Since January 2012, I have created over two hundred (!) pieces of music for the Disquiet Junto. That represents thirteen hours of recordings, which is more music than I have produced for every other creative undertaking in my life combined. In honor of this milestone, I’ve compiled my best submissions on Bandcamp.
Junto founder Marc Weidenbaum has become a good friend, a core influence on my teaching practice, and the subject of a chapter I wrote for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning. The Junto is an emblematic example of what Thomas Turino calls a participatory music culture. In a participatory culture, the line between audience and performer is blurry or nonexistent, and getting everyone actively involved is more important than the “quality” of the resulting music. Junto members’ sensibilities are mostly experimental, and a lot of the music is too weird and abrasive for my tastes. But I value the community above any of its particular musical products. And the Junto has exposed me to some incredible artists who I otherwise would have never encountered: Daniel Diaz, Breanna Johnston, Banders Duckpow, sevenism, Ryan Scott Mattingly, Patricia Wolf, and others. See my SoundCloud likes for a complete list.
I have my own strict standards of musical quality, and by those standards, my Junto submissions have been a mixed bag. As I shuffle through my Junto playlist, I hear a lot of vague mixes, aimless structures, and muddy sound processing. But the Junto is about process rather than product, and I don’t regret any of the effort I’ve put in. I’m certainly proud of the tracks posted above, and they would not have been possible without all the not-so-successful experiments in between.
My favorite Junto projects involve remixing and being remixed. Hearing other people interpret my music through their own sensibilities was rare in music school, but it’s been a regular feature of my Junto life. And through the community, I’ve met several people who remix my tracks for the sake of doing it, not as part of a Junto prompt. More than one of these remixes was inspired by someone accidentally listening to my track while audio was playing in another browser tab, or by accidentally playing my track in more than one browser tab at once. These zen gifts are some of my most prized musical treasures.
A significant lesson of my Junto life is that there is no correlation between the amount of time I spend working on a track and how well it comes out. “First Chair at the Wavetable” took me less than ten minutes from loading a blank Ableton session to exporting the finished AIFF file. It got consistently great responses from people, some of whom aren’t generally interested in ambient or experimental music. Meanwhile, some of my soggiest messes were the ones I sunk the most hours into. Creative success is evidently a function of my depth of focus, not its breadth.
Anyway, thank you Marc for the hundreds of delightful compositional prompts, and to the community that has coalesced around them. Long live the Junto.