Working Artist's Statement: Draft 2

I slept on it, reread it the next day, and made some revisions. Here's the second draft:

I have been playing music for ten years. Beginning first with the clarinet, I now also sing, play saxophone, guitar, and piano. I compose and play many genres of music, but my focus is jazz; I play jazz because it is a style unlike any other that contains structure and rules, but allows freedom and creativity at the same time. Organization is one of my core values, but as an artist, I also desire freedom and room to explore; I see jazz as the only music that grants me that possibility and through that mindset, my passion for it has developed. In addition, I play jazz because of its versatility; jazz contains sub-genres within itself, so it is nearly impossible to become bored with it. I aspire to follow my bliss and make a living as a professional jazz musician, playing gigs and composing original music. I play because I am compelled to be a performer; I must perform. In my work, I make decisions based off of what I feel needs to be improved to perfect the piece. I know that if there are imperfections in the piece, I will not be satisfied with the end result, so I find the most efficient ways to eliminate them.

I am concerned with and interested in ethnicity and the intimacy that it results it. My studies of American jazz, gypsy music, and bossa nova reflect my desire to be part of a group whose members identify with each other through a common heritage. Although I am most often playing other people’s music and not my own, I seek to convey the relationships of melodies, instruments, and musicians with each other, and how these relationships make the song special. Since I am not only a musician, but an actress, a visual artist, and a writer, ethnicity is a recurring theme in all of my work, ranging from writing a musical revolving around the mafia to using foreign accents in theatre improvisation.

I usually work on several pieces concurrently. My current work has been preparing for college auditions by recording a demo in a studio and practicing jazz standards and transcriptions for live auditions. Currently, I have also been working on scoring my second children’s musical with the help of other musicians and writers. Rather than repeating something that everyone has already heard, I aim to make a bold statement with all of my work, giving me a sense of accomplishment and recognition.

WORKING Artist's Statement

Mind you...this is a work in progress. Anyone's feedback and constructive criticism would be very much appreciated, so please, I encourage you to comment! Here goes:

I have been playing music for ten years; most of my life. Beginning first with the clarinet, I now also sing, play saxophone, guitar, and piano. I compose and play many genres of music, but my focus is jazz; I play jazz because it is a style unlike any other that contains structure and rules, but allows freedom and creativity at the same time. Organization is one of my core values, but as an artist, I also desire freedom and room to explore; I see jazz as the only music that grants me that possibility and through that mindset, my passion for it has developed. In addition, I play jazz because of its versatility; jazz contains sub-genres within itself, so it is nearly impossible to become bored with it. I aspire to follow my bliss and make a living as a professional jazz musician, playing gigs, composing original music, and perhaps teaching at a university.

In my work, I make decisions based off of what I feel needs to be improved to perfect the piece. I know that if there are imperfections in the piece, I will not be satisfied with the end result, so I find the most efficient ways to eliminate them. For example, if there is a difficult phrase in a piece of music that I am having trouble playing, I take it note by note, piece by piece and play it over and over again, starting slowly and then increasing the speed until I can play it perfectly. I select techniques such as this based on efficiency and their success in the past. When selecting a song to learn or even writing an original piece, I simply choose sounds that appeal to me and mesh well together.

I usually work on several pieces concurrently. My current work has been preparing for college auditions. In a sense, every practice session, private lesson, concert, and competition I ever played was preparation for recording my demo and applying to college for jazz performance. My demo is complete, but I am now preparing for live auditions. This is a challenge because I am stepping out of my comfort zone; I am no longer just playing for an evaluation or an audience, but to gain entry to colleges that will foster my pursuit of jazz as a career. Currently, I have also been working on scoring a children’s musical with the help of other musicians and writers. Writing songs for a musical is a challenge in and of itself because so many things are required of the songs; they must further the plot in some way by developing characters or relationships, giving exposition, or introducing key points in the plot. In addition, they must make sense as individual songs as well as within the context of the show. With all of my work, I aim to make a bold statement that will interest people, rather than repeating something they have already heard before, giving me a sense of pride, accomplishment, and recognition.

The Enneagram Test...again!

This is the second time I've taken the Enneagram Test...the first was two year's ago in STAC. Two years ago, my result was a 7. This time, one test told me I was a 1 and the other told me I was a 7. I feel as if I have some 1 traits, but I'm truly a 7 at heart. In regards to the 1, I'm certainly a perfectionist, I can be controlling, I have good work ethic and I can find pleasure in working hard on something I love. However, the description of a 1 as a whole doesn't shout "LEAHHHHH!!!!" to me. The description of a 7, however, does just that. I'm an enthusiast...imaginative, I often get caught up in situations I imagine. I get bored very easily...so much that I'll start a million projects at once and I may or may not finish them. I love to do everything...I'm very interdisciplinary, I suppose you could say. That's why I'm almost hesitant about what career to choose because I love doing so many things! I have a busy schedule and I like it; I plan, plan, plan, even if I'm not done with something, I'll plan for the next thing. I could go on and on...the description of the 7 in the packet pretty much says it all. So I suppose I'm now a 7 with a hint of 1...if that makes sense.

Working Artist's Statement

Three Core Values:
1) Organization
2) Recognition-people liking my art/performance, telling me I'm good
3) Feeling of productivity-getting things done, sense of accomplishment

Issues:
Heritage/ethnicity-I've always wanted to belong to culture or ethnic group other than "American." I'm jealous of people who speak another language at home and eat ethnic food and visit family in their home countries. This pops up a lot in my work and in my life. It is probably why I study/speak French and Spanish and desire to learn other languages, like German, Portuguese, and Russian; it's also why I want to study abroad and eventually live in Europe, so I can feel like I'm a part of those groups. I always use accents in improv; they're a good way to find a character. I'm also drawn to ethnically based arts. For example, I just saw the musical 'Ragtime' which hit me really hard; it even made me cry...coincidentally, it is about the stories of different ethnic groups in the early 1900s, such as Latvian-Jewish immigrants, WASPs, and African-Americans. Fiddler on the Roof is another favorite musical of mine...it's about Russian Jews, and I happen to be half Russian/Jewish. I listen to ethnic music; one of my favorite bands is Gogol Bordello-a multi-ethnic gypsy punk band, composed of immigrants from Eastern Europe. Jazz, the thing I'm pursuing, is totally ethnic; it's the music that African-Americans made for themselves. I also have a fascination with organized crime and the mafia, another group based on ethnicity and tied together by it; two of the works I've helped write this year involve it...in the movie "I Know a Guy," a girl asks the don of the mafia for a favor. In the children's musical Cassie and I have been working on, Vivian, the pigeon-girl, gets involved with the mafia when she has no other choice. So what does this say about me? I suppose that I want those feelings of closeness, support, love, and acceptance associated with being "ethnic"...nobody likes Americans anyway.

STAC Live

My last STAC Live has me feeling a bit nostalgic. For the four years I've been in STAC, all four STAC Lives I've participated in have been completely different from each other...some more successful than others, some more fun, some more disastrous. This year's is giving me mixed feelings...in a sense, it was very successful. This group works so great together, so we got a lot done and had a lot to present. However, the only negativity I can think of is the audience; as Luke said to me, they were flat-out hostile; it was really a challenge to get them to laugh or even have any kind of response at all...I've been in front of audiences a countless amount of times, but this is the first time I've gotten such a negative energy from them. Luke made an observation that never occurred to me before: STAC Live is kind of like a dog-and-pony show...we're just there to prove to a bunch of people who don't care that we're not a waste of time and that we're actually very productive and intelligent, when in reality, we shouldn't have to prove anything to anyone. Regardless, STAC Live has always been fun to me, and I personally like the performance version of it better than the participatory version we did last year. In summation, this year's STAC Live: eye-opening, surprising, and a little harsh, but enjoyable nevertheless.

Steve's Workshop: Day 2

We went over a bunch more scripts. I guess it comes from experience and education, but it's amazing how Steve can take any script and say "fix this, this, and this" and it's automatically better. Even a few scripts where I thought to myself, "this is a little bit of a cliched student film," Steve was able to give the exact right advice to make it better. In Jack's script, he actually called for a bus blowing up, and obviously that's unfilmable, so Steve suggested that he illustrate the character's hostility in a different way, so he would be able to film it. And I suppose that's what a professional artist of any discipline should be able to do: point out what doesn't work and suggest ways to fix it in order to make the art better. I can't wait till I'm able to do that with songwriting, or improvising.

I only have one session left, since I won't be here on Tuesday, so hopefully we'll have time to go over the script for Children's Theatre. Then we can get a jump on it as soon as possible, since the play is over.

Steve's Workshop

Workshop day 2. We did cold reads of four people's scripts, which were, for the most part, successful. Steve wanted the scripts to have that sense of not directly saying or illustrating what you are trying to say...just letting the audience figure it out. Nearly all of the scripts we hashed through succeeded in this.

In my humble experience, it seems to be a recurrent theme of student films to try too hard to be overly clever or make a joke just for the sake of doing so. It was so refreshing to hear dialogue that was necessary and legitimately whimsical. Once again, to make a connection to other disciplines of art, I find this to be true in songwriting. I heard a song today called "Butterly" by Jason Mraz...ugh...that was just uninteresting and cliched because, rather than writing lyrics that were suggestive but still left room for the listener to figure things out, he wrote foolish, trying-too-hard-to-be-clever lines like "I'm taking a moment, just imagining that I'm dancing with you. You're the pole and all you're wearing is your shoes"...why don't you just sing, "I want to have sex with you. I really want to have sex with you"..it would fulfill the same level of interest. The same goes for a film; we never see much violence in Kontroll, but we know it has happened. We never see Laci slit a man's throat, but we know he did, and that's what's important. Even take Psycho-supposedly one of the scariest movie scenes in history, but we never even see the girl in the shower get stabbed. Brilliant.

I am fortunate to be in STAC, in a group of more advanced artists who won't make generic student films. I am also fortunate that we have the limitations of time, location, budget, cast, resources, etc. because limitations are what makes art good. If you can have everything you want, then you can make episodes 1, 2 and 3, of Star Wars instead of episodes 4, 5, and 6...which ones are better?

On a sidenote: I hoped to be working on the children's theatre script with Steve. Will that be possible at all in this workshop or should Cassie and I just talk to him outside of it?