The Daily Gamecock

Stuart experiments with sound and song

Greg Stuart, who teaches graduate courses in USC’s School of Music and undergraduate courses at South Carolina Honors College, performed a one-song, 30 minute set at Conundrum Music Hall on Sunday night. His instruments: a bow, a bell and a tiny speaker with recordings on it.

Stuart’s MacGyver-like employment of these materials demonstrates the patient curiosity of his work. He is an experimental musician, part performer, part inquisitive scientist. His performance on Sunday explored a sound he had been working on, but this time in front of a live audience.

“My performance tonight was a composition,” Stuart said. “I had everything worked out prior to the performance. The acoustics play a big role.”

Experimental musicians usually perform either by improvising or, in Stuart’s case, by performing a composition. That said, a key tenet to experimental music is that performances of all kinds are not just repeated renditions but singular, exclusive experiences, influenced by a range of sonic factors. So, it is unsurprising that Sunday night’s bout of severe thunderstorms played a role.

“There was some nice thunder during the performance,” he said. “It’s not something that I’m hoping will happen, but the space you play anything in is going to shape what one hears.”

Stuart started working with experimental music when he was 18 and kept with it through college and grad school before making it his focus in 2005. Fortunately, Columbia does have two venues that are excited to display experimental artists.

“[Conundrum] and at the art museum, these are definitely the two main places I’ve found for my work,” Stuart said. “Conundrum is such a great place to have in town because it supports experimental music improvisation, things that don’t neatly fit into a category.”

Helping expand such support, Stuart’s course at the South Carolina Honors College pushes students, many of whom have no musical background whatsoever, into the threshold of creating and exploring the possibilities of sound.

“The students are open to trying new things,” Stuart said. “I really hope that I can offer that class every semester. It seems like there is always a crop of students ready to try to make experimental music.”

Stuart claims he is often teaching the same material to his graduate students at the School of Music and his non-music major undergraduates, but the approach, of course, is different. He makes things especially engaging by occasionally having those students perform together.

“The nice thing about it is that you can bring the two groups together and all of it can seem to fit,” he said. “Folks who have been studying an instrument since they were three years old and somebody who is perhaps playing a concert for the first time in their life, you can figure out a way for those people to come together and make something. I find that really interesting.”

What is clear when talking with Stuart is that his passion for music and sound are only surpassed by his zeal for discovery. He sounds like an insatiable scientist when talking about his work.

“The sounds interact with the room; certain frequencies will be more or less stable depending on the room itself,” he said. “I know what the sounds on the electronic part are but interaction of all those things in this space is going to be different.”

Someone who has worked with sound his whole life, Stuart does not have it all figured out, he excitedly admits. His perception of music is still changing all the time, and he hopes it continues to do so.

“You want to get the sense that you’re not stuck in a rut, that you’re pushing yourself with your music,” he said. “Just to see, can this function? Does this work? The arranging of this bell and that speaker, does that do something? Yeah it changes all the time. I don’t want it to stop changing.”


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