by Leanne Zacharias ¦   January 31, 2019

Introducing Infinity Room, a podcast series exploring music and creativity through interviews, conversations and intersecting leitmotifs.

While in Toronto several month ago, I crossed paths with my first cello teacher. George Meanwell – a wonderful cellist/multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger – and I were both in attendance at a concert of all six sonatas and partitas for solo violin by J. S. Bach, performed in a small Distillery District church by six local Baroque violinists. It was a profound and exhilarating experience for those of us in the audience, summed up perfectly when George poetically remarked that “music is its own infinity.”

I am interested in personal encounters with this sentiment, and in turning an ethnographic lens on the contemporary creative community to uncover unique stories of creative projects, career arcs, works in progress and transformative, unforgettable experiences with music, sound and performance.

Over the next few months, this space will host a series of conversations with artists; an informal ethnography of interesting lives and unique professional roadmaps, with intersecting themes of identity, liveness, community and sense of place, relationship with technology, hi-fi and lo-fi communication strategies and the thrill of performance.

Lenore Alford is a musician-turned-coder based in the San Francisco Bay Area. We discuss her decision to quit being a professional musician, the impact it has had on her identity and relationship to music, and parallels between code-writing and music.