoline.

Also, this happened on our Fine Amnesty Day. So basically while hundreds of people

stood in line to have their fines forgiven this weird thing was happening in the

background.

One of the highest profile artists to come through was electronic composer / former

pro skateboarder Duane Pitre. By the way, if you haven't heard his album Feel Free, I

highly recommend it. He does beautiful things using Just Intonation.

This is from last week's performance. The Cincinnati Composers Laptop Orchestra

Project, aka CiCLOP, performing Terry Riley's In C.

This is a Hempispherical Speaker Array, made from Ikea salad bowls. Each array has

six speakers, and it reproduces electronic sounds more like an acoustic instrument.

For each performance I make a display of library material. I ask the artists to send me

lists of their favorite composers, bands, authors... anything that's in the library. This

way I'm using the performance to make new, unexpected inroads into the collection.

Here's another display. Isn't that a great poster?

I like to encourage one off or unusual collaborations. This is onewayness from Eerie,

Pennsylvania (on the right), and Drachemusik from Indianapolis on the left.

Here's another library-exclusive collaboration, the jazz trio Wrest with Sean Ali.

Saxophonist Jack Wright is just off camera. Ben Bennett is probably the only

percussionist I've ever seen play the carpet with a squeegee.

Sometimes there are lobster hats.

We usually get anywhere between 30 to 60 attendees for most performances.

Our first really crazy successful event was for Halloween in 2012 when I put together

a group of circuit benders to come up with a live improvised score to WF Murnau's

Nosferatu.

Our local NPR station did a spot on it, complete with a spooky sound collage in the

background, which brought a lot of people in.

The Symphony of Horror donned costumes. They reassembled this past Halloween to

play Phantom of the Opera.

This is probably my all-time favorite image of Experimental Music at the Library.

That's Mark Shafer standing on a trampoline trying to balance stack of drums while

playing saws.

We had close to a thousand people to see Bear The Sleeping Ghost, another one-off

Experimental Music at the Library collaboration with members of bands Bear (The

Ghost) and The Sleeping Sea. Okay, so they were actually there to see John Green

talk, and the band played afterwards while he was signing autographs. But it was still

a big moment for spreading the word about Experimental Music at the Library.

I'm always looking for ways to put different kinds of media together. Here we have a

cellist, Camera Lucida from Louisville, working with an interpretive dancer and live

video projections mixed and created on the fly in response to the music by an area

video artist

The Panoply Performance Laboratory from NYC is always an audience favorite.

Here's Brian McCorkle smearing petroleum jelly on his face while playing the

harmonica.

And here he is... doing something on the ground.

At the exact same time someone dressed as a chipmunk was connecting (or tying up)

the audience with twine.

Sometimes we wrap the audience in Velcro. You know, just because.

Whenever possible I like to encourage the musicians to taylor their performances

specifically to the library space and/or the collection. During this performance Neat-o

Torpedo incorporated PlayAway audio books. There are a few playing simultaneously

somewhere under the mess of wires and synthesizers.

Especially in a public space, you never know what kind of curveball you’ll encounter.

The most interesting performers respond accordingly.

In April 2013 we put on what was probably our most ambitious program to date. We

invited 20 artists to do 2 minute 16 second performances or time-based works

inspired by John Cage, Fluxus, and libraries. Artists from all over the world

participated by sending us video, sound, and performance instructions to be executed

by someone in the audience.

The finale of the night involved audience members reading random pages from

randomly selected library books simultaneously into microphones that ran through a

synthesizer played by another volunteer audience member who did not know how to

play the synthesizer.

Drew Wheeler, the guy with the hat, built a light-responsive synthesizer that was the

final stage of audio processing, and other audience members were given flashlights

to shine at it. So the result was this amazingly chaotic.... thing.... that.... happened.

Oh, and someone came dressed up as the rabbit from Donnie Darko.

One of the projects was an interactive website designed by Internet artist Chris

Collins where the audience could draw or write with their fingers on tablets

responding to what was happening, and their drawings would appear projected on

stage. The catch is you can’t see what you’re drawing until it shows up on the screen.

Someone made this one.

Oh hey there's me conducting the audience in making ocean noises.

The most effective promotion for Experimental Music at the Library comes from our

facebook page, which you can visit at facebook.com/ExperimentalMusicAtTheLibrary

On our library's Facebook page we create event pages. I have lots of fun designing

the cover images. Here are a few of my favorites...

I’ll never top this one.

I do all of these in MS Paint, and occasionally Pixlr.com, which is basically like a free

online Photoshop.

Here's a picture of a picture of a flyer listing upcoming performances.

And... now for what you've all been waiting for...

:-)

That last piece with the smashing violin was Fluxus artist and composer Nam June

Paik’s composition “One For Violin Solo” (1962).

So, the series has gotten a bit of attention. This was the first article, on the excellent

Library as Incubator Project website. By the way, if you don't know about Library as

Incubator Project, please go there. I promise you won't regret it.

Through a weird turn of events--it's a long story--Matthew Moyer from the Jacksonville

Florida Public Library heard about the series and wrote an article about it in Library

Journal

... And then Experimental Music at the Library made it into Paste Magazine.

But the article that received the most traction was in CityBeat, a Cincinnati weekly

alternative newspaper. Somehow the series, and the fact that I wear my gorilla suit at

the reference desk sometimes, made it into their annual "Cool Issue". They tell me

within a month it became the single most viewed and shared article in the

publication's history. Which I can't even begin to wrap my head around.

Then it made it onto BuzzFeed.

And then there was this. Which... I... Yeah. I'll just let that sink in.

However, by far the article I'm most proud of is actually a short review of a single

performance on a blog, Half-Gifts, written by a 15 year old named Jude Noel.

He writes: "It's not the first place you'd expect to catch premiere experimental artists

live, but, surprisingly, when it comes to the stranger side of music, there's no better

place in the area to get your fix than the Cincinnati Public Library. Each Wednesday

at seven, between the Fiction and CD shelves, one can take in one or usually more

drone, ambient or noise music sets for free. Yesterday happened to be my first

experience with Experimental Music at the Library program, and it certainly won't be

my last.

Shortly after beginning to come to the monthly events, he started making his own

experimental music, and eventually performed last summer.

Now he runs his own online record label. I can't take too much credit, he's a brilliant

kid. But I'm glad to have helped facilitate in some small way the library becoming an

important part of his development as an artist.

So, some of you may be wondering. Why experimental music at a LIBRARY of all

places?

Because I'm interested in blowing peoples minds. And by that I mean I'm interested in

creating conditions where people can be curious, maybe using a little bit of cognitive

dissonance. I'm interested in cultivating wonder through serendipitous encounters

with the Sublime. I'm interested in turning people on to how huge and weird and

amazing the world is.

When we first started the series one of the conversations we were having was how to

do things in the library that invites our patrons to have an encounter with challenging

material. I think a public library *should* be a place where people can encounter

challenging, mind-shifting things.

I really like what the art critic Jerry Saltz is fond of saying: merely good art makes you

go “wow! ...huh?” whereas spectacular art makes you go “huh? wow!”

By holding these performances out in the open, among the books I'm, hopefully,

creating situations where these kinds of things can happen.

Diverse artists

Partnership with Chase Public.

Possibly work with CCM

Grants to fund this…