Wabash Assistant Professor of Music and composer Peter Hulen was telling us about the improv night at his electronic music conference, which took place in mid-November at Poor Monkey’s blues bar near Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. The regular sessions of the conference—the Electro- acoustic Juke Joint Festival—took place at the university’s performing arts center, and Hulen’s "Body Periodic" was among the pieces played there.
But the improv session was at Poor Monkey’s, a converted sharecropper shack down a dirt road outside of town.
Picture these composer/professors setting up their computers at the local bar where, according to one online description," by ten o’clock the lounge grows smoky and raucous."
About halfway through the random tweets and loops and samples that electronic music can be (and that few of the bars’ regulars had ever heard) two inebriated women had had enough. Peter overheard them talking on his way out to his car to get his camera.
As Peter recalls, one said to the other, "Whut the haill was that??"
"I don’t know," said her friend, "but it sure ain’t the blues!"
Peter Hulen’s composition, "Organum on Ash Grove," was played at the Electronic Music Midwest (EMM) Festival at Lewis University, Illinois, in October.
Read more about Hulen’s work at his personal web page on the Wabash Web site.