Music for Hard Times
Built with the aim of offering a sonic resource for comfort and calming, composer Danny Clay and The Living Earth Show created Music for Hard Times: an eight movement work crafted using a series of composed "calming exercises," recorded independently in their homes using instruments, voices, field recordings, and found objects. The work is built to be listened to on a continuous loop if desired--that is, the eighth movement segues back into the first so that the listener has agency over the length of their own listening experience. Music for Hard Times is a work of experimental music in the truest sense, in that it was created to answer a fundamental research question: “is it possible for us to use the tools of classical art music to make people feel better?”
Video by Jon Fischer
MfHT as an educational tool
Music for Hard Times has been realized multiple times across the country as a musical study on improvisation, sonic meditation, and audio collage. In these projects, students of all ages use Danny's original score to record their own musical calming strategies over the course of several masterclasses. These new recordings are then layered and assembled by Danny and the Living Earth Show to create a new, community-generated work. Recent collaborators include students from the University of Maryland Wind Ensemble, the San Francisco Conservatory Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Girls Chorus, and the UC Santa Cruz Wind Ensemble.
The work currently exists as a score, an album, a collaborative educational project, and will exist as a live performance in the fall of 2021.
Classroom exercises are based around musical meditations such as this one.
Danny Clay
Danny Clay is a composer and teaching artist whose work is deeply rooted in curiosity, collaboration, and the sheer joy of making things with people of all ages and levels of artistic experience.
Working closely with artists, students, and community members alike, he builds worlds of inquiry, play, and perpetual discovery that integrate elements of sound, movement, theater, and visual design. Children's games, speculative systems, cognitive puzzles, invented notation, found objects, imaginary archives, repurposed media, micro-improvisations, and happy accidents all make frequent appearances in his projects.
Recent collaborators include Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, Volti, the San Francisco Girls Chorus, Wu Man, Sarah Cahill, Phyllis Chen, and printmaker Jon Fischer. His work has been performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), Ensemble Dal Niente, and has been presented by the deYoung Museum, San Francisco Performances, the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts at the Minnesota Street Project, the Grey Area Foundation for the Arts, the Meaney Center for the Arts in Seattle, and university programs throughout the United States.
Jon Fischer
Artist JON FISCHER was raised in Pennsylvania by Israeli parents from Morocco and France. Following an early move to the East Coast, he grew up in the suburbs of Boston and Philly. He earned degrees in bio-engineering and philosophy of science before his permanent return to California, where he studied fabrication at the Exploratorium and learned to screen print with a garden hose and a sixty-watt light bulb at CELLspace, the legendary San Francisco arts warehouse (R.I.P.)
He opened his first screen print studio in 2008, developing a technique that combines painting, photography, and silkscreen. Since then his practice has expanded to incorporate printmaking through sculpture, sound, & video. His work has been exhibited in venues across the country including San Francisco City Hall, Vanderbilt University, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, White Stone Gallery in Philadelphia, and the de Young museum in San Francisco. He is currently an Associate Professor of Marine Engineering Technology at the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo.
