Episode 3.10 - Dr. Emilie Amrein
Dr. Emilie Amrein joins us for our tenth episode this season! Emilie is a choral music educator, co-artistic director of Common Ground Voices/ La Frontera, activist, scholar, AND host of The Choral Commons Podcast! They talks with us about The Choral Commons Podcast, her social justice work, and making lasting change within the music field in regards to inclusion.
To learn more about Emilie, check out the links below!
Full Transcript
Carrie Blosser 0:00
Welcome to the third season of Diversify the Stand. Together, we speak with a wide range of musicians who talk about topics that are important to them. I'm Carrie Blosser.
Ashley Killam 0:08
And I'm Ashley Killam. We're so excited to dive into talks with a whole bunch of guests to see them. If you like following along and are a fan of our podcast, please leave us a five star rating and review. Thank you so much for joining to talk with us today. We're so excited to hear your story.
Emilie Amrein 0:30
Yeah, it's my pleasure. Really a delight to be able to talk with other like-minded musicians and podcasters. So thanks for the invitation so much.
Ashley Killam 0:40
Of course, and we'd love to start off by hearing just a little bit about your musical journey into kind of what you currently do.
Emilie Amrein 0:47
Sure. Well, I grew up in the Midwest. And I've been thinking about, you know, my growing up recently. My parents divorced at a very early age, and, for a variety of reasons, I was fortunate enough to get a full scholarship to go to a private religious school, which is where I really encountered choral singing for the first time. My family's not really religious, and I didn't come to choral music by that kind of heritage connection, but more just by circumstance, and I really found an affinity with the choir space. I think it was the feedback that I got from my teachers and the welcome that they offered to me and really pursued singing largely because of that kind of initial spark of recognition, of being seen. And I sang, really, from a very early age - like aged eight on - and really haven't stopped singing since. I participated in school choirs, took voice lessons, ended up going to Indiana University to study voice. Briefly thought I wanted to be an opera singer, but always really loved the idea of making music in community. I realized, you know, shortly after arriving at college, that really my disposition wasn't one of a soloist and was more of the ensemble musician-type. And so I kind of. you know, was making my way while also pursuing some of my own personal interests and activism as a young person. I volunteered at a domestic violence shelter, worked the overnight shift. During the crisis line, I worked in a variety of other shelter settings at for jobs as a college student and a graduate student. I worked with youth coming out of the juvenile justice system in a halfway house. I worked in a mentorship program for young kids in poverty in southern Indiana. So, I kind of had this like dual life for a while in college, kind of doing these social, engaged kind of political projects and then also pursuing music professionally. I ended up studying conducting in graduate school, sang professionally in choral ensembles around the country. Some of the, you know, most acclaimed ensembles: Oregon Bach Festival Chorus, Santa Fe Desert Chorale,and lived in New York City and had the life of a gigging musician for a long time. And eventually made my way to Minnesota where I did my doctorate and was really interested in connecting music to social issues. And, at that time, I was really focused on programming as the vehicle for kind of accomplishing that. And, since then, I really realized that, you know, there was a lot more to consider than just programming, and so that's kind of where I am today. I teach at the University of San Diego. I teach courses on music and social justice, community music, music, education for social change, and direct the choirs. I'm currently department chair at the University of San Diego, and, you know, that job is a real challenge in a lot of ways and also a privilege to be able to kind of imprint the department with a shared vision for a kind of a more just an equitable future of music and in higher ed and music studies in general. And I've been working. My kind of research area has been in the area of community music, so this is music outside of the educational space for social goals. And so, I have a cross-border program, working with refugees and migrants asylum seekers and deportees in Tijuana that I collaborate with a colleague from Boston University, Andre De Quadros. And he and I are also just finishing a book on this approach to musicing called Empowering Song, which is kind of a decolonial music approach that we utilize in that program but also in prison arts programs that he has run and that I've tried to start here in San Diego, but I've been delayed by COVID. So, that's kind of like the snapshot of where where I am, you know. I grew up with this kind of traditional music education, though, came to it again, by circumstance, and then have found meaning and purpose in my career, trying to merge that music making life with the social and political values that I have really been pursuing all along at the same time.
Carrie Blosser 5:45
That's awesome. I'm excited to read that book when it is available for us.
Emilie Amrein 5:50
Yeah, we're hoping to be done in the next few days! So it's been quite a passion project and a joy to be working on it, and also stressful to get all of the last little details together.
Carrie Blosser 6:04
Well, in addition to all of those things that you were just telling us about, we were we would love to talk to you a little bit about the Choral Commons Podcast.
Emilie Amrein 6:12
Oh yea, I forgot to mention it.
Carrie Blosser 6:14
Well, it's perfect that you didn't because that was my next question for you. So, excellent transition and lead in! But, we'd love to talk to you about how that started, the community you've built there, and one of our very first guests that we interviewed, Dr. Jace Saplan, mentioned you specifically, and we had watched a few of his episodes on the Choral Commons Podcast, and they're just so fantastic. So, share with our listeners what it is, what you do, and how it came to be.
Emilie Amrein 6:37
Sure. So the Choral Commons is a kind of digital meeting space for choral music educators, choral practitioners, community music folks to come together to really reconsider the ensemble space as a site for collective liberation, right? And so, it kind of has this radical political orientation to it, which we have been exploring for the last two years, really. The project started at the beginning of COVID, in part out of a collaboration, again, with my colleague, Andre de Quadros from Boston University and chorus America, and we had brainstorm this collaboration in probably April of 2020. So, very soon after COVID, shut everything down, and we really wanted to create a space for these urgent conversations. You know, we saw shortly after those initial conversations, the whole country rise up in response to the murder of George Floyd and the reckoning with the racial injustices, police brutality, mass incarceration, and the kind of unresolved legacy of the history of slavery in this country. And so, all of these topics were...it just seemed like such a timely moment and opportunity to frame what we do in the context of these larger political and social movements. And, you know, I think that for so many folks in classical music in the Western European tradition, there's been this separation almost that a divide between, you know, what happens in the real world and what happens on the concert hall stage and in the practice room, in rehearsal halls, etc. you know, and to really reflect on the ways that we are integrally bound up with what's happening, you know, on the street. What's happening in movement spaces. What's happening politically, that there is not really a difference between what's happening in the real world and what's happening in our particular fields of practice. We hosted in our first season, which was kind of the summer of 2020, I think, you know, 12, or 15 podcast episodes, and these were folks conversations with folks who were...who had a foot in both worlds: the music in academia, choral music in academia world and kind of social projects, what you might call community music, and those conversations, I think, were really fruitful. We then, in the winter of 2021, relaunched our second season or launched our second season. And we, at that time, decided to really go big, and had three different kind of podcast themes, and they were organized kind of around topics that were important to us and to our leadership team., right? So, we had one set of conversations on the podcast series called Surge, and those were conversations with cultural organizers and cultural strategists about the possibilities of art making as like an imaginative space for envisioning other possible worlds, right? So again, it's like in this political context, using the arts as both a vehicle for mobilizing people and kind of centralizing a message, but mostly for accessing this imaginative space, this possibility of kind of even utopic kind of thinking, and that was one series. And then, we did another called gather, which was conversations with community music folks who were working in particular contexts. So, we had a series of conversations with folks working in prison spaces, another set of conversations with folks working with the displaced in forced migration context. So, welcome choirs, integration choirs, which, you know, what have been kind of connecting recently-arrived asylum-seeking persons with folks who were kind of like in residence in a community. And then also, folks working with in the kind of immigration system and working, for example, in Tijuana, again, in shelter spaces. And then, our third series was called In Gender, and this was hosted by Nicky Manlove and Brad Dumont, and this podcast series considered gender diversity, gender expansive paradigms in choral music, and these conversations were really powerful, I think. So...and I think we had, again, like maybe ten conversations with trans and gender non-conforming folks who either conduct or compose or sing in choirs, and just kind of talking about what their experiences have been and what their visions for a more just and compassionate choral space might be. Since then, you know, so we launched, again now these in our second series, about 30 episodes, and we're in the process of kind of conceptualizing what we're going to do moving forward, and we have some ideas for some in-person programming which we're really excited about, and then ongoing conversations in the podcast realm. We were really fortunate to be awarded a grant from the Agrigento Foundation, and that's really been an opportunity for us to think about how we could leverage the community that we've kind of connected online with in an in person space.
Ashley Killam 12:32
Fantastic. I listened to the Engender Series out of those three. I love that! There was so much there, and getting all of the different perspectives and just how to, I mean, there's so much more that goes into all of this than just choir and just music recording. Carrie and I talked a lot with Jason about this, um, you know, you need to know the history, because there's so much, like, the two of us are coming from an instrumental perspective, but there's so much of the history with this, and with the different areas you talk about that you need to know that background is a problematic background if you're going to apply it to anything, you know, related to music.
Emilie Amrein 13:08
Right. I think that that's like been such an eye-opening realization, you know. There's this...the fact that we just have been taught kind of an incomplete history of the practice. And, you know, I think that there are probably some reasons for that that we should think about, you know? Not just the most nefarious reasons which come to mind first, but, you know, I think a lot about the advocacy that music educators and music administrators and performers have to do to kind of make a living in this country. And, there is like this kind of urgent and kind of existential need to be kind of always speaking the most positive truths about like what musics capacity is, whether it's like choral or instrumental, and that messaging, I think, has really resulted in a mythology about music that isn't entirely true, right? it's partly true; music certainly does have the capacity to be all the positive things that we say that it does, and has, but I think that, you know, at the same time, you know, music has been used as a tool of assimilation, as a weapon in a lot of contexts, and I think that by messaging only the positives, I mean, you understand why we have to do it, right? Because everybody's kind of scrambling, hustling for recognition, for money, for time, attention, etc. and necessarily so because of the way that the system is built in this country, but the impacts of that are really far-reaching and I think that it would really serve the discipline well for us to talk about the hard truths: about how music has been historically used for these, you know, these violent actions, whether we're talking about assimilation in the context of residential schools or as a tool of the voice of kind of authoritarian dictators, etc. right? And then contemporary violences that take place in the music education space. I mean, I think that these truths really need to be considered, and we need to reckon with that history and the present ways that that history impacts our practice if we're hopeful for a more just and compassionate future for this field.
Ashley Killam 15:44
Exactly, I couldn't have said it better! Completely, there's so much, and it's tough, but it takes a lot of learning and a lot of, you know, unlearning, but it's so important to know more than just our standard whitewashed music history that's been thrown at everyone for years and years. Right?
Emilie Amrein 16:06
I think too, you know, that this particular moment with how, you know...COVID has just been such a devastation to the arts and to education, and to read about the conditions in our public schools for teachers, I understand why people want to be inspired and given kind of the little kernel of hope of what it is that we actually do, you know what I mean? But, these times that...I just read this even this morning, you know, that the conditions that public teachers are experiencing in the classroom are in fact, by design, as like an effort to, you know, privatize education, and I think that, you know, those political realities are connected to these larger issues that we're talking about. So, while on one hand, psychologically, I understand that we need a pep talk, right? That things are really hard, and it feels like we need to know our value because nobody else is talking about the value. But, at the same time, by only talking about the positive social impacts and not considering that these histories, I think that we're really being used to prop a system that really needs to be interrogated and reimagined moving forward.
Ashley Killam 17:32
Definitely, and a little bit, you know, more into some of the social justice work you've done within kind of the music industry as a whole - I know, this is completely jumping areas from the podcast, but we'd love to hear about the work that you've done through the Common Ground Voices, the La Frontera program.
Emilie Amrein 17:51
Yeah, this has been such a meaningful project. So, we originally developed this project as a translation of a project that my colleague Andre was already doing in Jerusalem, and I was very interested a handful years of years ago to consider how music has been used in restorative contexts and prisons, but also in reconciliation in post conflict zones, and in conflict zones. So, I went and did some observations of his work with Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem and other groups that are doing kind of similar work, and I was very taken by how he navigated this kind of complex social political history and brought together people who had no reason to be in the same room, frankly, who really were wrestling with the idea of place and ownership and belonging. And, I mean, it was just like, very transformative to go and observe this choir, you know? And I thought, after having observed, like this could work potentially in the border region, too, because there is just such a symmetry, not in terms of the the politics of the history, but even just like the architecture of the border wall and the militarization of the border. You know, you see the same concrete wall in Jerusalem and the same rebar and the same barbed wire and the militarized police and the checkpoints and all of these things. I mean, there is this kind of resonance between the militarization of one zone and the other, and so, you know, acknowledging that they're very different histories, very different issues. I thought, "You know, this could work here." And so, we brought together in our first artist residency musicians from all over Mexico in the United States, and we did this cross border program, rehearsing on both sides. We spent, you know, three or four days into Quanah rehearsing and then came to the United States and spent three or four days here, performed on both sides, to community engagement projects, all with repertoire that helped us to consider a place, right? And, the kind of contestation of place and how this kind of how this region has been claimed by so many different groups of people, different nation states, and how, of course, originally, this land was inhabited and continues to be inhabited by indigenous people, right? And so kind of using the arts as a way of exploring that, right, and the project space kind of egalitarian values. And so, there's a lot of discussion, and it's not, you know, it's not a conducted ensemble in that it's not like the voice of a single artistic director guiding the actions and the music making of the community but it's very collaborative. And so, you know, we talked with these artists afterwards, and together, we decided, you know, this is all well and good, but in fact, unlike in Jerusalem, we have so much in common, you know? Aside from the language differences, we have...like all of the folks from Mexico in the United States had very similar educational experiences, expectations of how music was going to be learned, you know, facility with notation, rehearsal patterns, I mean, again, everything was shared, right? There really was no conflict between us at all. In fact, everybody politically was pretty much on the same page, too. And so we decided, you know, this would be really interesting to actually imagine how we could come to be in relationship with people even more profoundly impacted by the forced migration crisis. And so we started then developing our enquanto program, and so we went into refugee shelters. Before COVID shut us down, we had done three in three different refugee shelters, and we developed partnerships with these bases and worked with their residents who are all very different, right? So, the first program that we did worked with families, and these were mostly families from Central America, and then the second one was working largely with deportees, and it was so shocking to encounter folks who actually spoke English and know Spanish who had been deported from the United States. Then our third project was at an LGBTQ shelter, and we were working then mostly with trans women from Central America and from within Mexico, and I'm sorry. I sort of misspoke. The first Encuentros that we did it, also included refugees from Cameroon and from Haiti and Cuba. And I think that, you know, again, there is this sort of misconception about who the people, you know, that are being spoken of in the migrant caravans are, you know? I think there's like a lot of assumption that this is mostly folks coming from Central America and from within Mexico, but, in fact, this is a global migration crisis that is exacerbated by political machinations of the United States in a lot of different countries, but also by climate crisis and ongoing wars all over the world, right? So, Tijuana is a gathering place, a migrant city, with folks from literally all over. And it was so shocking to realize that, you know, we assumed that we would need bilingual folks in Spanish and English to kind of facilitate conversation, but we needed folks who spoke French just as much. And Haitian Creole in particular has been a challenge to find the speakers, fluent speakers in Haitian Creole. So this has been really powerful, and to see how we can be in relationship, how we can make music together, how we can tell stories, how we can reckon with the experiences that we have had, how we can honor the body...all of these things are the the types of issues that have kind of come up in that program. And I just want to be clear that those Encuentros you know...I think a lot of folks who do community based work end up just kind of bringing their practice into these marginalized spaces, but really, we we devised the practice with our participants, and it didn't really resemble a traditional choral rehearsal in any way. Right? We utilized this approach that my colleague and I have been writing about the Empowering Song approach, and it really is an interdisciplinary, creative process that's meant to create space for storytelling, basically, right? We're using music. So, we do work with the body, we do you know, poetry writing, we do drawing, we do acting, we do theater games, we make music. There's no notation used. And it's a very holistic way of expressing kind of our shared humanity. So, it's been really powerful to be able to get to know folks and to be in relationships with folks who have experienced, you know, the violence of borders, the long track to get to to Quanah. The long wait in Tijuana, the kind of deprived public health crisis of like living in mass in the shadow of the border wall. This has been really powerful, heartbreaking, angering, and has really fueled a lot of our activism kind of since then.
Carrie Blosser 25:48
It's so interesting when you're talking about, like, preconceived notions of things. I literally had no idea how close San Diego was to Tijuana. Like, it is so unbelievably close, and I don't know why in my brain, I was like, "Oh, it's just so...that's...they're so far away." But literally, most people I know, now in San Diego will drive to a point and walk over a pedestrian bridge and go take flights from the Tijuana airport.
Emilie Amrein 26:12
Exactly, exactly.
Carrie Blosser 26:14
It's that preconceived notion of like distance of country, right? And is that ingrained? Like, why do I have that incorrect knowledge in my brain?
Emilie Amrein 26:23
Yeah. Why do you, you know? Why did I, coming here?
Carrie Blosser 26:27
Yeah, super interesting. So, we're talking about all of these projects that you have been working on, and I'm so excited. I'm so glad that we get to meet you because the amount of projects that you're taking on, I feel like it's kind of like Ashley and I too were like, "Let's do everything!"
Emilie Amrein 26:43
Right! Yes! Podcasts, web presence, border work, classroom teaching, department chair, writing a book...yes, yes, it's like it's quite a lot. Yes, I'm glad to find other gluttons for punishment like me!
Ashley Killam 27:02
With everything you're doing, what advice would you give to current and future music makers or music educators that want to start thinking about building an inclusive space in, you know, their own particular little bubbles they're in?
Emilie Amrein 27:18
You know, I think that there are some really foundational values that are quite antithetical to the ways that we have experienced - I'm talking kind of in the royal we here - our own music education. I'll speak for myself, right? My own background in my own education in music...I did not find hospitable to some of the foundational values that I hope we can embrace moving forward, right? The idea of kind of a democratic, egalitarian, making space around schools is not something that is really taught, right? Any conversation about kind of collaboration is still filtered through this paradigm of the conductor as decider, right? This authority that the conductor is afforded just because of, you know, how this practice has been taught from generation to generation, right? So, the idea of kind of a democratic art-making space is the very first thing that I would encourage a music educator to consider moving forward, and what I mean by that is a value of reciprocity and mutuality. If you can infuse your classroom space - your rehearsal space - with that foundational value, that we're in this together, that me as a teacher, that I have as much to learn from my students, from my participants, as my participants have to learn from me. I mean, I think that that single thing is the doorway through which so much can happen, and that idea goes back, you know, to the work of Paulo Freire, who really critiqued this idea of the banking model and education, which is really still very pervasive in music, education: the idea of kind of the sage on a stage, the expert at the front of the classroom, who's imparting their knowledge to this empty receptacle of a student, right? That I'm going to impart my knowledge into the brain of somebody else, right? That idea is very much still the norm in music education. As a choral singer, I can't tell you how many times I had ideas about the music, about the text, about the interpretation, about the sound, about like how we moved in space. And, when I offered those ideas as a young person, those things were really shut down, dismissed. And I was really told to, you know, "Stay in your lane. you are the musician." And in fact, we were regularly not called musicians versus called singers, right? Like "You're the singer. You're supposed to just execute what's on the page, and the interpretation job is left up to the conductor." Right? And, of course, there have been moments where, you know, those roles have been slightly varied. But the idea that the conductor might have something to learn from the participant is just not the norm in music education, and I think that so much of our practice could be really transformed by that single thing, right? The other thing, I think that would be a really helpful shift in how we consider the music making endeavor is the decentering. of notation, and this is quite controversial, still. The decentering of kind of the idea of the composer as genius. And I don't mean to diminish the contributions of our composer friends in any way. But that's just not how it's always been done, and that's not the way that it has to continue, right? We afford, again, a type of authority to the composer as a single human being who is, again, imparted musical ideas mediated by notation, interpreted by the conductor, delivered by the ensemble in a way that is really new, actually. People have been making music in community for 70,000 years. the Western tradition that has the phenomenon of the composer and the conductor, is, you know, only a couple 100 years old, actually, and to realize that there are many more ways to make music than that one way when we've been taught that that one way is the best way and really, the only valuable way of making music I think is something that we really need to like chip away at. That mythology, I think, is quite dangerous, because again, it creates a hierarchy that positions some people in the room above others when, in fact, a true collective endeavor puts everybody kind of on the horizontal. And so, I think those two ideas are really helpful. Maybe if I was gonna say a third is to think about the body differently in the music making process. I was always taught growing up that, of course, music is a physical activity. We use our bodies, to take care of your body, you want to like make sure your posture is aligned. You want to think about your sound production from kind of a connecting to the breath, right? But that's a particularly utilitarian way of looking at the body, when in fact, our bodies hold memory, ancestral wisdom, knowledge, imagination, actually. And if you can think about the way that the body...if you can think differently about how the body exists as integral to the mind and to identity, it also informs, you know, how you treat the body in rehearsal, you know? For example, in my rehearsals, I have my students doing movement where they are generating gestures that are connected to textual ideas, to emotions. And, in that way, they're using the body as kind of a creative tool, right? Not as an not as an expressive tool solely, but as like where the ideas come from, right? So, as a repository for knowledge, wisdom, memory, experience, identity, all of that. So, those three things I think, would really be helpful, you know, thinking about the horizontal relationships, decentering the primacy of the conductor in the compose,r honoring the body. I think that if we were to reimagine the "how" of our practice, rather than just the "what" and the "who," I think we would go a lot further faster. And this is, I think, an important thing, because, you know, we're talking about diversity, and we're talking about justice, and I think, again, for my own self, I came to the conversation through the idea that well, "If I just think differently about repertoire and about hiring, that we're going to be on like on better footing." But really, you can diversify your program. You can diversify your roster. You can diversify your audience. But if you're still working in a paradigm that places some above others, you haven't really accomplished anything, actually. And so, I think we have to spend a lot more time thinking about the "how" rather than just the "who" and the "what."
Carrie Blosser 35:01
I love that, and I love, too, like the connection to like emotional or like the more like internal feelings because, like you're saying, like, if you're working with your choir, your band or your orchestra with motion, some motions are not possible for some people. So like, looking around that, you know, creating like extra layers to the connection to music, not only is providing a more musical experience, but it also allows more opportunities for people with different like abilities of their body.
Emilie Amrein 35:29
Sure, and you know, I have...I'm a parent of a disabled child. And, you know, I think that that has been such an important part of my own story. Conceptualizing the body and the mind and variations in people's bodies and minds as assets, rather than deficits, I think is huge, right? So, it's not like actually a problem that people move differently. It's not a problem that people think differently. It's, in fact, an opportunity for us to express the beautiful range of humanity that exists. And, you know, I think, again, we do a lot of work with this notion of inclusion and accommodation and equity in terms of access. And these are all like important things that need to be part of the conversation, but again, it's a framing disability as well as race and other kind of demographic identities, features as deficits that need to be remedied, that need to be fixed. Like we need to fix our access points to the stage so that people who move with wheelchairs can access the stage. Well, that's true. But also, you don't have to fix the problem. How about like, consider the fact that the stage is elevated to begin with? And why is that? Like, let's ask these difficult questions. Why is there a division between the stage and the audience, right? How is this choice reflecting values from the 18th century rather than the 21st? Right? And of course, we inherit spaces. We don't get to design them necessarily, but they're all connected to one another. We are working with a paradigm of education that is also designed in the 18th century. A paradigm of music making that was designed in the 18th century, and in Europe, right?. So like, how can we...how can we recognize that is like the first step.
Carrie Blosser 37:37
I love it. All right. Well, we have one final question for you. We ask this of all of our guests, and we would love to know what is on your music stand this week? And how are you diversifying your stand? It could be your actual music stand, could be a metaphorical music stand the choice is yours.
Emilie Amrein 37:55
I'm working with my choir on a piece of music called "We Shall be Known." It's an arrangement of political pop songs by a duet that is known as MaMuse, and we have learned this song, and I am this week, challenging my students to kind of rearrange it. We have kind of building blocks, we have the ingredients of this piece learned, and now we have to figure out what exactly it is that we want to say with the piece, right? The text is so beautiful: "We shall be known by the company we keep, by the ones who circle round to attend these fires. We shall be known by the ones who sow and reap the seeds of change. Alive from deep within the earth. It's time now, it's time for us to thrive. It is time we lead ourselves back to the well. It is time for us to know of the great turning and for us to lead in love." And I just love this text. So, you know, we are really thinking about story. We're thinking about the body, we're thinking about how musically we can convey this question of who we are and why we are here. We are thinking about this as a frame through which our entire semester is going to be experienced. And so that's what's on my agenda for the week. It's kind of funny, you know, I think not that long ago, I would have had six or seven pieces that we were working on at the same time from all over the world and really different in terms of style. But you know, since COVID and all of these ideas have been rumbling around in my head, you know, I'm really trying to slow down. We're doing one piece. We're not doing it with notation. We're thinking about why, what it is that we're trying to say, who we are being in relationship with one another, showing up, allowing ourselves to be known, knowing the others in the room, the great diversity and the assets that each person brings in to the conversation. All of that! That's on my that's on my docket for the week.
Carrie Blosser 40:10
Excellent. Thank you again so much for joining us.
Emilie Amrein 40:14
It's been a real pleasure, and I hope we can hang out sometime in real life!
Carrie Blosser 40:19
I would love that. Thank you for listening to diversify the stand. To support us and our projects, visit our website at diversifythestand.org.
Ashley Killam 40:30
And a huge shout out to Eris DeJarnett, who wrote the intro and outro music. The piece that we've been playing is "Bored Games" for two trumpets and fixed media. Links to their website are in the podcast description.
Carrie Blosser 40:40
And as always, we asked our guests what's on your stand?