Hear “Dusk, etherial,” from “Stick Season”
I’m Clay Gonzalez, a sound artist, composer, and orchestra director based in Southeast Michigan.
At times I’ve been a classical musician, a folk musician, a performance artist, an improviser, and an experimentalist. My work today finds a space between all these traditions, and tries to create something new and inclusive there.
For me, the most meaningful part of making music is using art to build and support community. That’s why I see the interpersonal side of music-making as the beating heart of my practice.
The medium I work with is the concert itself.
I often serve as composer, producer, and presenter for the same project, and I don’t cleanly delineate these roles within my practice.
Many projects take the form of large-scale “regenerative immersions,” where musicians come together to make site-specific soundscapes, inspired by participatory folk traditions and sounds of the natural world.
I also lead social singing events that get everyone in a community resonating together, without the barriers imposed by an audience-performer divide.
My favorite projects have included laypeople, hobbyists, and complete beginners alongside experts in the performing ensemble. Similarly, I try to craft performances that both laylisteners and experienced ears can enjoy, music that resonates with people from a broad range of backgrounds. I try to make shows that bring different kinds of people together around a shared, beautiful experience.
A number of elements are present in nearly all my work.
As composer and concert-maker, I try to activate physical space in creative and unconventional ways. Many of my compositions are site-specific and spatialized (with the ensemble thoughtfully spread out over a performance space).
Much of my work features intermedia elements, drawn from my background in performance art and my love of Fluxus.
At one of my shows, you might see people bang rocks together, pour water, sing, read aloud, draw, process in a line, jump, flail, tear paper, break sticks.
I use these elements to explore themes of nature, death, listening, healing, history, and finding meaning in a finite life.
I strive to use my work to meaningfully connect with and build place.
I take a hyper-local approach to composition, writing and producing music in a way that supports specific communities, and enlivens my specific home place of Southeast Michigan.
My main project, Regenerate!, radically re-envisions the orchestra as a place for social healing.
The project draws on the rich inheritance of orchestral music and rebuilds the practice on a foundation of play, shared joy, and connection. Regenerate! seeks, through the production of workshops and concerts, to establish a new paradigm for how music can interface with the world around it. It’s a call for joyful revolution in classical music; a call to make the tradition I love more thrilling, inclusive, and sustainable.
