The Music of The Working Centre: Fresh Ground
Hyperlink
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU-BzQBCybc
Artist’s Statement
My name is Nathan Stretch and I am a recent graduate of the Master of Arts in Community Music program at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Fresh Ground is a building that houses a number of interrelated projects at 256 King Street East, in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. It is part of a community building-organization called The Working Centre (TWC). I work out of the Fresh Ground building for The Working Centre, coordinating housing, and access to technology projects.
Much of Fresh Ground is open to the public; its street-level entrances provide access to a community film-making project, a plant-based cafe and commercial kitchen, and — in the centre of the building — a versatile events space that often acts as an extension of the cafe. The building also hosts eight units of supportive housing on the second floor, plus — in the basement— a coved film-making studio (or “infinity room”), and an extension of The Working Centre’s community bike shop.
The Music of The Working Centre: Fresh Ground (… Fresh Ground) is an entwined soundscape and soundtrack created in an effort to transmit the feel and spirit of a specific place (Fresh Ground) while also espousing the core principles of the wider organization (The Working Centre). For the purposes of this sounded installation, Fresh Ground acts as a microcosm of The Working Centre. The Working Centre is a philosophically motivated organization that seeks to limit internal bureaucracy while maintaining a responsive and practical, grass-roots approach to community building. TWC’s principles include: rejecting status, creating community tools, building community, work as gift, producerism, and serving others, (Mancini, 2015).
… Fresh Ground is but one of a suite of tools that include Working Centre publications, videos, presentations, websites, virtual and physical tours, classes and symposiums that stack and seek to expand on an individual or groups’ own experience in TWC’s public, hosted spaces. These tools and experiences combine in service of relational, authentic understanding (Taylor, 1991). … Fresh Ground was inspired by the work of Barton and Windeyer (2012) and their understanding of the intertwining nature of soundtrack and soundscape in site-specific theatrical installation, that is to say: an audience may have an extra-immersive experience if a place-based installation/performance includes audio components collected and replayed binaurally on-site.
… Fresh Ground is an arts-based research project that started out as an autoethnographic research project. Ellis, Adams and Bochner (2011) contribute a useful explanation of autoethnography wherein the methodology considers the positioning of the researcher: the researcher is embedded in complex relationship with self, subject and fluid reality. By framing ...Fresh Ground as arts-based research I was able to commit to an “enacted, living inquiry” (Springgay, Irwin, and Kind, 2005, p. 3) in disrupted space. Arts-based researchers are open to new courses of action in the in-between — space created or even ruptured by interdisciplinary activity — allowing for potentially meaningful intervention in liminal place via soundtrack, soundscape, and composition (Springgay, Irwin, and Kind, 2005). Not unlike autoethnography, both process and product are valued as vehicles for knowing in arts-based research.
I used an emergent symbology to guide the project to its satisfying completion without exerting undue control over the process and the people who joined with me to create … Fresh Ground. Concepts and philosophy were collapsed into palatable symbols that musicians referenced in their music making and shaping. Symbols included (but were not limited to) chiastic patterns (figures 1) and their alphanumeric renderings (figures 2 and 2.1). An understanding of the chiastic relationship/structure, the idea of holding symmetrical and asymmetrical simultaneously — balanced but not the same — was a helpful conceit for the kind of esoteric and complex music making we were attempting together.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 2.1
Another useful symbol I employed was a map of the Kitchener, Ontario roadways King and Weber (figure 3) that run ostensibly parallel (North/South) yet intersect regularly: a disruptive, tangible, and hyper-local metaphor used to encourage musicians to move beyond “parallel symmetries” (Pelkey, 2013) towards the kind of reciprocity (the abandoning of preconceived notions, the curation of surprise, an emphasis on relationship, and practical action predicated on the former) espoused by The Working Centre (Mancini, 2015; Westhues, 1995).
Figure 3
Soundscape and soundtrack elements were created and recorded by myself and musicians with an immersive understanding of The Working Centre (including employees, volunteers, and participants). The soundtrack was created over a series of sessions, recorded digitally, built and expanded upon by multiple musicians, mixed and manipulated digitally using Logic Pro. Musicians were asked to engage with each other and the project in a spirit of reciprocity — a pervasive concept of The Working Centre where people actively discard preconceived notions and open up to the “surprise” of working together in an emergent, shared reality.
… Fresh Ground was made to be listened to in headphones, and was prepared as a site-specific project that impacts the listener most effectively if they engage with it while in the events space at Fresh Ground. Sounded elements of the installation were recorded on-site with the intention of playing them back on the same site: a technique that can be used to create an extra-immersive experience for listeners in headphones. Fresh Ground’s event space is open to the public, and can reasonably be occupied by an individual or small group for the duration needed to listen to the entirety of … Fresh Ground without disrupting the normative understanding of the environment.
Since debuting The Music of The Working Centre: Fresh Ground in the fall of 2019, much has changed:
● Some key employees have come and gone from The Working Centre and Fresh Ground.
● On February 20, 2020 Joe and Stephanie Mancini (who founded The Working Centre) delivered a seminal talk at Fresh Ground entitled “Emergence and the Emergency: Deep Trust & the Climate Crisis”, effectively explaining and updating The Working Centre’s active philosophy.
● The cafe, bike repair, and film-making projects at Fresh Ground closed to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
● Supportive housing projects at The Working Centre and Fresh Ground intensified and changed dramatically as we implemented new strategies to help some of the most acutely ill members of our community to shelter-in-place.
● The Fresh Ground cafe, kitchen, and events space have been seconded as an emergency daycare facility for essential workers at TWC. Up to seven children aged 3-11 and two staff people regularly occupy the space and act as a cooperative “pod” school in order to provide a consistent care and learning option for TWC families during the COVID-19 pandemic.
During this extra-reflective period brought on by COVID-19, Fresh Ground’s identity has emerged further, casting itself as more than a building that houses innovative projects of The Working Centre. Fresh Ground is emerging as a forum for growing-edge thinking and reflection around three concepts:
● Climate Change and Resilience
● Ecological Economics
● Local Democracy
The Music of The Working Centre: Fresh Ground has been updated to include a “pandemic soundscape”: an audio snapshot of Fresh Ground during the COVID-19 shutdown, as well as recorded audio from events and presentations that have taken place at Fresh Ground since the installation’s debut. It will continue to be updated to reflect fluid reality, and exists as a living inquiry.
Provocations
What do you know about Fresh Ground and The Working Centre now that you have listened to The Music of The Working Centre: Fresh Ground? What, if anything, do you think the listener is missing from the experience, by not listening to … Fresh Ground from within Fresh Ground?
Is place-based music inherently transportable? Is all music place-based to some extent? What, if anything, might be gained by listening to your favorite piece of recorded music within the architecture it was originally recorded? What are the cultural and musical consequences of extracting art and music from the places and spaces they were made and/or recorded?
Describe the relationship of the soundtrack and soundscape in the piece. Did the musicians, producers, and mixers make meaningful contributions to the soundscape in a way that guides the listener towards extra meaning or deeper understanding? Can you “hear” the effect of the guiding principles and symbology in the decisions made by people contributing to the soundtrack? Can the track be described as chiastic? Symbolic? And if so, why is this significant?
References
Barton B., Windeyer R. (2012). Immersive negotiations: Binaural perspectives on site-specific sound. In A. Birch & J. Tompkins (Eds.), Performing site-specific theatre. (pp. 182-200). doi: 10.1057/9781137283498_12
Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A. (2011). Autoethnography: An Overview. Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 36(4 (138)), 273-290. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23032294
Mancini, J. & S. (2015). Transition to Common Work. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Pelkey, J. (2013). Chiastic Antisymmetry in Language Evolution. The American Journal of Semiotics, 29(1), 39–68. https://doi.org/10.5840/ajs2013291-43
Springgay, S., Irwin, R. L., & Kind, S. W. (2005). A/r/tography as Living Inquiry Through Art and Text. Qualitative Inquiry,11(6), 897-912. doi:10.1177/1077800405280696
Taylor, C. (1991). The Ethics of Authenticity. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
Westhues, K. (1995). The Working Centre: Experiment in Social Change. Kitchener: Working Centre Publications
