Today we’d like to introduce you to Nigel Deane.
Nigel, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I grew up mostly in a suburb near Denton, Texas. My dad is a professional musician and my mom was initially a music major in college, and my engagement with music for much of my life was generally initiated and supported by them. Within this musical environment, I became acquainted with various styles of music at a young age, as well as instruments and sounds that aren’t necessarily typical in a household in the US, like Hungarian cimbalom and the sounds of contemporary percussion music.
As someone who was an antisocial kid through most of my primary schooling, music became a personal and organic outlet for my creativity, which was and still is vitally important in my life. My parents put me in piano lessons when I was 7, and although I didn’t enjoy it, I did occasionally write little tunes for piano, like a composition I wrote one night that I called “King Arthur’s Castle.” I quit piano after one or two years of lessons and took up violin for my fifth-grade orchestra. Around that time, I started messing around in the music-making software GarageBand, which was my only real personal interest outside of playing video games. In large part, music became more of a career choice because of a composition competition that was started during my freshman year of high school by my amazing orchestra directors, Michelle Hanlon and Jeremy Atkins. I was the only one who entered the year it was started, so I won by default. I was very socially anxious, and also just dealing with all the usual terrors of being a freshman in high school, so having my music played by a bunch of my peers was a horrifying but thrilling experience. I felt like I had a way to communicate some deeper parts of myself to others. I won the competition the next three years, and now the competition is named after me, which in a funny way feels like a memorial.
My parents have been incredibly supportive of my weird and vaguely defined career path, and because of their help, I was able to go to the Interlochen Arts Camp during high school and attend the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University for a bachelor’s in composition. At Rice, I started to develop a more critical view of the strict Western European Classical path in music. I did work in fiction and poetry writing, theater, video art, and religious studies while I was there, but those always felt auxiliary to the narrow set of skills and activities that defined a “composer” in that environment. My experience moving to California to attend CalArts, and then to Los Angeles after graduating, have been the most artistically eye-opening experiences in my life. Everything I got involved with could be a part of my broader artistic practice.
This change in my approach to artistic creation has allowed me to get involved in professional projects well outside of the traditional realm of “Classical music,” like my recent experimental religious ceremony, MASS, which drew on Christian beliefs, practices, and history in a multi-media performance; my involvement as an ensemble member with Kunsthalle for Music at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, an exhibition in which the ensemble performed five hours a day, five days a week, with a dynamic program that usually changed day-to-day, with elements of performance art and visual art; and my performances with new music groups in Los Angeles like Wild Up and Monday Evening Concerts.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I think life is generally composed of topsy turvy roads for most people, especially artists. The biggest obstacle in my life was depression and social anxiety, which kept me from ever getting too close or vulnerable with pretty much everyone in my life, to the point that it was difficult to be honest with myself. Additionally, the taboo surrounding these things caused me to choose silence and suppression over actually addressing them. Looking back on my relationships with my friends through most of my life, I consider very few of them to have been meaningful or fulfilling to me because I didn’t take any initiative to maintain those relationships. Just since March, I’ve taken steps to build more rewarding relationships with my friends around me as well as with myself. I’m lucky that during COVID, I’ve had some space to reflect on all of this more seriously – I started therapy for the first time in my life, and I’ve started journaling frequently, which has been very rewarding.
Can you give our readers some background on your music?
I work mostly in the realm of music as a performer (primarily violin and viola), composer, and educator (teaching privately and as a Teaching Artist with the Harmony Project). I’ve also made work as a video artist, writer, sound designer, dancer, performance artist, and installation artist, and all of these things, being parts of my life, have influenced my outlook on what roles in life art can fill.
Focusing on my work as an educator – my high school orchestra directors and other amazing high school teachers made me understand what impact public education, and particularly arts education, have on students and society. I think that education can play a hand in addressing people’s satisfaction with life, or, if done wrong, it can contribute to people’s dissatisfaction with life. I was so lucky that my high school teachers helped me to discover what types of experiences brought me joy. They went beyond the curriculum and acted as holistic mentors, and looking back I can say that they were some of the driving forces for me in sustaining myself through mental illness. Now as a music educator, I’m constantly striving to approach my role as a teacher with a broad humanistic perspective, which has often proven to be incredibly powerful for my students.
I’ve studied popular methods of music education as well as theories of traditional classroom teaching, and have arrived at a student-centered teaching practice with many sources of influence. I always take students’ interests as my first consideration. I think about what tools I can provide them to achieve their goals, while also consistently giving them new music to check out so that we can learn more about the student’s musical tastes together. The importance of my work hits me hardest when I get a letter or card from a student. I had a high school violin student who, on our last day working together, gave me some of her drawings and a cactus-shaped vase, as well as some other random gifts, and wrote a letter saying I was the best teacher she had ever had. I have that letter taped to my bedroom door and occasionally read it in the morning – it had a profound impact on my sense of purpose.
As a performer, I have been drawing influence from a diverse set of musical styles since I was young, and have continued to branch out as I grow older. Outside of my conventional violin lessons, I would do these little musical projects unbeknownst to my teachers, where I would take whatever song I had a fleeting interest in and learn it by ear. I gained skills that I never expected to gain while learning music of various styles from many different cultures. This practice also helped me to develop some understanding of the potential power music can have in the individual lives of people as well as in the connections between people. At first, my violin playing was a set of skills and techniques. Now I see my musical performance on any instrument as a set of lived experiences coming together to inform how I move with the instrument and what sounds I produce.
My creative work similarly draws on many sources of inspiration rather than relying solely on what I learned from music theory class. For example, in my piece Wes Giannni at? an audience watches a violinist and pianist playing a piece of music, as expected, but suddenly the performers are shouting absurd made-up food names, and then whistling in harmony, and then switching instruments. For my collaborative piece called pose // repose with my friend MarieElena Martingano – a fantastic dancer – I got to be on stage as a contemporary dancer, even though I had had no training in dance, and I made an electronic soundtrack as an environment for us to dance within. My installation piece Luminascence focused on the manipulation of light in a space, and in preparation for the project, I tried to read as much as I could about the significance of light in religions that I had never heard of. For my more recent piece MASS, I and my two amazing collaborators, Argenta Walther and Richard An, performed electro-acoustic renditions of music from the 13th to 16th centuries, mimed a Pre-Tridentine Mass, and baked bread live on stage, among other things. Working with material that is completely new to me is what provides me with an exciting sense of discomfort and discovery when I approach a project.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Before living in Texas, I lived in North Carolina until I was seven, and part of that time was spent in a house that was situated right next to a big wooded area. I remember waking up to sunlight filling my room with shadows of trees creating these shimmering swaying patterns and hearing birds chirping outside. Those mornings always felt very special.
Contact Info:
- Website: mostholysacrifice.com
- Phone: 9405951993
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @nigeldeane.93
Image Credit:
Katie Eikam, Pete Agraan, Liz Jernegan Samberg, Carly Otness
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