The Sounds of Silence
Can Whittier College turn up the volume on its music scene?
Whittier College’s campus is quiet, especially in the evening. The setting sun bathes the palm trees in a soft golden light. Like a blank canvas, the old, exotic revival Wardman gymnasium is painted orange by the sun reflecting off the mirrored glass of the modernist Science and Learning Center. A few students make their way to and from meals and back to the dorms, but not many. The squirrels scurrying in the dirt seem to outnumber the humans. Often, it seems that the only sounds you are likely to hear this time of day are the gentle breeze and the hum of Campus Security barrelling through Upper Campus on their golf carts. It’s peaceful, serene. Come for a week and you might call it paradise.
Students, however, aren’t here for just a week. Silence, the lack of sound — a lack of motion at its base components — can become grating. When there’s nothing happening, students get restless. Uptown Whittier has a few nice restaurants and cafes, but nothing open late for the under-21 demographic. Seeking something to do, students go off campus to get into parties that will inevitably be shut down before midnight.
There are some attempts to add some life to quiet campus. K-Poet, the student radio station, regularly hold events with food, crafts, and, most importantly, live music. Whittier has no shortage of talented musicians willing to get up on stage and add a dash of colour to the college’s white walls, but there is a problem. When first-year guitarist, Sam Smith, signed up for K-Poet’s first open-mic night he asked if he could help set up the equipment. He imagined there would be amps, drum kits, and mics that needed to be levelled and, since Smith is a musician in his own right back in his native Chicago, he wanted to soundcheck himself. The K-poet staff looked at him blankly.
“All they had were two microphones,” says Smith.
The saving grace came in the form of Johnathan Siordia, a guitarist, vocalist, and, most importantly for Smith, a commuter who is able to bring his own amplifier, large enough that it needed to be transported by one of the school’s golf carts to Club 88. If it were not for Johnathan and his amp, the musical performances would not sound anything close to how good they do with it.
Walking back to my dorm from this first open-mic night, I was left wondering: why doesn’t there seem to be any equipment available? I’ve been to open-mics before, even performed at some, but there was always something more than microphones provided. My first thought was that the music department would have something students, especially organisations like K-Poet, could borrow occasionally for events.
Danilo Lozano is a two-time Grammy award winner and the Richard and Billie Deihl Distinguished Chair of the Music Department. He’s a large presence, tall and with a deep voice that reverberates around the room, not the soft, gentle kind you would expect a flautist to have. When he walks, you can see the toll that playing college football at the University of Southern California has taken. His straight-legged limp on his right side is the result of surgery which, in turn, is the result of hundreds of heavy collisions. It’s a big price to pay for being able to study music.
When asked about why K-Poet doesn’t borrow equipment for its open-mic nights, Lozano pointed out that it was a mistake to believe there was equipment to borrow in the first place. Despite being a liberal arts school, Whittier College teaches only “one kind of music” in its music program. The music major is very “traditional” according to Lozano with students expanding into personal interests on their own time.
If a student wanted to specialise in tabla for example, then the college will get someone external to come and tutor the student for free if they are a music major. This is how the college gets around not having a broad range of music classes. Lozano, however, would like to see a broadening of the music curriculum from the beginning of a student’s time at Whittier. He believes this can be done by employing new, exciting artists to teach. In particular, Lozano would like to see banjo player Béla Fleck, whose new instrumentation of Bach blows apart the notion that the classics have to be stuffy and uninteresting, in the classroom.
The aim is to help students find employment within the music industry and also help them make their own music if they so desire.
While it is important to know the fundamentals of music, Lozano recognises that this does not necessarily lead to great employment prospects. The world of music is much more digital than it was when the music major was conceived. Lozano is excited to see a new class hopefully starting next year that focuses on production and electronics. This class will use the new studio in the music building and certify students who take it in Avid Pro Tools, an industry-standard engineering and recording software.
The aim is to help students find employment within the music industry and make their own music if they so desire. However, the studio is lacking some of the basic equipment one expects to find in a studio. This is why K-Poet cannot borrow amps from the music department. They simply don’t exist. Moreover, this course will not be a three-credit course. This is to be a pre-professional qualification.
Lozano explained that the music department has a budget of only $13,000 to run on for the entire year. Some students worry that this is not enough to provide them with what they need to create and flourish. This is how Conal Nealis, a music major felt before hearing about the new class, but he is disappointed that the course will be worth less than three credits. His primary interest is in programming and production techniques; the cutting-edge of modern music the current music program overlooks. Lozano is quick to point out that this is not a problem confined to Whittier. This is, he says, a “small-school issue” on a national scale. When asked how Whittier compares to the program at Occidental, a similarly sized college, Lozano says that Occidental is “slightly worse.”
Occidental is “slightly worse.”
If the music department does not have the money for students to reach their full potential musically, then there is one other body which could serve this function: K-Poet. Kat Garrison, the representative for the media council on the senate, and also a member of staff at the radio station, agreed to speak on the subject. While speaking with Garrison, it became clear just how much K-Poet is in a state of rebirth.
K-Poet is very proud of the attendance at the open-mic nights that Garrison says average 60 students. While this may have been true for the inaugural open mic, and especially for one controversial act who came with an entourage, even then the crowd tended to dwindle as the event went on: Sixty turned into more like 16 quickly. This is not necessarily because the performers lack talent — some acts will be better than others, sometimes by great degrees — but what really seems to diminish audience attention is the sound quality. That’s partly down to lack of equipment and partly down to a lack of attention at the mixing board. Garrison agrees that improved sound quality would help open mics be more successful, but says that K-Poet is not financially capable of doing so at present.
While speaking with Garrison, it became clear just how much K-Poet is in a state of rebirth.
Budget cuts between 2011 and 2014 saw the student TV station, QCTV, laid to rest and almost did in the radio station as well. This year, K-Poet took a big hit to the wallet due to much-needed refurbishments. For example, the computer needed in order to broadcast required a complete rebuild so that it didn’t malfunction during on-air segments. This is by far the biggest item on their budget for this year at $1,500. This is a one-time expenditure, however. When totaled up, the 2019–2020 budget for K-Poet is $10,128, a figure that almost rivals the music department.
Included in the annual expenditure is a claim for $1,200 worth of t-shirts “used as uniform for staff and events.” Garrison says that the t-shirts are on average $10 each to purchase, but adds that, despite what the budgeted items say, most of the t-shirts are actually given to K-Poet staff and students free of charge. Some members of K-Poet management, who commented on the basis of anonymity, questioned whether the 120 t-shirts were a worthwhile purchase. “It’s ridiculous how much they spend on t-shirts,” one staffer commented.
For perspective, the broadcasting technology department, which allows K-Poet to function as a radio station (excluding monthly costs on the purchase of music, licencing, and renting the server required to broadcast) is $46 less than what the t-shirts cost. By contrast, a 100-watt Fender amp, easily powerful enough for Club 88, is $399 on guitarcenter.com — equal to nearly 40 t-shirts. That still leaves K-Poet with 80 t-shirts, which seems like plenty to go around. On the other hand, some argue that the t-shirts serve an essential function in boosting the club’s visibility on campus. In the words of Joe Donnelly, the Media Leadership Council advisor [and Journalism instructor], “it [K-Poet] has to put on its own oxygen mask before it can help others.”
K-Poet’s open mic nights used to be held in Lift, a coffee shop on Greenleaf Avenue in Uptown Whittier. Lift has a good atmosphere for such events — ample seating and lowered lights in the evenings. Perhaps it would be more appealing to sit and watch student performers over their coffee and cake than in Club 88 with its CI catering. Moreover, one could argue, embedding the college into the local community through supporting local business would help the college lifestyle feel less secluded from the wider Whittier population.
Lift appears to be interested in rekindling the old relationship. Mark Smith, a studio manager at K-Poet in 2013 who now works at Lift, says that “it’s such a no brainer. It would only enrich the campus… what we’re trying to do here is grow community.”
Furthermore, Smith says that there are other local venues which would be pleased to see Whittier students bringing in business with their performances. Sala, a new cafe with a wine bottle-shop on Painter would also be receptive. Garrison says she suspects the venue was moved due to the amount of paperwork involved in creating off-campus events, making the idea of performances outside the college less “no-brainer” than perhaps it should be.
The last echoes reverberate through a half-full Club 88. As they fade and die, the audience and performers say their goodbyes before going their separate ways. The campus falls silent once again. You might, walking back to the comfort of wherever you call home, faintly hear the sound of someone playing a guitar drifting out of a dorm-room window. Maybe they’re thinking about performing at the next event. Maybe they’re struggling to put a band together. If you look hard enough in the nooks and crannies, you’ll find a whole host of students wanting to create, but finding it harder to do so than maybe it should.
It seems that exciting new sounds are on the way, but is it too little too late?
