2. Generating historically contextualized musical ideas with local residents: Participatory music workshops
3. Instrumentalizing ambient music for the purposes of collective imagination: Guided walking meditation
References
[1] Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Oakland: University of California Press, 2013).
[2] Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York City: Verso Books, 2012).
[3] David Toop, "How Much World Do You Want: Ambient Music and Its Questions," in Music Beyond Airports: Appraising Ambient Music, ed. Monty Adkins and Simon Cummings (Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press, 2019), pg. 18.
1. "Remember, these are dances in a hospital." –hospital administrator (1933), referring to dances that hospital staff hosted for patients during the inpatient care era
2. "I don't define mental illness, I don't know what it is" –director of the Kirkbride's mental illness program (1974), showcasing the unknowns of mental health care during the outpatient care era
3. "These are our castles" –relative of Thomas Kirkbride (2015), the architect of the "Kirkbride model" of mental health care, during a visit to Fergus Falls during the surplus property era
4. "I really hope it's still there" –resident of Fergus Falls (2019), speaking of the Kirkbride's potential demolition during the debated futures era
During my fellowship, I lived on the Kirkbride grounds in an apartment building that was once a nurses dormitory. In addition to repurposing some of the campus into apartments and government offices, the green space surrounding the Kirkbride is now a public park. I often walked the grounds, gathering audio with my field recorder. After a few weeks of living at the Kirkbride, I noticed that Fergus Falls residents frequently walked the grounds as well.
To build on this community practice of strolling the Kirkbride grounds, I decided to create a guided walking meditation as the primary way to experience the quiet citadel project. This inclination resulted in a 5-panel zine that accompanies the album. The zine includes a walking route with four stops (corresponding to the four songs on the album), images of the buildings at which listeners should stop, and historical anecdotes and reflective prompts for listeners to consider while listening to the album.
Together, the album and the zine comprise the guided walking meditation. They are intended to generate knowledge and idea-sharing among Fergus Falls residents about what to do with the Kirkbride moving forward. As listeners traverse the grounds, the zine prompts them to reflect on the different ways that the Kirkbride has served the Fergus Falls community over time. Then, the guided walking meditation culminates with imagining possibilities for how the Kirkbride might serve Fergus Falls in the future. The songs on the album, inspired by the Kirkbride's history and ideas from the music workshops, provide a sonic backdrop for this personal reflection and idea generation.
I hosted two participatory music workshops during my fellowship at the Kirkbride, one with adults (which had three participants) and one with high school students (which had five participants). In these workshops, I used the four eras listed above as jumping-off points for musical exploration. The adult workshop focused on the Kirkbride's earlier eras (inpatient care and outpatient care) and the student workshop focused on the latter eras (surplus property and debated futures).
I'll use the inpatient care era (1890s-1950s) as an example. First, I prompted participants to create graphic scores by asking them to draw something that, to them, represents Fergus Falls in the 1930s (for each era, I instructed participants to focus on one decade during the era in question; for this era, the 1930s). Participants then shared their scores, describing why they chose their image. The scores included a bottle of alcohol (referring to prohibition in the U.S. from 1920-1933), the door of a Fergus Falls speakeasy during prohibition, and the financial crash at the beginning of the Great Depression.
Using hand instruments (tongue drums, glockenspiels, seed rattles, and so on), participants then created sonic expressions for each of these graphic scores. I then instructed one participant to put the drawings in an order of their choosing. Lastly, all participants played their sonic expressions together in the chosen order—resulting in a three-movement musical passage inspired by perceptions of Fergus Falls in the 1930s.
Below, you can see the graphic scores that participants created as well as listen to the musical passages that they inspired.
The exercise of creating historically contextualized graphic scores served to nuance and humanize the Kirkbride's history. For instance, the graphic scores inspired by Fergus Falls in the 1930s catalyzed me and the workshop participants to consider the Kirkbride in relation to societal realities of the inpatient era, such as far-reaching financial hardship and prohibitive stances in regards to alcohol consumption. By doing exercises like this, we can begin to find connections between the prevailing mode of mental health care (inpatient care) and the societal realities of the time. For example, during this time the U.S. took a hardline stance on alcohol consumption, essentially willing it to disappear; perhaps this can explain why mental illness was addressed in a similar way—by removing individuals from their families and communities. As another example, the U.S. and other countries experienced a severe economic downturn during this time; perhaps this can explain why families agreed to institutionalized care for their loved ones—it was one less person for them to support.
Socially engaged art, with recent roots in relational aesthetics and deeper roots in the historical avant-garde, serves as a catch-all label for relationship-based and community-driven artistic disciplines, such as participatory art, creative placemaking, art for social change, and others (see: Grant Kester's Communication Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art and Claire Bishop's Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship). [1][2]
Ambient musicians, perhaps due to how technical and conceptual the genre often is, have been relatively quiet regarding how their art can contribute to social change efforts. In Monty Adkins and Simon Cummings' edited volume Music Beyond Airports: Appraising Ambient Music, David Toop's contribution "How Much World Do You Want? Ambient Listening and Its Questions" offers a vital prompt to ambient musicians about how, if at all, their art can help bring about positive social change:
"What is my music and what is the world’s music?" [3]
This question shepherded all aspects of how I created quiet citadel during my three-week fellowship with Springboard for the Arts. Divided into four sections, this exposition offers a case study of how I used music-making and music-sharing as a research method to assist the residents of Fergus Falls, a small town in rural Minnesota, determine what to do with the disused Fergus Falls State Hospital, or "the Kirkbride."
I started my fellowship by learning about the history of the Fergus Falls State Hospital at the Otter Tail County Historical Society. The Kirkbride opened in 1890 and provided mental health services to thousands of patients until it closed in 2005. My archival research identifed four major eras in the Kirkbride's history:
1890s-1950s – Inpatient care (from the Kirkbride's opening until widespread critiques of institutional mental health care)
1960s-1990s – Outpatient care (the gradual process of deinstitutionalizing mental health care)
2000s-2010s – Surplus property (when the Kirkbride sat empty and parts of it were demolished)
2020 and onward – Debated futures (debates about what should be done with the Kirkbride moving forward)
These eras in the Kirkbride's history became guideposts for the quiet citadel project. They offered structure to the participatory music workshops, suggested that the quiet citadel album should have four songs, and prompted the guided walking meditation to include four stops. In short, this historical context provided a framework for how I applied my music-making and music-sharing for the purposes of assisting Fergus Falls residents imagine the future of the Kirkbride.
I chose to end the walking meditation at the Kirkbride's most iconic structure—its tower, or the "quiet citadel" as I refer to it. The question of what to do with the Kirkbride is still under debate in Fergus Falls. My hope is that the guided walking meditation—walking the grounds, reflecting on and discussing the questions and prompts—can help Fergus Falls residents come to a collective decision that feels right.
For this last song, I primarily pulled from the thrifted cassette tape of piano songs as well as from the "remaining trees" graphic score because of its pensive, reflective quality.
As my fellowship ended, the City of Fergus Falls was in the midst of engaging residents about what to do with the Kirkbride. I collaborated with city staff to design an event in which Fergus Falls residents could do the guided walking meditation and then provide ideas about what they want for the Kirkbride's future. Unfortunately, this event was indefinitely postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic; I still hope to host it in the future.
In response to David Toop's question with which I began this exposition—"What is your music and what is the world’s music?"—quiet citadel feels jointly owned by me and by the people of Fergus Falls who helped create it. This includes the music workshop participants, the staff at Springboard for the Arts, the staff at the Otter Tail County Historical Society, and of course the patients and medical professionals who lived at, were employed by, and sought care from the Fergus Falls State Hospital from 1890-2005.
Ultimately, quiet citadel is a participatory, music-based approach for Fergus Falls residents to generate knowledge and ideas about the next era for the Kirkbride. In this way, as much as quiet citadel is my creation, it belongs to Fergus Falls and the people who make their home there.
As the Kirkbride deinstutionalized its mental health services, part of the campus became the Otter Tail County Government Services Center. I chose this as the second stop on the walking meditation because it represents the major changes in mental health care during this time. Rather than serving as a home for its patients and staff, the Kirkbride became a centralized coordinating hub for people seeking mental health services.
This song prominently features field recordings of vehicles leaving the parking lot at the end of a work day, a sonic metaphor for the shift to outpatient care. I also took inspiration from the "groovy wallpaper" and "flowing hair" graphic scores because of their incorporeal quality.
a site-specific, participatory music project that examines music-making and the purposes that music can serve
I opted to start the guided walking meditation at what used to be the receiving building. This is where incoming patients began their journey with the Fergus Falls State Hospital during the inpatient era. Immediately below, you can see the photo reference I took of the receiving building during my fellowship.
While in Fergus Falls, I visited a thrift store and bought a cassette tape of piano songs. I sampled this tape for the first and last songs on the quiet citadel album. For the first song, I used the melody from a rendition of "Tennessee Waltz" because of its lilting 3/4 melody, which to me captured the feeling of the 1933 quote from one of the Kirkbride's administrators: "Remember, these are dances in a hospital."
During my fellowship, a crew actively demolished part of the Kirkbride. I captured audio of the demolition via my field recorder; these sounds start the song. From there, the song becomes a requiem for the Kirkbride's demolished structures.
Prior to and during my fellowship in 2019, a heated debate took place in Fergus Falls. Some residents wanted the Kirkbride torn down, saying that it holds negative memories for many people. Other residents wanted to save it, noting that it is one of the only remaining Kirkbride-style structures in the country. As I write this in early 2022, the most historic parts of the Kirkbride—the tower and the sprawling wings—still stand, along with some other structures. The latest plan is for some these remaining structures to be renovated into apartments.
I made quiet citadel as part of the Hinge Arts Residency with Springboard for the Arts. They describe this fellowship as a community development program that activates arts programming related to the historic Fergus Falls State Hospital, or "the Kirkbride."
