Charlie

Silent Music Sounds Off

There is a common misconception that you must have instruments to make music when really, in the freest sense, anything can be an instrument and anything can be music.

As an increasingly familiar name in Charleston, the New Music Collective exists to bring this idea to light. By writing grants and raising money, the five-year old brainchild of multi-instrumentalists Nathan Koci, Philip White and Ron Wiltrout seeks to make our city a destination for composers and other acts who would not fit at the Music Farm or other venues.

The Collective and its members compose and play their own material as well. Ranging from original chamber music and banshee-moaning circuits looped through effects pedals, to music that explores silence, there is no limit to the creative ingenuity of this bunch.

“New music” is a term that, according to advisor and performer, Sam Sfirri, “constantly updates itself.”

Think of it as contemporary art…a continual change in perspective, rebuilding on all the elements involved. Co-founder and local percussion pundit, Ron Wiltrout, says that it “picks at the fringes of genres and cultures.”

Get this: they acknowledge that both sound and silence are music. Next time you are sitting in a venue, close your eyes and listen. There is melody and rhythm all around – coughing, shuffling of paper, whispers, sniffling, and the gentle hum of a hundred alternate breaths. That’s music.

Everyone in the Collective comes from different schools of thought, but welcome their differences to achieve a common goal.

Nathan comes from the “bang on the cans” post-minimalist tradition of composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

Philip holds to the American experimentalist tradition, conjuring sounds from homemade non-linear feedback systems, sounds he says he cannot always control.

Ron emerged from the modern jazz experimentalist tradition with heavy influence on improvisation.

The other members all hold to the perpetual nature of sound and the textures within it.

The texture is the ability to induce a sense of color or to feel an ocean breeze. Some pieces performed and/or written by the New Music Collective have been created with similar themes in mind. Demonstrating that the world and everything in it can capture your ear if you let it.

So, let it.

For more information on the New Music Collective, its members, and upcoming events, check out NewMusicCollective.org. Our pick? The May 29th concert at Redux.

Story by: Seth Amos