October 15–22, 1998

music issue

Artists in Residence

		Salon Selector: Andrea Clearfield

You never know what you'll hear in Andrea Clearfield's living room.

by Scott Robinson

On the first Tuesday of each month, Andrea Clearfield's Center City apartment is transformed into a performance space. This September eve, an audience sits on the floor or on folding chairs, watching dancer Kate Watson-Wallace interact with synthesized sounds from Manfred Fischbeck, flutist Cynthia Folio, percussionist Ron Kravitz, and Clearfield herself, at the piano. Later, soprano Shannon Coulter sings songs by Mendelssohn and Brahms in preparation for an upcoming West Coast recital. Other performers include hand-drum ensemble Drum Urge, poet-flutist Elliot Levin with Charles Cohen on the synthesizer, and singer-guitarist Juan Avila performing a musical extract from a Central American fable.

"I've always considered myself a person who likes to bring people together," says composer Andrea Clearfield.

Outside Clearfield's apartment techies are striking the set of Rent behind the Merriam Theater and every salon performer is accompanied by intermittent clanging and shouting from the street below. At the Academy of Music, such distractions would be the end of the world, but here, they are more like sand in the bottom of a bowl of clam chowder—a gritty certifier of authenticity.

For 12 years now, Clearfield has brought together musicians and audiences into her home, in an updated version of the 19th-century musical salon. Following pre-arranged programs, the monthly salons, though informal, are not loosely organized jam sessions, but intentional, structured events resembling both an open house and a concert. Though the salons aren't advertised, Clearfield sends out monthly postcards to selective friends and artists (but if you're interested in going, e-mail her at aclearfi@astro.ocis.temple.edu).

"I really enjoy creating new kinds of community and ritual," she says. "People need that in city life."

Clearfield is proud of the high level of concert-music playing in her soirées. "Some of the finest chamber music in Philadelphia is happening right in this room," she declares.

But that's only part of the story.

On one evening you might hear a performer from the Concerto Soloists or the Philadelphia Orchestra, on another you might hear Peruvian flute playing, balalaikas, electronic music, or Middle Eastern music with a belly dancer.

"The people who come in because their favorite folksinger is performing here may hear a Bach Trio Sonata for the first time," she says. "It gives me great joy to see people's ears opening up… and I didn't want to create just another gig, but a place where there is a real active exchange between the performers and the audience."

In fact, any given month's performers were often part of the previous month's audience themselves. Performers preparing for a public recital may give a piece a dry run in the supportive, sociable setting of the salon. Artists feel free to do works in progress or composers offer music that might not have been heard otherwise.

Tina Davidson, another Philadelphia composer whose works have been heard at Clearfield's salon, says that the audience is integral to her craft.

"Art always demands that you be a participant," Davidson declares. "It has to be focused. I find that when people are really sitting down and listening, [music] is a whole different art form."

The salons began in 1986, when Clearfield and some 25 recent fellow graduates of the University of the Arts found themselves in need of an outlet for their musical energies. "We were all just out of school with our graduate degrees, and we wanted to perform," says Clearfield. She moved into her Center City apartment in July, and the gatherings began in August. "I moved into this apartment with the intention of starting this," she says.

And in the often toxic world of concert music—orchestral musicians, for example, have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession—the salon gives the musicians an outlet that allows them to be the kind of artists they were trained to be.

"What they're doing here," Clearfield says, "is getting back to the roots of why they went into the profession in the first place. The gig mentality gets old after a while. People want to come to a place where they can be really free to express themselves from the heart."

The musicians, who sometimes come all the way from New York to perform, are not paid for their work at Clearfield's non-gig, though she would like to be able to offer them an honorarium to cover parking and expenses. Aware of the risk that payment might turn her salon into a cabaret, she still wants to seek non-profit status so she can apply for grants.

Clearfield's own musical background is quite varied. While she started classical piano studies at age 6, she has also played in rock bands. She's been a singer and a flautist and she plays the mountain dulcimer as well as Latin music.

Clearfield, who is currently pursuing her doctorate at Temple, is in high demand as a composer, with commissions for local ensembles such as Relache as well as for international groups.

"I don't feel like I need to get this grant or this commission or this award to feel successful," she says. "With the salons, so many people have told me that this has created a space for them that they value in their lives, musicians and audiences alike.

"In a world where so much is happening on a multimedia level," says Clearfield, "and we're having all of our senses aroused to a pretty high level most of the time, maybe it's a challenge to sit and just listen to music. I think it demands a certain kind of quietude within."