Mock Audition
Mock Audition explores a complicated relationship to classical music through electronic performance, satire, and improvisation.
In 2020, I finally bit the bullet and finished a song. I had been sketching ideas in ableton for years, but struggled to believe they could be anything but nonsense. Ironically, my confidence came from referencing classical repertoire and recontextualizing it.
Making this music became an escape from the dogma of working as a classical musician. I could run from the perfectionist impulses, the gatekeepers, and take refuge from the racist, classist and patriarchal ideologies that have held me hostage and whittled down our repertoire to a tired group of dead white men.
Loving this music feels complicated, though I think I still can in the right context.
So I take samples, synthesizers, clarinets and classical repertoire as ingredients in my music. My songs include improvised loops, quotes from Stravinsky, Mozart and Angela Davis to hopefully inform a light-hearted critique of “high art making”.
While so much art and beauty from all over the world has ties to colonization, participating in the “preservation” ideology, the nostalgia and the escapism that governs many American art institutions can make me feel complicit in the violence of today. What are we trying to protect and preserve as our landscape feels more and more dystopian?
I don’t have formal plans to record this music yet, but you might catch me playing it in a small bar or venue in Brooklyn.
Here’s something from my mock audition at littlefield on June 1st, 2023.
Metropolis Ensemble’s Flamekeepers
A Live Streaming, Perpetual Sonic Art Installation
“Flame Keepers is a perpetual music installation based on Jakub Ciupinski's concept and design. Commissioned, created, and launched by Metropolis Ensemble in response to COVID-19, Flame Keepers runs uninterrupted in real time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Invited artists are commissioned weekly to supply new original material every seven hours. As a result, the piece will evolve as an open-ended collective composition designed to run forever.
We intend the Flame Keepers experience to be a virtual bonfire shared by a group of strangers worldwide, a concert that never ends, made in, and especially for, times of hardship and social isolation.”
I was lucky enough to be the first artist to participate in January of 2021, weaving reflections on the new year and auld lang syne into the loops and textures left for me, and for the ones that followed.