What does a city sound like? That’s the question that musician, composer and educator Nick Ginsburg tries to answer with his work. The southern Illinois native is finishing a stint as the Paducah Arts Alliance’s artist-in-residence during which he’s trying to create a soundscape to represent the far western Kentucky city that mixes musical composition with field recordings of the local environment. Ginsburg spoke with WKMS Morning Edition host Daniel Hurt about his process.
Carbondale native and Los Angeles based musician, composer and educator Nick Ginsburg said that music, interesting enough, was not what he imagined it to be doing for a career. Originally, his academic career was focused on environmental studies and the impact humans have on our natural world, but he has managed to merge the two, by making music with an environmental consciousness.
"In high school in Carbondale, I started playing in orchestras and started as an orchestral French hornist. And I pursued that in my undergrad career, I ended up going to Vassar College, right after I graduated high school and briefly studied environmental studies and quickly realized that music was what I wanted to do with my life and ended up going to Oberlin Conservatory In Cleveland.” said Ginsburg. “And that really opened my eyes to just the world of music and arts and what it can do for communities and, and I really ended up sending me on this kind of roundabout path. I studied and finished my Environmental Studies majors that I started at Vassar and learned about the possibilities of environmental sound art, which is a field of art that engages ecological issues, environmental issues, and really tries to probe our relationship as humans as communities to a greater environment. And I started to find that work very interesting.”
Ginsburg said he found this combination of environmental awareness and sound such an interesting pairing that it became the biggest focus of his work.
Even though I love orchestral playing, and still play the French horn professionally, I quickly realized how much larger of an audience and how more poignant things like environmental sound art and field recording could be.” said Ginsburg.
Ginsburg said it was amazing how powerful a communication tool music was and that he decided that was the format which he wanted to communicate to audiences.
“And not just the music but sound, which is what really brought me to environmental sound art and environmental sound art to put it simply is using music and sound in a way that ties it to spatial or ecological issues.” Ginsburg said.
Ginsburg explains that while serving as artist-in-residence for the Paducah Arts Alliance, he was working on a sound project directly related to the community, a sound map of Paducah.
“Sound maps are a relatively common form of environmental sound where artists, musicians, interdisciplinary practitioners, even scientists will take field recordings, that is, recordings using microphones for particular out or space, particular room, particular environment, and then link those recordings, overlay them rather onto a map. And so people will have with this project, in particular, the ability to explore different parts of produce go through their particular sounds of those places, and some places might be recognizable pretty easily.”
Ginsburg said locations near the city’s river which would feature sounds commonly associated with waterways like river boats or barges, but also the footsteps of tourists and locals.
“Each individual place is going to have what we would call an environmental sound, our different sound marks, different distinctive sounds that we can, you know kind of instantly distinguish as individual kind of markers of that particular place found has this ability to bring us back to a certain place a certain time, you know, a certain moment in our lives. And that's why I believe it has such a power to communicate ecological issues that can emplace us in a way that the visual world can't.”
Bringing that same sound equipment into the science world, his other passion, Ginsburg said the same equipment is used by scientists to measure the health of a place, and even its water quality.
“Field recording and some of the tools of environmental sound are used deliberately by scientists, you have biologists, water quality scientists, especially wildlife biologists who use field recording as a way to measure the health or quality of a certain environment. We as musicians and artists, we're using similar tools. And we are trying to communicate similar things about trying to get us to think a little bit more deeply about the everyday environments that we that we live in and are affecting on a daily basis.
Ginsburg said his return to the region has been met with nothing but positivity and a welcoming, thriving artistic community.
“The arts community here, it really is so special. Obviously in a big city like LA or Chicago or New York, you're going to have, larger arts infrastructure, larger arts community, but in a place like Paducah, you have a community of artists, everyone is interacting and pretty much occupying the same space, and it's people from everywhere. So I've really greatly enjoyed my time here.”
