Virtual Transitioning
What will curiosity, collaboration, and community look like in 2021?
In a time where many performing ensembles have taken a hiatus, Fifth House Ensemble has stayed creative, present, and continued to feed relationships with the schools and communities to which they belong. On top of expanding their university residencies and secondary education programs, Fifth House shares a daily Deep Listening practice on Facebook and has been engaging with gamers and music lovers on Twitch, where they’ve shared their performance of Undertale LIVE with interactive audience participation.
As an intern that started during the pandemic, I was anxious about how I would be implemented into the organization. My previous intern experiences in arts administration were largely based around event planning: I was used to running around concert venues, smiling for audiences, physically transporting artists, and serving as a human reminder of whatever was needed that day. Being virtually introduced (and useful) to an entirely new team was frightening to me.
It didn’t take more than ten minutes in a staff meeting for me to quench these fears. Every Zoom session tackled meeting agendas swiftly and efficiently, while also providing plenty of laughter, serving as an instant medicine to stress. There are frequent pet appearances, Zoom filters, and occasional fart jokes. Everyone is passionate about music making, truly friends with one another, and able to crank out incredible work in this WFH environment.
Our CEO, Melissa Ngan, hosted a session entitled Cultural Chameleon last week in partnership with James Madison University. The session focused on finding common ground with other people, whether or not they would be potential collaborators. I was in awe of how seamlessly she integrated her family history, personal victories, obstacles, and experiences of using music as a civic practice. The personal storytelling connected points that were meant to inspire others to engage with their communities, and was presented in a way that kept me thinking, “Why not move forward like this? Why not use all parts of myself to connect with all parts of the world around me?”
Working with Fifth House has taught me that the musical landscape functions like a constantly burning stove filled with different pots and pans of perspective. As a recent music graduate, I am so used to providing insight on student experiences. With the freelance economy and orchestral auditions on pause, I found myself unsure of where to put all of the musical skills I had just spent two degrees honing. I felt this big abyss in transitioning my pan of experiences from the “student” to “professional” burner. Am I still the same person if I’m not learning and performing music every week? What does the future hold for a performer who has had a year-long hiatus of regular, in-person performing?
After attending Melissa’s Cultural Chameleon session, I realized that this period of my life is meant to feel quite transitional, unsure, and completely up to me -- especially during the pandemic. In fact, being able to stretch my organizational, administrative, and operative skills has been an anchor for my brain during the pause on live music. The small successes that come with completing a task, making a connection, and talking about how to effectively gather experiences and love for music into a tangible effort has inspired me to push my own boundaries of what I may be capable of.
The incredulous amounts of logistics, organizing, and creative brainstorming required for an artistic organization like Fifth House could not be possible without the musicians behind the scenes. Every single member of the staff is a musician who has faced this post graduation journey of shifting skills themselves; I am lucky enough to be met with empathy and guidance as I start sharpening parts of my brain that were not firing at full force during my performance degrees. Development, marketing, finance, and operations were all facets of organizing that I dabbled in university settings, but have proved to look quite different in terms of a small, nonprofit chamber ensemble. If school served as a safe vacuum for learning and growing on the instrument, this pandemic has been my opportunity to grow administratively in ways that successful, entrepreneurial musicians must embody in order to continually share our art.
Fifth House residencies, meetings, and projects have given me the opportunity to expand on what being fulfilled and successful could look like for those with a love for music and collaboration during and post Corona times. I am incredibly grateful to the entire Fifth House staff for letting me sit in on their meetings, letting me poke them and ask for tasks, and most of all, for understanding the transitional moments we are all in, and knowing that there is always common ground.