Conversation: In Conversation:
Tavarus Blackmon Patti Kilroy
Tavarus
I’m here with Patty Kilroy: performer, musician extraordinaire, and a wonderful individual that I’ve had the opportunity to work with before.
Tavarus
First and foremost, how have you been holding up with performance space closures and art spaces shuttering? What has it been like as an artist, musician, performer during this time of COVID?
How has the last year affected your work as far as the difficult things we’ve experienced as a culture: like the death of George Floyd, and the activist marches that happened, and then to see how the Capital rioters were treated in comparison to let’s say, the Black Lives Matter protesters. Has this trickled into the studio at all? Is this influencing the way you’re thinking about your work in general?
Patti
Patti
I mean, it’s definitely been an adjustment. I was actually pretty new to the West Coast and Los Angeles when this all started. I had moved to the West Coast in 2019, so I was kind of building up. Most of my career up to that point had been in New York, and that’s where I had been based prior to that. But then when everything went remote, it was definitely hard to see recitals and performances getting canceled. It was definitely a bummer for me as an educator, because my students couldn’t gather and meet and rehearse and stuff. But I do feel pretty fortunate in that I am
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pretty comfortable already with using technology and finding solutions that way. So I’ve been having everybody record remotely, and I’ve been doing a lot of that work myself. So the transition over to that—to kind of just being stuck at home and finding ways to make music while at home—it hasn’t been too bad for me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really miss playing with other people in a room. I haven’t really done that since March, and I really look forward to when I’m able to do it again. But for me, I’ve actually been really forced to learn things that I’ve only casually dabbled in before—like I had never made performance videos seriously before.
It’s interesting for me—or maybe interesting is the wrong word. I mean, I do think that the best thing that I can do as an artist, because I don’t feel like I can speak directly to the experience of all Black and Brown folks, so I don’t incorporate it directly in my art. But I do feel that I, as an artist, I can increase the representation of the works of Black and Brown composers. And in the repertoire I choose to play and the repertoire I choose to teach students, I often think very critically about where this repertoire is coming from. And what is its history? And how can I
