A Q&A With Rick Burkhardt

PEP’s Executive Director, had the opportunity to ask musician Rick Burkhardt some questions about his work and how he uses as a way to advocate for peace. His answers them below. Make sure to see Rick when he performs with Charlie King and Good Trouble on October 19th at 7 PM at Eden Seminary. You can buy tickets here.

Your work spans music, theater, and performance art. How do you approach creating in these different mediums, and how do they influence each other?

Rick: I don’t actually see them as different. I think we humans spend so much time using language that we forget we’re always getting information from other directions as well: sound, melody, “body language”, etc. My goal is always to mix words and sounds in new ways. When you do this, you’re automatically performing.

Many of your compositions and performances challenge conventional forms. What draws you to experimental approaches, and how do you maintain a balance between structure and spontaneity?

Rick: I like to try to do something that hasn’t been done before. I think that’s where a better future comes from. I’m not really very drawn to spontaneity — I really enjoy planning! But, I do want the plans I make to lead me somewhere I didn’t predict, so I can explore those unpredicted results. When a plan I make leads me somewhere new and surprising, that often feels spontaneous!

With The Nonsense Company, you incorporate elements of music, theater, and speech. How do you decide which medium is best suited for a particular message or performance?

Rick: I try not to decide. Ideally, the pieces I make contain all these things. Sometimes a piece starts to lean heavily in one direction, so the words or the music start to become particularly interesting to me, and take focus for a while. And that’s fine (I don’t have to keep them in “balance”).

That said, most of the works I’m performing on this tour with Charlie King are meant to sound like “songs”, haha. I mean, they’re traditional song forms being used to give shape to ideas I haven’t heard in a song before, ideas that I hope benefit from songlike shapes. I try to help them push their own envelopes, musically and/or lyrically: for example, when writing one of these songs, I might be exploring a question like “what happens if I condense several different historical events into one song?” or “what kind of melody will express the point of view of these characters I don’t really understand?” or even just “what happens if I squeeze more rhymes out of this word than usual?” I guess some people would call the resulting songs “offbeat.” But they’re definitely songs! Haha!

You often perform your own work. How does being both the composer and performer influence the way you present your pieces on stage?

Rick: Well, if I’m one of the performers, that means either (1) I can only compose things I already know how to perform (boring), or (2) I’ll have to learn something new (exciting). Usually I start from a place of thinking “well, I sort of know how to do this one thing, but if I wrote a piece really focused on that thing, I’d have to get much better at it, and maybe discover something about it that I didn’t know before.”

What are some of the challenges you face when creating work that defies traditional genres? Have you ever encountered resistance to your more experimental approaches?

Rick: Oh absolutely. People (not a majority of people, but often a quite intense minority) resist them all the time, haha. Sometimes people get angry at something I’ve made (or at me, haha) because they think there must be a simpler version of the thing I made, a version that would be easier to perform or easier to understand. Maybe there is, but I don’t know what that version is, because I didn’t write that version, because that version wouldn’t have interested me as much. On the other hand, some people enjoy the same complexities I enjoy, and for those people, “resistance” is part of the fun. It’s a sign that they’re enjoying the ride, with all its curves and bumps. Nobody ever complains that a rollercoaster was “too complex”, haha.

As an artist with a focus on politically and socially charged themes, how do you measure the impact of your work? What do you hope audiences take away from your performances?

Rick: I hope that people (including me) who experience my pieces will come away thinking about something differently. Pieces of art do not make policy decisions or solve political problems, but if people who have seen a piece of art see something in their life a week later that makes them think “oh, that’s kind of like what happened in that piece of art… but in the piece of art it somehow turned out differently…”, then I think the art is doing its job.

Your work often engages with historical and political themes. Are there particular events or movements that you find yourself returning to for inspiration?

Rick: I’m not sure “inspiration” is the perfect word for the answer I’m about to give, but, I feel like I understand my life more when I understand how colonialism shaped it. I find it urgent and important to learn about perspectives from that history which aren’t mine. I think we white people talk about “stories” in a very narrow way. We don’t notice that other cultures have different ideas than we do about how a “story” is supposed to work. And worse, far too often we force their art forms and their histories into our capital-S “Story” models. I’m inspired when I encounter a piece of history that has escaped that enforced remodeling.

As someone who works across multiple forms, what new directions or themes are you interested in exploring in the future?

Rick: I think I already have way too much to work on, given the directions and themes I’m already dealing with, haha. But again, if I do my job right, it’s going to take me in directions I can’t predict yet, which is the entire point, so I welcome that. (Speaking more pragmatically, I have always created pieces of art with live performance primarily in mind, and though I don’t intend to stop doing that, I would like to translate much more of the work I’ve done into recorded form, so that people can experience it without having to be in one right place at one right time. In other words, “I gotta spend more time in the studio.”)

What advice would you give to young composers, playwrights, or performers looking to experiment with form and content in their work?

Rick: There’s lots of pressure to create things that follow models people already know. Ignore it. Create something that follows those models, and people will pat you on the back, give you all sorts of compliments, and then forget you ever existed. Create something new and people will notice. Also, take yourself seriously, and take your art seriously. Let seriousness in. And once it’s in, don’t let it take over, not all the time. Seriousness is an important color in the palette, and the palette needs other colors too. So does the world.