sprout and the stories of our investigations

pictures and videos from The Science of Accordion Reeds

The night opened with delicious, pumpkin-sauce spaghetti cooked by Beth O’Sullivan, a math teacher from Cambridgeport involved in sprout and The Science Club for Girls.

After socializing for a while, we heard a world premiere of the piece You Are written by local musician and composer Mike Romanyshyn for clarinet choir. The ensemble includes Mike Romanyshyn, Dana Colley, Steve Rauch, Maury Martin, Ben Pasamanick, Grant Smith, Trudi Cohen, and Shaunalynn Duffy.

Next, we heard a little bit about the science of reeds.

But not clarinet reeds!

Peter Buchak gave a lecture about the fluid dynamics explaining how accordion reeds work. We talked about the difference between the reeds in accordions, called free reeds, and the “fixed” reeds on a clarinet or saxophone. We also heard a little bit about how different accordion designs have led to very different types of accordion playing because of limitations in how many reeds an instrument includes.

Ben Pasamanick shared a collection of reeded instruments he has collected from around the world. We all tried to guess which instruments had free reeds and which had fixed reeds and Ben gave us a hint at what each instrument sounds like.

Finally, Skorosmrtnica (meaning, literally, “cheap wine” but also “fast death”) performed a set of Balkan tunes sporting a 4 person accordion section and teaching the audience to do traditional Balkan dances during some of the tunes.

The Science of Accordion Reeds on November 19!

This month’s dinner is being held on November 19 at 7:30pm at 339R Summer St. Somerville MA, just outside of Davis Square. The theme is Reeds! How they work and how they sound.

The spaghetti will have a special seasonal pumpkin sauce this time, thanks to local cook Beth O’Sullivan, and there will be a $10 donation to cover the cost of food, drink, and performers. Metered parking spots are available a couple blocks from us towards Davis Square, and if you have any trouble finding us please give a call at 617.575.9219.

The month’s performers will be ::

- Peter Buchak has been playing accordions for over 15 years. Now, he is also studying the fluid dynamics that make accordion reeds work and has an interesting story to tell as a Ph.D. student in MIT’s applied math department. He will be giving two short lectures on the history and science of accordion reeds. In the first, he will talk about how the movement of air around the reed allows the accordion to make its signature sound. In the second, he will be talking about the evolution of the instruments themselves and what this means about the type of music each is used to play.

- Skorosmrtnica is a local Balkan band that will providing music throughout the evening. There might even be room for dancing!

- Mike Romanyshyn is a local composer and performer. He plays clarinet in the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, composes and plays with The Allstar Refjudzi Band in the Czech Republic, and will be performing a new piece for clarinet choir with the help of some other local clarinetists.

- Ben Pasamanick is a local musician and a member of Skorosmrtnica. His personal collection of reeded instruments from around the world will be on display during the performances.

the little red school house–on its head!

October 15 was the second in our series of dinner theater events. The theme for the evening was education, and we had a range of performers and perspectives. People began arriving around 7:00. We ate and talked until around 8:15 when we started the first of the performances.

(Please excuse the photo quality for this dinner’s blog post. We had some documentation failures, so these are just frame shots from a flip video camera. I will come back and post links to the video once we have it online and cleaned up a bit.)

Taylor Stoehr helped found the Changing Lives through Literature program in Dorchester District Court. This program provides ex-offenders the opportunity to take a specially designed literature course to receive time off probation. Taylor shared reflections and observations about the educational philosophy behind the program followed by a group discussion of some of the sensitive issues his work in the legal system so often touches.

James Croft is a Ph.D. candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a background in theater and arts education. He performed a series of dramatic monologues incorporating ideas from prominent educators as well as from his own experience teaching in London Public Schools.

Jenny Romaine has worked extensively as a puppeteer, performer and director and is a founding and current member of Great Small Works. She performed A Manifesto on Light, a light show reinventing a lecture given by professional lighting designer Dr. Linnaea Tillet by realizing the theoretical concepts of the lecture in the form of the performance. Jenny described it as “a play with pedagogy.”

People hung around until around 11:30pm, many continuing to talk about the issues raised in the performances.

our first dinner was a success!

Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Band

What is HONK?

a cantastoria performed by members of Somerville’s Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band looking at the many and joyful meanings of the sound “HONK!” (It is not only a plug for the HONK! festival to be held in Davis Square on October 9-11).

Mr. Right Flag

a passion by Penelope Hillfrau, is a solo puppet drama about almost everything.  Penelope writes: “it was born from a long tour, but it’s not clear whether it was given birth to or thrown up.”

Bill Me Later

a performance by John Malpede (founder of Los Angeles Poverty Department and a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies is a monologue about the consequences of credit card debt (or lack thereof).

the open house that almost wasn’t

With stories about landlord troubles rampant among coworking and hackerspaces, we wanted to avoid the problem all together by letting everyone know we were there and that they could come and talk to us about any noise, traffic, or other complaints they might have over the coming months and–hopefully–years. And besides, we were excited to get to know our neighbors.

We designed small event announcement cards, like the ones often sent our for gallery openings, that explained a bit about our space and the people working here. We passed them out, knocking on all the doors in a three block radius, and leaving them where no one was home. The night before, Alec had the idea to post an announcement on the Davis Square Livejournal.

When Sunday evening came around, we set up some cookies and fruit on the table downstairs, moved our speakers downstairs, and stocked our drinks fridge. We didn’t compare hypotheses for attendance, and maybe it’s best that we didn’t. We wanted the event to be drop-in, so didn’t expect the place to be rushed, but we received a total of 10 drop-ins. One dropped by because of the (150) flyers we passed out; three saw the sign we had posted and lit at the end of the driveway and decided to drop in; one, a friend of David’s, read an impromptu tweet before leaving work; the rest had read the livejournal post.

We met some very supportive and interesting people form the Davis neighborhood, but even if it is honest to say we weren’t expecting huge crowds, we were all certainly expecting more than 10 people over the course of 4 hours. The low turnout felt amplified by our postponement of the event for a week due to confusion in getting the flyers printed early enough for distribution and poor internal communication about the rescheduled date of the event.

It’s hard to generalize, but our experience has suggested a few things ::

• Impromptu events (four or fewer days notice) work, but only if you are trying to reach out to an audience with whom you already have a relationship.

• Turnout from strangers will probably be low enough that publicity plans should account for a one in fifty or one in one hundred turnout rate (read: postering should have happened over a much larger area).

• Themed, online communities are ideal for encouraging communication between people who share interests.

• Communicate about expected attendance and expected turnout from publicity efforts before the event with enough time for feedback and iteration.

• Reach out to other people and ask them to leverage their social networks to spread the word about your event.

The low turnout also meant we got to spend more than a few minutes talking to each person and that we got to talk more deeply with each person about what sprout is all about and what our plans as an organization and a space are.  It was really useful to get feedback on our language and explanations at that level so we can work on becoming more clear and compelling.

We are planning to hold this type of event every one or two months, hoping that the recurrence of invitations will bring new people each time.  Hopefully, we’ll see you next time!

spaghetti for people

The police didn’t show up until 10PM.

Apparently, you need a permit to have a live band play in your driveway in Somerville.

By 10, though, there were just remnants of the evening’s earlier event :: a pot of chilly spaghetti, some make-shift benches, and–the only thing to suggest that a brass band had been dancing and jiving in the driveway of 339R Summer Street just an hour and a half before–a bass drum, meant to be worn over the shoulders, bearing the words, “Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band” (SLSAPS).

We were wrapping-up the first evening in a series of dinner theater events hosted by sprout in a small carriage house just outside of Davis Square in Somerville. The events aimed to bring people together around good food, good music, and good performance in an informal, social setting. What we’re after is a low-pressure venue for local artists to share their work in a community context, and our first dinner started us moving in that direction.

The event began with delicious spaghetti, Italian bread, and drinks, and even though the day aggressively threatened rain, we ate and talked all night in the the growing dark. Steam rose from the spaghetti, as the air grew more crisp, and the brass band SLSAPS opened the night with a set of upbeat tunes while people finished up their dinner and talked. We followed the band inside to see a beautiful cantastoria about the many and beautiful meanings of the sound, “HONK!” in honor of the HONK! festival coming up on October 9-11 in Davis Square.

Inside, the public workshop and lab housed at 339R Summer Street had been transformed into a performance space. A rag-tag collection of seats–ranging from wooden-plank bleachers to couches to office chairs–sat the 45 attendees and focused our collective attention on a performance space carved out of the former machine shop, framed by the larger and less mobile of the machine tools strung with orange, holiday lights.

After the cantastoria, a puppet show called Mr. Right Flag, a passion by Penelope Hillfrau, brought marionettes, hand puppets, and other objects to life, asking audience members to provide some of the soundtrack for the piece.

The final performance was a comedic monologue by John Malpede, the founder of the LA Poverty Department, called Bill Me Later, which proved an incisive and hysterical look at credit card debt.

Attendance at the event was modest, peaking at 45 people, including performers.

We spent about $170 between food, drink, and disposables and brought in $250, which means we were able to entirely cover costs and then offer our two solo performers a $40 stipend each for sharing their work. We hope to continue our spaghetti dinners as a self-financing experiment in how to build a temporary, small-scale performance venue.

The next dinner will be held on Thursday, 15 October in the same little carriage house at 339R Summer St.

As the series develops and gains traction, we hope to curate each month’s performances around a given theme (October’s will be education-themed :: The Little Red School House). Then, we’ll use that theme as a focal point, bringing together a set of performers who approach the theme from different perspectives, whether artistic or professional, activist or scientific.

I’m excited and curious to explore what it looks like to “perform information” in more than the gestural way that science or technology are often “performed” now. What does it look like for mechanical objects to become full-fledged characters in a story? Is it possible to “perform data” without distorting the complexity of the scientific phenomena from which that data derive? How can theater inform the medium of traditional lecture?

While the primary goal of the dinners will remain the creation of high-quality, variety-show style performances, I hope for the dinners to serve as a means for exploring this intersection between theater and information, seeing where it leads.