Bringing Home the Art

Spending summers at Byrdcliffe as a boy was always a magical experience for me. Founded in 1902 by Ralph Whithead as a Utopian community, the Byrdcliffe Art Colony of Woodstock, NY has long been a creative haven for artists and is the origin of Woodstock being a colony of the arts. Having the opportunity to come back for a creative residency was a dream come true.

Through the assistance of Carla Smith, Executive Director of the Woodstock Guild (which owns Byrdcliffe), I obtained the grant from MAAF to support a three-month residency from April through June of 1998. Over the past 15 years, I have been developing a sign language for on-the-spot composition called Soundpainting. The goals of my work in "Artist as Catalyst" were to further the development of Soundpainting, to incorporate it into public schools, and to involve the community in performance. This language, consisting of over 600 gestures, is used to communicate with an "orchestra" during performance. The result is a collaborative work based on improvisation. The current Walter Thompson Orchestra of 25 is made up of musicians, actors, dancers and visual artists. By incorporating these other mediums into the orchestra, traditional boundaries are dissolved and a dialogue between the different art forms develops.

The language is broken down into seven categories: Sections (individuals or groups of players), Rhythms (tempos and time signatures), Genres (the "feel" of the groups of players), Tonal Indications (key centers of specific chords), Functions (instructions used in conjunction with other signals), Sculpting (concept and/or texture), and Palettes (sections of notated and/or rehearsed music, text or choreography).

Working with children opens up additional possibilities for me in creating new language. With the assistance of Superintendent Hal Rowe, I introduced Soundpainting to the fourth and fifth graders of the Onteora School District. For 10 weeks, I worked with each class once a week, culminating in a performance that brought members of each class together to form one large Orchestra, including members of my own. During the 10 weeks, each child learned approximately 40 gestures, including Laugh, Speak, Minimalism, Dance Badly, and Play/Can't Play. Many of the children became fluent enough in the language to take turns as conductor and create their own works. I truly enjoy teaching young people advanced concepts in composition without necessarily having them play any conventional instrument. It is a wonderful accomplishment to impart complicated rhythms and complex harmonic structures to children and see them recognize these in everyday sounds. I am a strong believer that all children are creative and it was very exciting to see their individuality expressed through Soundpainting.

Over the course of the residency I also had the opportunity to further develop Soundpainting in a "think tank" environment with members of my Orchestra, as well as invited musicians, actors, dancers and visual artists from around the country. Over 150 new gestures were created. We worked six hours a day, six days a week, with performances amongst ourselves each evening, and for the public each weekend. The latter, held in the historic Byrdcliffe Theatre, gave me the opportunity to expose the local community to Soundpainting and to compose with new language in front of an audience. In a performance, I like to chink away at the wall that exists between performer and audience. I ended each performance by teaching a handful of gestures and bringing the audience into the action for a 10-to-15-minute Soundpainting.

In addition, I spent four weeks co-teaching a graduate course with Nancy Mangano-Rowe called "Language and Music in the Integrated Classroom" at the State University of New York at New Paltz. I worked with elementary school teachers. They anticipated that the introduction of Soundpainting into their classrooms will result in increased attentive listening, concentration, confidence, creativity at all levels, understanding of complex ideas, and increased comfort experimenting with new ideas.

Over 600 people learned Soundpainting during the three-month residency. A documentary of the project is being produced by filmmaker Burrill Crohn. A workbook on Soundpainting for elementary school teachers is now being written. And plans are being made to return next year for work in the public schools and another, month-long residency at Byrdcliffe. I would like to give special thanks to MAAF (and its partial funders, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Johnson & Johnson) for making this dream come true; to the New York State Council on the Arts for the many years of funding my Orchestra; to Fleet Bank for additional support; and to the Woodstock Guild for hosting this residency.