{"id":7509,"date":"2024-09-27T13:15:05","date_gmt":"2024-09-27T18:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=7509"},"modified":"2024-09-27T13:15:08","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T18:15:08","slug":"a-qa-with-rick-burkhardt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/a-qa-with-rick-burkhardt\/","title":{"rendered":"A Q&A With Rick Burkhardt"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a> on October 19th at 7 PM at Eden Seminary. You can buy tickets here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your work spans music, theater, and performance art. How do you approach creating in these different mediums, and how do they influence each other?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick<\/strong>: I don\u2019t actually see them as different. I think we humans spend so much time using language that we forget we\u2019re always getting information from other directions as well: sound, melody, \u201cbody language\u201d, etc. My goal is always to mix words and sounds in new ways. When you do this, you\u2019re automatically performing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick<\/strong>: I like to try to do something that hasn\u2019t been done before. I think that\u2019s where a better future comes from. I\u2019m not really very drawn to spontaneity \u2014 I really enjoy planning! But, I do want the plans I make to lead me somewhere I didn\u2019t predict, so I can explore those unpredicted results. When a plan I make leads me somewhere new and surprising, that often feels spontaneous!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick<\/strong>: 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\u2019s fine (I don\u2019t have to keep them in \u201cbalance\u201d).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


That said, most of the works I\u2019m performing on this tour with Charlie King are meant to sound like \u201csongs\u201d, haha. I mean, they\u2019re traditional song forms being used to give shape to ideas I haven\u2019t 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 \u201cwhat happens if I condense several different historical events into one song?\u201d or \u201cwhat kind of melody will express the point of view of these characters I don\u2019t really understand?\u201d or even just \u201cwhat happens if I squeeze more rhymes out of this word than usual?\u201d I guess some people would call the resulting songs \u201coffbeat.\u201d But they\u2019re definitely songs! Haha!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You often perform your own work. How does being both the composer and performer influence the way you present your pieces on stage?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick<\/strong>: Well, if I\u2019m one of the performers, that means either (1) I can only compose things I already know how to perform (boring), or (2) I\u2019ll have to learn something new (exciting). Usually I start from a place of thinking \u201cwell, I sort of know how to do this one thing, but if I wrote a piece really focused on that thing, I\u2019d have to get much better at it, and maybe discover something about it that I didn\u2019t know before.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick<\/strong>: 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\u2019ve 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\u2019t know what that version is, because I didn\u2019t write that version, because that version wouldn\u2019t have interested me as much. On the other hand, some people enjoy the same complexities I enjoy, and for those people, \u201cresistance\u201d is part of the fun. It\u2019s a sign that they\u2019re enjoying the ride, with all its curves and bumps. Nobody ever complains that a rollercoaster was \u201ctoo complex\u201d, haha.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick<\/strong>: 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 \u201coh, that\u2019s kind of like what happened in that piece of art\u2026 but in the piece of art it somehow turned out differently\u2026\u201d, then I think the art is doing its job.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your work often engages with historical and political themes. Are there particular events or movements that you find yourself returning to for inspiration?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick<\/strong>: I\u2019m not sure \u201cinspiration\u201d is the perfect word for the answer I\u2019m 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\u2019t mine. I think we white people talk about \u201cstories\u201d in a very narrow way. We don\u2019t notice that other cultures have different ideas than we do about how a \u201cstory\u201d is supposed to work. And worse, far too often we force their art forms and their histories into our capital-S \u201cStory\u201d models. I\u2019m inspired when I encounter a piece of history that has escaped that enforced remodeling.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As someone who works across multiple forms, what new directions or themes are you interested in exploring in the future?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rick<\/strong>: I think I already have way too much to work on, given the directions and themes I\u2019m already dealing with, haha. But again, if I do my job right, it\u2019s going to take me in directions I can\u2019t 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\u2019t intend to stop doing that, I would like to translate much more of the work I\u2019ve 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, \u201cI gotta spend more time in the studio.\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What advice would you give to young composers, playwrights, or performers looking to experiment with form and content in their work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n


Rick<\/strong>: There\u2019s 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\u2019s in, don\u2019t 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.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7510,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-pep"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Rick-Headshot-portrait-scaled.jpg?fit=1917%2C2560&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7509"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7511,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7509\/revisions\/7511"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}