Plugging Into a Community

New York City provided inspiration to some of the great composers of the last century. John Cage marveled at the sounds of Sixth Avenue, and the publication of Ned Rorem’s New York Diary may have brought him as much notoriety as any of his musical works. But surviving in the city isn’t the same game it used to be, and new music composers from different generations have recently begun looking for ways to carve workspaces and communities into the streetscape.

The Electronic Music Foundation—founded in 1994 and responsible for producing and promoting some of the best concerts and recordings of “classical” electronic music in the city—is in the process of renovating a new Chelsea office space to offer classes and recording facilities for composers. And across the river, composer and Princeton doctoral candidate Lainie Fefferman is the driving force behind Exapno, a funky space aimed at giving composers not just a place to work but a community. Both spaces work on a membership model. EMF, which has a strong base of “subscribers” who take advantage of the organization’s promotional capacities, will give discounts to members as well as offer classes and lectures to the public. Exapno is, at the moment, looking to fill about a half-dozen slots in its small collective model, which buys members the use of a desk in a downtown Brooklyn building that is also home to an architecture firm and a television production company—not to mention a scattered collection of carousel horses and restaurant supplies—and plans for a rooftop chicken coop. In a sense, they represent two generations of New York composers: EMF, based in Chelsea, is, if not more formal, at least more established; and Exapno, a hand-to-mouth endeavor, is based, like its target constituency, in Brooklyn.

“I work best in a community environment,” Fefferman says. “I want this to be ideal for someone who’s just coming out of school, doesn’t have a lot of money but still wants to be in a community. Everybody talks about composition being such a lonely thing, but it doesn’t have to be.”

When Fefferman moved from Princeton to New York City, she found herself sharing a small studio with composer Jascha Narveson (ironically just blocks from EMF’s offices) and trying to work in their cramped apartment or in diners in the neighborhood. She also noticed that many of her friends were in the same situation. Taking a cue from such collectives as the Brooklyn Artists Gym and the dancers’ space Chez Bushwick, she used Facebook as an organizing tool in the never-ending quest for space in New York. After she found an agreeable landlord at 33 Flatbush who was willing to take whatever membership dues she could generate while getting set up, she borrowed a name from Harpo Marx’s autobiography (Marx writes that he’d seen his name transliterated into Russian as “Exapno”) and created a sort of college dorm lounge in the midst of the building’s sculptors and stacks of chairs.

“The idea is taking the hard, weird mystery out of plugging into new music,” she says. “For the price of a gym membership, you can have a community. I’ve already written one piece here. I’m very excited.”

Eventually, she hopes to have room for recording and performances, as well as more members.

“In an ideal world, there’d be enough energy behind this that he’d give us a big chunk of the building,” she says.

The EMF was already subletting space in an audio production firm’s Seventh Avenue office when the company moved its base to Vermont earlier this year. EMF took over the lease and started expanding, putting in soundproofing and computers and preparing to expand its prior business of online CD and music software sales and concert production and promotion to include a service end.

“We’re not in the compact disc business, we’re in the new music business,” says founder and president Joel Chadabe. “One of the things we’re planning to do now is to create communities based on specific kinds of interests: recording, microphone choice, field recording and postproduction and also emerging composers. We’ll have ongoing creative groups. People who come to do the workshop will feel connected by being part of the creative group. They’re in a community. They can continue to be in contact and get support.”

It’s an ambitious effort at a time when mainstream arts organizations are feeling the recessionary pinch. EMF eliminated two of its paid positions last year and is working with a skeleton staff of three, plus contracted help. But the organization is retooling, hoping to grow its staff again, and to become a center for artists who no longer have university resources at their disposal and have outgrown the initial support of being an “emerging composer.”

Chadabe’s ambitions reach beyond the Seventh Avenue office, however, and he hopes to see the creation of a concert hall dedicated to electronic music. “We want to establish a center for creativity in New York that links the expressive arts with science and technology,” he says. “It’s probably unattainable; it’ll probably cost $30 to $40 million. But there are plenty of cities in the world that have places for multimedia presentation in electronic arts. We need research into how to define the nature of art in an increasingly electronic society. I think that’s the most interesting question right now. This space is a launching pad.”