MUSEUMS, COMPOSERS AND COMMUNITIES
A Composer's Journey into the Secret Life of Museums

By William C. Banfield

The Museum Loan Network (MLN) facilitates long-term loans of art and artifacts among museums, allowing them to better serve their communities. Typically, the organization has made exhibits possible through two types of grants: travel grants that have allowed teams of curators, educators, and community members to visit other museums, examine their collections and negotiate loans; and implementation grants that have funded the actual loan of materials and the installation of exhibits. Through Museums, Composers and Communities, a program sponsored by the Forum and the MLN, composers will join teams from visiting museums as part of travel grants, bringing new ideas to exhibits. Implementation grants will include composer residencies similar to those of Continental Harmony. The program currently has four pilot projects underway, including composer William C. Banfield's work with the Mobile (Ala.) Museum of Art. -- Ed.

(Sounding Board, Dec. 2001) I love art museums. In particular, I love connecting with the individual works -- each filled with its own artistic energy, each a work of craftsmanship, and each a recording of human history and experience. Entering museums, I'm excited and filled with awe. As a composer and artist, walking through a museum is like walking with hundreds of kindred souls.

So you can imagine my joy when I was asked to participate in Museums, Composers and Communities. The new program pairs composers and museum curators in an effort to expand museum exhibits and better engage audiences through multidisciplinary collaborations. Though there's a rich history of collaborations between musicians and visual artists, adding a composer to the curatorial process -- the actual selection of works for a museum exhibit -- is unprecedented.

I entered into collaboration with the Mobile Museum of Art. As part of a travel grant, I joined the museum's curatorial team this past summer on a whirlwind trip to select works for an exhibit celebrating "the American experience." The exhibit will inaugurate the museum's new building during the fall of 2002. The four-day trip included stops at The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Rose Arts Museum at Brandeis University, The New York Historical Society Museum, The Henry Luce III Center of American Culture in New York City, and The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. At each stop, we explored the museum's collection and began to select works for the exhibit.

In preparation for an implementation grant proposal, I visited Mobile in April to speak with museum staff, members of the Mobile Symphony and Mobile Opera, and the local public radio station to begin planning a community residency and commission that would culminate with the exhibit's opening. I was also invited to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in July, where I participated in an "interdisciplinary symposium" -- a think tank of scholars, curators, deans, grant administrators, artists, and museum directors convened by the MLN.

The discussions at MIT were a triumph in every way. For my part, they expanded the possibilities I saw in partnerships between museums and musicians. The level of professional sharing was very forward and extremely productive. It was a prime example of artists stepping up to the plate to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Collaboration was a major theme of the symposium. Interdisciplinary collaborations require special chemistry and balance between the participants -- a continual re-mixing and re-blending of ideas to create a process and, through that process, a product. Striking that balance is often difficult, but the payoff can be remarkable.

As symposium facilitator William Keens noted, "It takes many languages to describe reality." With each artistic discipline, each language used, we open our interpretations of the world we live in to new perspectives. Such an approach can refresh, open, and clarify our ways of knowing and being. Through interdisciplinary explorations, we realize that the common core joining the humanities, as the word's root implies, truly is the human experience.

Of course there are challenges in all this. In the discussions preceding the visits to other museums, Dr. Patricia Shifferd, the Forum's project director; the Mobile Museum staff; and I laid out the issues we wanted to keep in mind while putting this exhibit together. Among those issues, we identified the need to bridge gaps in the community -- gaps between generations, classes, and between "vernacular" and "high" art; the art world's reluctance to embrace popular culture; and society's need for new heroes. In all, we created quite a tall order for the exhibit.

This tall order raised an important question: Were we trying to make the institution do something it wasn't meant to do? I worried that we were strangling the throat of a big white goose in order squeeze out a golden egg. Fortunately, that proved not to be the case. Quite the contrary, our respective backgrounds in curating and composing allowed us to address issues such as space, color, and line from different perspectives. This brought about a synergy of ideas and a wealth of creative problem solving that allowed us to re-examine the scope and purpose of the exhibit.

To better facilitate our collaboration, Mobile Museum of Art Chief Curator Paul Richelson sent me a helpful list of what he called "equivalencies," guiding concepts that are shared by different artistic disciplines. They included evolution of theme, compositional structure, spiritual values and beauty, emotional power, memory, movement, myth, legend, and rhythmic disclosure. These ideas became our guide to finding the shared values between disciplines and provided us with a common language that transcended our individual artistic disciplines.

Planning the residency and commission brought about a set of equally challenging hurdles. Initial discussions included the museum staff, representatives from the Alabama Symphony and Mobile Opera, and me. How could we create a work that celebrates collaboration; serves the opening of the exhibit and building; meets the needs of the museum, the symphony, and the opera company; and has a life and relevance beyond its premiere?

We came up with two options, both written for orchestra and voices. The first would be based on written narratives of local poets. The other would reflect specific impressions of the new works obtained for the exhibit. We eventually settled on the latter.

To assure the work a life after its premiere, we decided that it must be possible for smaller ensembles -- say an orchestra without voices or an a cappella choir -- to be able to play excerpts of the work as part of concert programs. This would allow sections of the larger work to be performed in the same creative spirit but on multiple occasions. Its life would begin with the museum opening and spread out to community performances. Specifically, we talked about partnering with the symphony to present sections of the work in a series of residency-related school concerts.

The entire process is, of course, still in its infancy, and much work lies ahead. Even at this point, however, the process has been extraordinary. The ideas, or equivalencies, that are rising up as themes, have become my guide to finding "the right note within the frame" -- that is, to find appropriate ways of integrating music and visual art. For me, they've also become part of a personal journey. Those ideas have illuminated human experience through the objects selected for the exhibit and served as a map for this composer's journey through the collaborative process.

A composer and performer, William (Bill) C. Banfield holds the endowed chair in Humanities and Fine Arts and serves as associate professor of music and director of American Cultural Studies at the University of St. Thomas. He is the author of Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers (Scarecrow Press), and host of NPR's Landscapes in Color and WCAL's Essays of Note.