These are dire times for the campus music lover. While tons of very good, formal, sit-down recitals and concerts abound, the frustrated concertgoer in search of musicians not wearing ties and black blouses is forced to forgo the college on a hill and make a hundred-mile round trip to attend even the most humble of open mic nights.
An evening blowing off some steam and getting down to the hipper genres of contemporary music requires a sacrifice of sleep and schoolwork, and finally a perilous journey home through darkness, drunk drivers, and inclement weather. Unfortunately, catching a concert when you live at Gustavus represents an almost prohibitive investment of time and money.
Why leave? The college campus has always functioned as a culture factory, the ideal environment for the incubation of artistic talent – The Strokes, The Doors, Vampire Weekend, Queen: all these bands met, practiced, and first performed at the universities they attended. More locally, MIAC schools like St. Olaf and Macalester boast burgeoning rosters of student bands and regular performances in dedicated spaces. Gustavus should be perfectly capable of doing the same, so why are we abandoning our campus to, often, watch students from the U of M and urban MIAC schools perform?
It’s certainly not for a lack of musical talent. Our decorated bevy of choirs, ensembles, and orchestras attract hundreds of capable musicians who practice and perform constantly. The issue, then, must be a lack of incentive– the missing venues, distributional infrastructure, and adoring audience that make producing original music worth the hours of labor it demands.
Formed for the sole purpose of correcting this deficiency is the Gustavus Music Collective, a loose consortium of college virtuosos, proficients, and barely-dilettantes (myself), united by a passion for music and devoted to the promulgation of homegrown, informal and non-academic music here at Gustavus.
“We’ve got three kinds of events in mind:open mic nights, guest performances, and video sessions.”
The Collective arose from the ashes of another campus org that you seniors might remember: Musical B.A.R., a lovely, if confusingly named, group that used to host the occasional open mic night down in the Dive. When that group lost most of its leadership to the graduation of the Class of ‘15, the decision was made to start anew with a broader, more inclusive moniker to fit a broader, more inclusive purpose.
We’ve got three kinds of events in mind: open mic nights, guest performances, and video sessions. A G.M.C. blog will be maintained to announce and report on these events while also promoting student’s submitted music and running periodic articles on guest and campus musicians.
The open mics will be open to all, with walk-ins welcome (though priority will be given to those who sign up beforehand). The guest performances will feature artists from off campus, typically artists from the Twin Cities area; think the kind of stuff you hear getting played on the Current. The idea is to open up some interface between GAC and the very vibrant Minneapolis music scene (envy of the Midwest) with accessible, at-home, all-ages shows that are absolutely free. Finally, the video sessions will try to provide campus and guest musicians with some fun, free audiovisual exposure in the style of NPR’s Tiny Desk or Live at KEXP series; artists will be filmed playing a short set, the video of which will be posted with high-quality audio to the G.M.C. website and social media.
The first open mic night will have taken place the night before this article is published. Dates and times for events to come will be published on the G.M.C. blog (still under wraps) and the official Gustavus Music Collective page on Facebook. Anyone looking to get involved, share their music, or get themselves up in front of an audience should send a message to the Facebook page.