I Am YEG Arts: Ian Crutchley

Potential. Some people see it in everything. If you’re Ian Crutchly, you also hear it, feel it, and can’t wait to share it — which is exactly what he does. Whether he’s composing, performing, collaborating, or teaching, his end goal is always the same: to share what you can with each other. To Crutchley, that same sentiment informs a lot of what goes on in the arts here — a community he describes as a network of deeply caring and collaborative relationships — with a future he can’t wait to see.

Composer, educator, and Artistic Director with New Music Edmonton, this week’s ​“I Am YEG Arts” story belongs to Ian Crutchley.

Tell us about your connection to Edmonton and what keeps you living and working here.

I moved to Edmonton in 2009, along with my spouse, flutist Chenoa Anderson. She grew up out here, so, for one of us this already was home, but now I also consider it home! Top reason to stay here: the arts scene! This is a place where folks in any experimental arts discipline can find opportunities to present their own work, and also to work with others. Somehow, when you move here, those already here just seem to find you. And underlying all this is the great support we enjoy by way of public funding.

How did you get your start as a composer/​performer? Was it always Plan A?

Like many, I started by playing in elementary school band class. Some things you can only see in retrospect: looking back, I can see that right away music was at least a little bit more important to me than it was to most of my friends. And while many of them dropped music over the years of high school, I kept going and, with the encouragement of my parents, decided to go on to college and university. It was there that I first found out what a composer was and immediately decided it was the right thing for me. By a weird quirk of the curriculum in the B.Mus. prep program I was in, I was actually assigned to write a 12-tone piece in my first year, and that hooked me for good. Also, I can see now that I had a long fascination (predating band class) of finding ways to make instruments (and other things) make cool sounds, and enjoyed rock music that was basically chaotic and noisy.

Tell us a little about your role with New Music Edmonton (NME) and what makes it special to you and the city.

My official title is Artistic Director, and I am basically the one in charge of supervising what artistic content we present. While some decisions are entirely my own, we do most of our programming in a collaborative way, with team-juried open calls. We also invite individuals who are not directly involved in the organization to curate events.

What makes NME special to me is seeing how, thanks to enormous amounts of community input, it has evolved from a club for classical composers into a bona fide hub for pretty much any creative practices involving sound as a medium. What makes NME special to the city? To be honest, I think it is that we remain unique in being the only publicly funded organization whose sole purpose is to support the practices we do and to offer professional presentations of new work by local and visiting artists.

Tell us about someone whose support and advice have guided your career.

Oh wow! That’s a big question. I feel like the mentorship from which I have benefited is really an assemblage of large and small things that have come from different people over the several decades since I first started studying music. My family’s unconditional support has been vital, as have been the bits of advice and situations I have found myself in as a result of my teachers’ guidance, suggestions and interventions. I have also learned tons from my students. At the heart of it all, for decades, I have been blessed with incredible support and sage advice from Chenoa, my partner in life and art since we met at UBC.

What does community mean to you, and where do you find it?

It’s somewhat epitomized by the very young person who, accompanied by a parent, went door-to-door in our neighbourhood early in the pandemic, leaving a note letting anyone know that if they needed anything at all, they could call and this brilliant human would be there for them. Amazing, and inspirational! The words caring and sharing also come to mind, along with an obligation to act, when we can, to ensure others are okay and getting the help they need. We can’t be a community unless we care about everyone in it and share what we can with each other. I think this idea informs a lot of what goes on in the arts here — there is an amazing network of creative, collaborative, and deeply caring relationships underlying it all, within and across disciplines.

What is the creative process like for you? Where/​how do you usually begin?

Like many, notebooks are the core of my work. If I am writing a new composition, it begins with trying to either verbalize in writing or represent graphically what will happen. My notebooks, worked on in cafes, libraries, airplanes, and even bars, are mostly full of multi-coloured words, numbers, and drawings. My way of working is focused on setting up a process, unique to each work, of which any finished work will merely be one example of what that process might produce.

What qualities overlap in being a composer and a performer. How have you grown most in each role?

Since my performance activities are improvisatory, constant invention is a must — yet that kind of invention is crucial to composing, too. In improv, it is the (nearly) instantaneous generation of a sound or sounds in response to a unique performance context. In composition, the invention has more to do with inventing new ways of composing via unique, stable processes that underlie a new piece.

I’m not totally sure I can say I have grown as an artist — part of being an artist, for me, is about the sense of play, even when it is serious. Maybe I am better at playing now! Hmmm… I think one way things have changed is that decisions happen more quickly, and that might be one way in which, as my ​“second practice,” improv has informed my compositional work. I owe a lot of that to numerous dancers in Edmonton, who have generously allowed me to grow as an improviser in the context of their workshops and finished works.

As a composer, though, I am also at a real crossroads with what I am doing — the concepts are really at odds with what I prioritized in the past. I am very happy with that and allowing myself, through slow development and experimentation, to find a way of concretizing what it is I am imagining.

What are you looking forward to most this winter in Edmonton?

I actually like the winters here and am even a winter cyclist! Personally — and I know not everyone is like this — I feel way more creative in the colder months. That has always been the case. I was also really excited to make a return to teaching this fall, at Concordia University of Edmonton. I’ve been away from teaching for a few years but have really been inspired by getting back in the classroom with a great group of students!

I think one of the other reasons I enjoy the colder months is that they tend to be the time when most arts organizations launch their seasons. Whether online or in person, I’m looking forward to all sorts of great things from local and visiting artists, and to the inspiring performances and community activities that everyone’s been cooking up in the off-season.

What excites you most about the YEG arts scene right now?

The last three years have been very hard in so many ways, and everyone (not just artists) are really just coming to terms with what’s happened. On the other hand, emerging from this period has been some truly visionary presentation strategies, some serious commitment to long-term equity policies and structural change, and even some new venues. We’ve also seen some amazing new ideas and works from established artists, countered by lots of cool and innovative emerging artists.

Underlying it all, we’ve enjoyed fabulous support from our local and national funders. All of this suggests the potential for a lot of wonderful and surprising new work to happen in the months and years ahead. The tough times are not over, but artists here will keep working and finding ways to express the things everyone is experiencing and the times in which we are living, through all kinds of amazing practices. I’m looking forward to what’s to come!

Want more YEG Arts Stories? We’ll be sharing them here all year and on social media using the hashtag #IamYegArts. Follow along! Click here to learn more about Ian Crutchley and his work with New Music Edmonton.

About Ian Crutchley

Ian Crutchley was born in Toronto, grew up in Surrey, has lived in England and New Brunswick, and seems to have settled in Edmonton. His ongoing education in creativity and in life has been informed by phenomenal teachers, students, and a remarkable menagerie of wise, sharing, and loving people he has known at work and at play. A classical composer by training, his practice has broadened in recent years to include improvisation and performances with dancers and other artists. The sounds he uses can come from anything that he finds that seems useful, from traditional instruments to marbles and odd bits and bobs he has found in junk shops and alleyways. He has a particular fondness for transistor radios.

Ian is an educator, a founding member of the improvisation group damn magpies, and the Artistic Director of New Music Edmonton.