We recently connected with Abby Kellems and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Abby thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is <i>Weathering Steel, </i>an album written and recorded by the Plein Air Sound Collective at the Tank Center for Sonic Arts. The Plein Air Sound Collective is a group of composer-performer-producers that focuses on creating site-specific pieces in which the physical performance space is also considered to be a collaborator. In May 2023 we had the opportunity to record our first album at the Tank, which is a seven-story steel water cistern-turned-recording space in western Colorado.
The Tank was the perfect place to kick off this project because it has such a distinct sonic character, with lots of reverb and resonance. It isn’t soundproofed, and it didn’t have any temperature control when we were there, so outside temperatures and sounds (like airplanes and birdsong) were also influencing our experience with the space, and some of that made its way into our recordings.
One of the reasons I’ve loved making this album is that everyone in the collective is such a wonderful musician and collaborator who has a distinct musical voice and really excels at their craft (shoutout Veda Hingert-McDonald, Jessie Lausé, Jonathan Galle, Nelson Walker, and Gavin Kitchen!). It was so special to come together as creatives and have conversations about the different ways that each of us was thinking about the Tank as a member of the group, and how that would translate in terms of composition and performance. We all wrote at least one piece for the album, so there are lots of different styles that emerge from all that reverb and resonance. It was such a gift to work with artists that I admire so much.
The album is still in post-production, but a solo violin piece called <i>Dark Skies</i> that I wrote for Veda Hingert-McDonald is out on YouTube now! I’m really excited for when the full album comes out next year and we can finally share the really amazing work done by everyone in the collective.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a composer, pianist, and occasional tuba player based in Colorado. My work explores the images and intricacies of the natural world, and I focus on creating musical experiences that facilitate a deeper relationship between listeners, performers, and the environment. I grew up hiking, camping, backpacking, and rafting in West Virginia and Oregon, and my experiences in nature and concern for the environment have had a huge influence on my body of work.
For the past few years I’ve concentrated on two main creative avenues, the first of which is finding meaningful ways to explore the natural world in traditional concert spaces. Some of my favorite pieces I’ve written in this vein are <i>Love Letter from a Sinking Ship,</i> a chamber suite based on Fort Collins-based artist Erika Osborne’s series of paintings depicting climate change, and <i>Stilling,</i> a piece for the ~Nois saxophone quartet and dancers that explores shifting global wind patterns.
The second avenue is creating musical experiences that come alive outside the concert hall. Earlier this year I was commissioned to write a spatialized multimedia piece called <i>Pre/postlude: Free Flow</i> for the Black Box Experimental Studio at CU Boulder. The piece explores the beauty and power of undammed rivers and the crucial role that they play in sustaining ecosystems. The audio and video components came from field recordings and videos that I took at the Yampa River, which runs through northwest Colorado and is one of the last free-flowing rivers in the United States. And something I’m working on right now that I’m really excited about is a collaboration with Gavin Kitchen and Jessie Lausé to create an installation + performance project that fuses instrument building and music composition with recycling education.
Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
People! People are the absolute best resource, in so many different ways. It’s such a privilege to be able to create the things I do with the people I do, and it’s difficult to imagine that I would have had the opportunities that I’ve had without the support of my family and music teachers and friends and community and collaborators. Something I’ve had that I know not every creative person does is being surrounded by loving people who connect with my art and want me to succeed. That in itself is such a hugely helpful emotional resource in a field as challenging as this one, where you have to be really comfortable with rejection and secure in who you are as an artist.
People have helped me in a lot of very tangible ways as well. I’ve gotten to study with some really wonderful teachers who helped me become a better performer and composer, but also pointed me towards fellowships and scholarships and career opportunities that have made a huge difference in my life, and really pushed for me to be able to make the art that I wanted to make. My high school band director Lia Poole created a percussion ensemble to play a piece that I wrote, and I wrote it for way more percussionists than my program had so a bunch of my friends and classmates learned how to play percussion instruments just to perform that piece. It was such an amazing display of community. I didn’t know anything about percussion or composition at the time, and the piece makes me absolutely cringe now, nine years and a master’s degree in composition later! But it was amazing to have that experience of writing and rehearsing a piece with a large dedicated ensemble as a seventeen year old. And I think it was important to have that example of “hey, let’s just create this” so early in my life, because so much of being a successful musician now is just having the ability to create your own opportunities.
And now that I’m on the other side of writing a lot more music, my favorite pieces that I’ve written have benefitted so much from the input of other people, from composition teachers to peers to performers! Performers know their instruments better than any textbook, and the performers who are interested in new music especially just blow me away with all the sounds and techniques they know how to do. It’s gotten to the point where sometimes I enjoy the writing and rehearsing parts of the creative process more than the actual performance, because of how much fun it is to talk and experiment with musicians. Also, in the past year or two I’ve been pushing myself to acquire new skill sets, which has included branching out more into the electronic side of things. I’ve been really lucky to have friends who are more experienced in that area who are happy to point me towards resources and answer my questions. I guess all this to say- if you can, surround yourself with people who support you, love what they do, love what you do, and know more than you!
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
Music is such a significant part of my growth, as an artist and as a human. Most of my work focuses on different aspects of the environment, but I don’t have a lot of education in environmental science, so a large part of my writing process is actually just doing a lot of research and trying to be sensitive to the ways that what I’m learning and what I’ve experienced and what I think interact with each other. I like to write about things that are local to me because I can go outside and make my own connections and observations and structure a piece around sounds that I actually heard, movements that I actually felt, things that I actually saw. It makes this sort of very fleeting and intangible art form feel more grounded. So I come away from each piece feeling a stronger connection to my surroundings and understanding a little bit more about the place that I live.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.abbykellems.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abbykellemsmusic
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@abbykellemsmusic8023
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/abby-kellems-557671984
Image Credits
Gracie Fagan, Nelson Walker, Mahting Putelis, Pilar Athaide-Victor, Abby Kellems