where the ideas for Music in the Barns came from…
NEW YORK
In many respects the crucial antecedents to the creation of Music in the Barns and what might be called our broad conceptual focus—as well as our thinking about presenting and performing music in ways that find inspiration in installations by contemporary conceptual artists and Fluxus “happenings”—began with Carol Gimbel’s arrival in New York City immediately after graduating from university in 1999.
As she explains it, “I found myself attracted to the old wholesale garment trade district on New York’s Lower East Side—between Houston and Delancey, Allen and Essex—at a moment when it was all about new arrivals like myself looking for cheap space to open boutiques, studios to make art and music, or housing, and the commercial tenants who had been there for decades, still selling job-lots of fabric and vintage junk.”
“As it happened, my fascination with a local junk collector led me to the magical storefront of Johanna Hofring, and eventually I became part of her art collective. Although Johanna is celebrated today as a fashion designer—very much at the forefront of “green” eco-conscious couture, she came to New York from Sweden with the idea of becoming a fine artist and musician. However, her voracious passion for all the arts, adventurous openness to mixing it all up, and personal charisma resulted in her turning her storefront into an art gallery, studio workspace, and musicians’ hangout. So, while it served as a showcase for Johanna’s first collections of organic, handmade clothes, it also became a vibrant neighborhood open house—with regular art gallery openings, parties for her collections, and a remarkable crossroads for musicians from very different worlds to meet.”
"For my New York friends from the classical music world, Johanna’s storefront opened up new realms of possibility. Many of us recent graduates of Juilliard and other conservatories—regarded the prospect of joining an established symphony orchestra with some ambivalence. And I particularly admired David Goodman’s short-lived symphonic orchestra, the Wild Ginger Philharmonic, with their unorthodox ideas about interpreting by consensus and encouraging improvisation. But, in many ways it was “jamming,” and playing at parties for a crowd of artists and random neighbors, in a mix with aspiring alt.folk singer-songwriters and performance artists that would affect all of us, and gradually evolve into a radical new culture of crossover classical. Not the least of it was we loved how much we felt part of the neighborhood."
ONTARIO
Equally important as a source of inspiration was an invitation from Michael Schmidt in 2002--and again the next year—for Gimbel to join the symphony orchestra that he conducted at an annual festival held each summer on his 200-acre biodynamic dairy farm, located 100 miles northwest of Toronto.
Described as “a yearly convergence of innovative thinkers and world-renown performers, centered on themes of sustainability, education and artistic enlightenment,” it was an extraordinary experience to have as a young musician. One that Gimbel says, inspired her early in her career to begin thinking about how much context can enhance the presentation of music: on the one hand, sharpening our sense of awe and wonder, but also, on the other hand, how the invisible fourth wall between performer and audience completely dissolves when you spend your days in each other’s company eating and drinking, talking, learning about sustainable agriculture, and getting to know one another.
In more recent years, Music in the Barns has had the privilege of being Schmidt’s partner in creating his Symphony in the Barn summer program.
SYMPHONY ON A WORKING FARM
TORONTO
By the mid-1980s, it was obvious that Toronto’s economic prosperity and growing reputation as a “livable” city was about to cause a crisis of affordable housing. And much as this routinely had done in other cities, it would decimate the city’s burgeoning contemporary cultural community.
Unlike many cities, however, Toronto’s artist-driven, public/private property development projects—focused on strong stakeholder collaboration and neighborhood community involvement—have been remarkably effective during the past thirty-five years. And Toronto today provides a compelling case for art’s potential to be a powerful agent of social change, advancing such progressive civic goals as preserving architectural heritage and fostering a policy of “green” building design, without displacing the arts community (although this has not always been accomplished without controversy).
Among the most successful of such projects is Wychwood Barns—developed by the Toronto not-for-profit organization Artscape in conjunction with the City of Toronto and numerous community supporters. On the site of the St Clair Carhouse and railroad yard, the developers transformed a complex of five majestic but dilapidated long brick sheds sited on a toxic four-and-a-half acre brownfield into a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood community hub framed by a small city park. The ambitious hope was that the aggregate result might function as a 21st century reboot of village life, combining a small town commons and Main Street.
Some thirty units of affordable artists’ live/work housing, work-only studios, and community-run gallery were to be only one element of Wychwood Barns’ ecologically balanced whole. The complex also includes a theater, as well as a farmer’s market, community food centre, greenhouse and garden run by The Stop, a public-spirited Toronto not-for-profit with a broad range of programs and events aimed in part at lower income families and the elderly. Other tenants include a nursery school, a children’s art school, and office space for a dynamic mix of non-profit organizations, along with the principal community association for the St Clair West and Wychwood neighborhoods.
Sensing the development’s unique potential while still under construction, musicinthebarns’ founder Carol Gimbel applied to become a tenant—a rigorous, highly competitive selection process in which she needed to convince the Artscape board she had something important to offer the community. Ultimately, she was granted the lease to a “storefront” suite facing onto the walk leading to the complex’s covered public “Mainspace” And the concept of musicinthebarns rapidly began to take shape. To whatever extent we had a brief, a mission, or a role to play as part of this potentially utopian creative workers’ collective, it was to add music. For us, Wychwood Barns presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring everything we aspired to do under a single roof.
The soaring 7500 square foot “Mainspace”—without the constraints of a fixed stage or auditorium seating—would be an ideal laboratory to master the logistics of presenting classical music concerts as immersive spectacles, art installations and happenings. And as a tabula rasa in other respects, we had remarkable freedom in the creation of programming spanning the entire repertoire of music written for string ensembles from the past but especially from younger Canadian composers breaking down the walls between classical, popular music and jazz.
Our most starkly minimalist evening began with a solo performance of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata by the New York pianist Cullan Bryant. Seated in profile at a concert grand piano he was illuminated only by a flood of pure cobalt light.
By contrast, for an evening of multimedia works by Canadian composer Nicole Lizée, we premiered a version of her “Hitchcock Études”—written for string quartet and percussion, scored with brief recorded sections from the films’ soundtrack—and projecting her collage of glitchy images culled from “Psycho,” “The Man who Knew Too Much” and “The Birds” on banks of large, temporarily mounted screens.
One consequence of our decision to occupy a storefront, rather than a conventional office space, was that almost nothing we did daily was conducted completely behind closed doors. And while production meetings, music lessons, workshops with children, and rehearsals of the musicinthebarns ensemble (and guest artists) were not open for passersby to wander in, we wanted to send a signal we were accessible, and very much a part of the heterogeneous community that lived in, work at and visited the barns. We also incidentally contributed to the ambient aural fabric of the barns’ public space.
