Interview with Musician-in-Residence Jamie Topper Jamie Topper has been playing music since her earliest days. She has been studying the drum for seven years, and has worked with children and adults through Gallery 37, Chicago Teacher's Center and After School Matters. She currently plays with the University of Chicago's Middle East Music Ensemble, and with Mofoe, an Afro-Caribbean folkloric group. Which artists, past or present, inspire or influence your art/music making? I primarily study rhythmic traditions, Afro-Caribbean and Middle Eastern. I pay close attention to the frame drum traditions of the world, like Puerto Rican plena, Dominican salve, Moroccan Sousi music, Italian tamburello, Brazilian pandeiro. These are embedded folkloric forms, produced in a community and for specific reasons. I am fascinated by the evolution of these musics as they travel in diaspora. I notice the communication between the drum and the other instruments, or how the drum communicates with a dancer, or how the rhythm and the singing respond to each other As far as individual artists, Hamza El Din, a Nubian oud and frame drum player, is a big influence. I have always listened to a lot of delta blues as well, Lightnin Hopkins is an old standby. Tom Waits and Chris Salveter teach me about lyrical sensitivity and storytelling in music. There is a recording by Taj Mahal with Toumani Diabate which is way up there too, for its delectable combination of styles. My students are a big inspiration too, they take me places I would not find alone.   How does your own creative work inform what you do with children in hospitals? I lean toward musical forms that tell a specific story. I like details that shoot through you and reverberate a while. I tend to record sounds of the city, while traveling, or at the hospital that are meaningful and use them in projects. These days I have been tracking handclapping rhymes around different neighborhoods. As a percussionist, I am particularly sensitive to rhythm, in music and in life, and the effects of different polyrhythmic combinations.   How have you had to adapt your experience and knowledge in music to fit in the hospital environment? I have had to refine my adaptability. At the hospital all of the typical elements that you normally know about before you teach (length of the workshop, content of the workshop, who will be present, which bodily fluids may be visible) are unknown until you get in there. So careful observation and listening is crucial, every time. If a patient can't move an arm, maybe it's an opportunity to explore vocal rhythmic syllables or beatboxing. How can we collaborate with what we've got.   Teaching at the hospital has also allowed me to expand my skill set, to brush up on my skills for guitar, piano, music theory, digital editing, to be able to respond to a wider range of kids. I am continually adding more sonic options to my tool belt for working on projects.   When you walk into a child's room, how do you motivate them to create music or a work of art? I introduce myself and explain briefly what I'm doing there, because it's a bit different from what most of the other 'visitors' come in to do. I start by trying to find a point of connection with the child to work from, a common interest, artistic or otherwise, or a mood. There are a lot of options for what we can do together, and I want it to be relevant for the kid. Sometimes I describe the collection of instruments we can work with (electric guitar and bass, keyboard, conga, frame drum, percussion, digital music programs, recording equipment, CD burner). I also usually have a few larger creative projects going on that they can contribute to in various ways if they want. Sometimes I let them hear other tracks to get an idea of the range. I like to find out their musical history, if they've ever played an instrument, or if they sing at church, or if they could what instrument would they want to learn. That helps a lot to help me decide what to propose. Playing drums is usually an easy sell, but if I only taught introduction lessons on the drum I would probably have burned out a long time ago and may not be as effective creatively. It's kind of like, these are the ingredients we have right now, what do you think we should make? But we both have to be actually interested in the outcome of the experiment or it's not as rich.   What surprises you the most about teaching music to hospitalized children? When I see children a few times, I am always surprised by how much they remember from previous visits. Also the details that they pick up on from our work surprise me in a most delightful way, it is unpredictable. If I can hear those details and references and use them to guide us, then the collaboration is more true.   Tell us about a current project you are working on and how it has evolved. Some patients and I have been experimenting with ways of translating different things into sound. For example, in one composition we decided to assign note values to each staff member we saw. Then we sat in the hospital hallway for fifteen minutes. As people passed by we plotted their note onto staff paper. If two or three people came together, it made a chord. Now we are trying to work out what value this sound 'map' has: what do we gather from listening to the resulting piece that we don't gather just by watching the people walk by in the hallway? Are there any emerging patterns? And what if we change the variables, or use only note values from a particular scale, how much do we want to control the experiment? It's like we are playing with some kind of music machine, but we are also inventing the machine as we go, and tweaking it.   back to contents