Flame Keepers is a perpetual music installation based on Jakub Ciupinski's concept and design. Commissioned, created, and launched by Metropolis Ensemble in response to COVID-19, Flame Keepers runs uninterrupted in real time, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Invited artists are commissioned weekly to supply new original material every seven hours. As a result, the piece will evolve as an open-ended collective composition designed to run forever.
We intend the Flame Keepers experience to be a virtual bonfire shared by a group of strangers worldwide, a concert that never ends, made in, and especially for, times of hardship and social isolation.
Kelsey Gallagher is a New England-based musical and visual artist. She recently completed a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in clarinet performance at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, where she studied with Mark Nuccio and Dr. Margaret Donaghue, and presented her research in multimedia approaches to contemporary music performance.
During her time in Miami, Kelsey served as the adjunct professor of clarinet at Florida International University, performed regularly as a member of the NODUS Ensemble for contemporary chamber music, taught annually with the Nu Deco NXT Youth Ensemble, and appeared with the New World Symphony. This summer she traveled to Panama City, Panama as a teaching artist for the Alfredo de Saint Malo International Music Festival, taught at the Summer Youth Music School in New Hampshire, and was featured as a concerto soloist with the South Florida Clarinet Choir. Her own compositions will feature in her upcoming solo performance at the 2024 College Music Society Joint National Conference.
Kelsey is currently a freelance clarinetist, adjunct faculty at the University of New Hampshire, and holds a private lesson studio in Southern New Hampshire. She regularly takes painting commissions, and her watercolor art has appeared this year on the covers for the debut albums Emigrate by clarinetist Luke Ellard, and Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail by Breana Gilcher’s LA-based improvising chamber ensemble, Petrichor. Her previous teachers include Dr. Kimberly Cole Luevano at the University of North Texas and Dr. Elizabeth Gunlogson at the University of New Hampshire.
On this page, seven musical ideas, or streams, loop simultaneously in real-time.
As the streams repeat, the musical experience will never be or sound the same because the individual loops run asynchronously and their durations are divergent.
As a result, the seven streams shift and realign into subtle new configurations continuously.
The perpetual metamorphosis of this composition is catalyzed by a commissioned prompt: every seven hours, a select artist serving as the Flame Keeper is given the chance to replace any existing stream with a single new one.
The moment a new stream is introduced, the system enters a seven-hour lockdown, during which the composition cannot be altered by human hands. After the given seven hour lockdown is over, the Flame Keeper may swap another stream and the cycle begins anew.
At the beginning of the week, the new Flame Keeper inherits the state of the installation from the previous one. Due to the seven hour lockdown mechanism, it is impossible to swap all seven streams in less than forty-nine hours.
During this three day transition, the new Flame Keeper builds within the composition created by the previous artist, gradually making it their own.
If the Keeper misses any of the upload windows, the system engages a fail-safe algorithm that replaces any one of the streams with one randomly selected from the historical archive of musical streams of all former Flame Keepers. The results might be harmonious, cacophonous, anodyne, or expressive, yet always surprising.
If left completely abandoned, the composition will evolve with unpredictable results, continuously.
Use this feature to travel back in time to experience any artist's work.
Jakub Ciupinski is a Polish composer living in New York City. Although his music is often associated with electronics and interactive performances, he has written numerous pieces for traditional acoustic forces, varying in scope from solo miniatures to symphonic works. Jakub has collaborated with Metropolis Ensemble since 2009.
Grammy-nominated conductor Andrew Cyr (“a prominent influence in the world of newly emerging music”, The Washington Post) founded Metropolis Ensemble in 2006 to support ascending contemporary composers and performers through the creation of new work.
Avneesh Sarwate is a programmer, musician, and multimedia artist working in the fields of audiovisual performance, installations, and interface design.
Ryan Rose is a software engineer and saxophonist living in Cambridge, MA. His work explores musical expression through robots, physical installations, connected web experiences, and more.
Daniel McKemie is an electronic musician, percussionist, and composer based in New York City. Currently, he is focusing on technology that seeks to utilize the internet and browser technology to realize a more accessible platform for multimedia art.
