SHAWNEE, OHIO (2016-21)

MOJO Magazine (UK): 5/5 Stars
& 2019 Underground Album of the Year

Ohio composer and sound-artist paints his masterpiece.
BRIAN HARNETTY has been lost in Appalachian field recordings for over 10 years. On 2007’s haunting, echoing debut American Winter, this one-time student of the composer Michael Finnissy placed cracked tales and high-flown songs from Kentucky’s Berea College sound archive alongside his own junk shop gamelan constructions of dulcimer, prepared piano, banjo and percussion. For this new work, Harnetty utilizes the archive of Shawnee, an old mining town in Appalachian Ohio, home to his mother’s ancestors. Using the oral histories of some of its inhabitants, and attuned to the grain, rhythm and melody of their voices, Harnetty’s delicate, keening chamber folk recalls Moondog, Charles Ives, and his old mentor, Finnissy, yet retains a benevolent delicacy all of its own, gently reaching back into time and guiding these long-dead story-tellers into the light of the present day.

Musikexpress (Germany): 5/6 stars

When Brian Harnetty began visiting the 650-person town of Shawnee in the southeastern Ohio Appalachians in 2010, he first set out on a family history trail closely linked to the migration of Welsh miners to this “Little Cities of Black Diamonds” region. He made contact with local residents, did research in archives, did field recordings, and discovered a box of 40 cassettes from the 1980s, which turned out to be a true treasure: it contained numerous interviews with an oral tradition of a forgotten history.

People who talked about their everyday lives, and sang songs that shared their memories. "Slowly mixing past and present," Harnetty wrote in the booklet for the album, which was only in the process of deceleration and contours assumed in a collage of interviews, sound recordings, and chamber-folk sequences (“Kammerfolksequenzen”), which he recorded with a small ensemble (including Paul De Jong of The Books on the cello).

Each of the eleven "songs" is dedicated to a narrator. In the photographs, the space between times and generations comes together; when Lucy talks about how she played piano in a local band and always flirted with the boys, at the same time we hear piano, bass, and saxophone from the present, and the contexts shift.

The recordings here are quite similar to those that sonic ethnographer Harnetty and songwriter Will Oldham created in SILENT CITY in 2009, with the help of field recordings. SHAWNEE, OHIO, published on the Berlin label Karlrecords, is a lot at once: acoustic portrait, empathic narrative, and historical search for clues. It is music that opens a door into an unknown room. The simple act of listening can shape the future, says Harnetty.
- Frank Sawatzki, April 25, 2019

Van Magazine: Imaginary Places: The Ambient Influence on Contemporary Music

Writer George Grella tackles contemporary ambient music, and includes Shawnee, Ohio and Wayne National Forest in the discussion.

“If music is about sounds coordinated in time, moving from the present moment to the future until there is nothing left, then perhaps ambient music is the archetypal music. At stake are not notes or rhythms, but time and space. Sound simply unfolds; the abstract structures it defines are not fleeting musical forms, but entire worlds…

Yet the places of ambient music don’t have to be tethered to the present, even though that’s when they are heard—they can be a vision of the future or an evocation of the past.”
- George Grella, July 2019

Dusted Magazine: a dialogue between Peter Taber and Justin Cober-Lake on “Shawnee, Ohio”

Peter Taber: Brian Harnetty’s Shawnee, Ohio offers 11 tracks of archival interview and other recordings mostly made in the 1980s in a small northern Appalachian mining town, each paired with contemporary acoustic instrumentation composed by the artist. The album is presented as both a musical and a folkloristic project. On the latter front, it enters complex ground, as Appalachia was important for the development of the field in the U.S. That work filtered out of the academy and into popular ways of regarding the region. Here, for example, the track “Boy” presents a recording of a child inquiring into the experiences of one of his elders. The recording was made in the 1980s, but in the context of an Appalachian folklore project one senses the imprint of turn-of-the-century field research on the style of interview the boy’s been assigned to conduct (and the fact that he’s been assigned the task in the first place). His questions are overlain with contemporary, deliberately-paced chamber music, dramatizing the interaction. Across multiple temporal frames, then, we glimpse the processes by which communities inquire into, memorialize and nostalgize themselves. This is the most striking feature of the project for me. Justin, what were your initial thoughts?

Justin Cober-Lake: My first thoughts were to try to figure out exactly what Shawnee, Ohio is. The more I feel unable to figure it out, the more I like the work. It’s not a typical folklore project by any means. Harnetty’s compositions make up the bulk of the music, and they’re not typical Appalachian sounds, despite his interest in the region’s music. Some of it comes more from a chamber music tradition, and some of it connects more to modern indie-folk (I hear some Sufjan Stevens in the sparer moments). The work is also a memory of memory, retrieving decades-old interviews about events that happened decades before that. Some of it is self-aware, as when Jack Wright turns a song from a century ago into an anti-fracking singalong. Memory, anthropology, and music start to blend into a work of art that both encapsulates a town and stands at a remove from it, a pretty meditation on a challenged region. One of the strangest moments for me is the appearance of the saxophone on “John,” which could almost pass as Harnetty’s cinematic accompaniment, but which actually comes from a street recording. The whole work becomes something more unified than pastiche, and more complicated than a snapshot, but also something that sits outside its subject more than I expected. I like your point about glimpsing “the processes by which communities…,” but I also wonder about the layer of Harnetty doing something new (memorializing?) with that communal memory. It’s moving and revealing, and I imagine we could fill this space just following one of many possible themes, such as anthropology, modern composition, traditional music, or regional political history.  

Peter Taber: You highlighted two of the moments that really struck me, as well.  Like you, the saxophone on “John” caused me to do a double-take, as I attempted to figure out what temporal layer the music came from. The moment also stands out for its spontaneity on an album in which the predominant feeling is deliberative, whether in terms of musical composition or folkloristic inquiry. Finally, some of my confusion about “John” came from the way it had nothing to do with my own narrow vision of what Appalachia is. I was chastened to remember that if someone plays a saxophone in Appalachia, it is, in a very meaningful and unfacetious way, Appalachian music. So “John” is a useful track for me, in which Shawnee is made briefly strange to outsiders like myself by way of this ordinary moment in which no one performs any particular version of Appalachian-ness, but people simply go about living, jubilantly in this case.  “Jack”’s folk song referencing fracking similarly reminds us that struggles over how communities in the U.S., as well as the country overall, relate to fossil fuel extraction are very much ongoing, and that Shawnee is actually at the front lines of that battle. The piece thus pushes back on the fly-in-amber-in-amber quality that a project like this risks, though the textual framing of the work by Harnetty could have gone a little further in this regard for my taste. 

Justin Cober-Lake: I agree that he could have gone further with the framing, although I’m reacting in part to my own interest in understanding a more complicated version of Appalachia than the standard narrative. Harnetty hasn’t presented a sociological report, but he’s created modern art out of regional history. I don’t mean that he’s done it disrespectfully. I think just the opposite, in fact; he sees something worth presenting in a novel way to make sure that we listen, an approach that sets it apart from a set of field recordings. The oddity of the project keeps it engaging – I’m never quite sure what I’m mining for in any given listen (pun intended) – but it also delineates the challenges of creating a work like this one. You can get a taste of it online at Harnetty’s website, but I’d be interested to see this work performed as part of a multimedia presentation. I don’t know that I’d take anything different away from it, but I’m curious. I’m also curious what audiences would take away. A nice night at a concert? An interest in exploring the area? A raised awareness about fracking? Fortunately the piece isn’t so pristine as to be stuck on that first answer.  

OX Fanzine: 9/10 stars

A gentle cloth of chamber music is spread over archival material in this melancholic and tender publication. The archival material consists of interviews, songs, and conversations with (mostly older) citizens from the village “Shawnee, Ohio,” near the Appalachian Mountains. With his ensemble, Brian Harnetty revels in the memories of the interviewees; memories of the work in the coal mines, of (deceased) friends and family members, and of moving experiences. The narrated and experienced is interwoven emphatically with wood winds, banjo, saxophone, violin, and piano, so that an ethnographic perspective of the village arises. This perspective is enormously fascinating and authentic through its artistic and musical examination of the past. “Shawnee, Ohio” is a respectful dialogue between the past and the present, insightfully making societal, environmental-political, and demographic developments come alive. (9/10 stars)
- Henrik Beeke, June 2, 2019

The Wire: “It’ll stir your heart”

60 years ago, a young radical American rolled up at a Yorkshire village and charmed his way into the mining community there. Clancy Sigal’s “Weekend In Dinlock” is classic reportage shading into fiction, a now rarely acknowledged but genuinely pioneering work in what came to be called the New Journalism, or participatory journalism. Brian Harnetty’s sonic portrait of a small Appalachian mining town has very much the same tone and impact. The archived voices are so perfectly in role that you might assume they were actors, the music so melancholically suited to the scenarios narrated that the whole project sounds like the soundtrack to a neglected smalltown film of a past age.

And yet, what unites the two projects over a long span of time – Sigal died a couple of years ago, back in the Los Angeles he loved and hated – is the strong sense of engagement, not in the old-fashioned sense of specifically political solidarity, but in the ability to absorb oneself so deeply in the history of a place that the most trivial happenings, rather than the most dramatic, turn out to be the telling ones.

As a sonic ethnographer Harnetty (whose family has deep roots in the town) is most obviously inspired by Wendell Berry, who followed Henry Thoreau out into the wild and in the process exposed the Thoreauvian lie about wildness, which is the thing we take with us rather than the thing we seek. Harnetty cleaves to the Berry line about art that heals and protects its subject being “a geography of scars”. He has dug deep into the history of Shawnee, its inhabitants and its inevitable disasters – only fishing is more dangerous than mining, and both are far more dangerous than soldiering – and at every point seems to soothe its scars under a layer of gentle folk, played out on piano (Harnetty himself), reeds, fiddle, cello and vibes, a miniature orchestral underscore for a place of less than 700 souls, located plonk in the southeast of Ohio, one of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds that represent the hidden reality of Trump’s America. He’s their Gatsby, Rockefeller and Mr Big. They still believe in the Dream, knowing it to be a phantasm. Harnetty catches the place in a moment of wakefulness, when memory and desire are equally strong, but no stronger than the realism of acceptance.

Shawnee, Ohio is a difficult record to categorise, caught between spoken word and modern folk, but with the musical side winning out. It’ll stir your heart, even if you don’t quite buy the reality it is selling.
- Brian Morton, June 4, 2019

Das Filter: Brian Harnetty writes a wonderful music portrait about the mining town of Shawnee, Ohio

Harnetty describes his work as a "sonic ethnographer." What this means can be heard in an exciting way on his new album. Shawnee is a typical mining town, founded in 1870, where the people always worked hard, but it has been in decline. Harnetty himself has family ties with Shawnee - his ancestors arrived from Wales in 1872 to start a new life. With the album, the musician reveals the history of the city and its inhabitants - in the form of an oral history cast in music. Interviews with residents - led over several decades and only by chance found in the town’s archive - serve as a backdrop for his careful chamber music pieces - at least until the interviewees do not even talk, but much rather want to sing themselves. Listening to it is as wonderful as it is frustrating. The personal stories and memories allow a step into the people’s private lives, with which we must first cope. The portraits that emerge get under your skin. For the area was and is a battered place: formerly coal, today fracking. Against this background, the stories automatically become more dramatic. You begin to empathize with the situation of people, to feel what happened to them earlier, what problems and situations they faced. And you also try to imagine what kind of people they were. A great work full of depth - and an important contribution to the historiography of the forgotten.
- May 5, 2019

Columbus Monthly: Columbus composer helps us to learn to hear

Columbus-based composer and pianist Brian Harnetty lived in Berea, Kentucky, in 2006, working to complete a fellowship at Berea College. Each morning, he headed to a basement library on campus and immersed himself in one of the world's most significant sound archives documenting Appalachian history and culture. In long rows of cataloged stacks are thousands of recordings: oral histories, old radio shows, field recordings from people's homes, others from inside the region's many churches. The sound archives—stored in a mix of mediums—include open reels, cassettes, and even some 78s. With nearly 85 years' worth of material, it would take someone a lifetime to listen to everything. Harnetty had only a month.

He'd sit, headphones wrapped around his head to cancel out the world around him, listening to samples, eight hours a day, days on end. The recordings he selected were, by default, mostly random. Some he found searching the catalog with keywords like "winter" or "night." Others were suggested by archivists and librarians during coffee breaks. Then one day, Harnetty heard a voice—raspy and boisterous, an emotive contralto unaccompanied by instrumentation. It was Addie Graham, a singer of traditional ballads and hymns, many originating from the British Isles. The recordings were made in the 1970s. Graham was born in the late 1890s in eastern Kentucky and sang in obscurity until her early 80s, when she began performing at regional musical festivals. It was the rough cuts of these recordings, the lulls between songs when Graham bantered with others in the studio or laughed with abandon in a high-pitched peal, that Harnetty listened to over and over again. "You could hear how alive she is," Harnetty explains in a recent interview at his home studio in Clintonville. "She is so full of life."

The weekend after first listening to the Graham archives at Berea, Harnetty attended a party in nearby Whitesburg, Kentucky, and talked about the impression Graham had made on him. "Oh, yeah, that's my great-grandmother," a woman at the party, Amelia Kirby, told him, and proceeded to introduce the young composer to her father, Addie Graham's grandson, Rich Kirby, who has worked to keep his grandmother's music alive. This unexpected and brief connection with the descendants associated so intimately with a sound archive already chosen by Harnetty changed many things for the young composer. Harnetty had been using samples from sound archives in his works without seeking direct permission from the musicians or singers, or ever meeting someone with a direct connection to a recording. This serendipitous encounter altered not only how he now thinks about sound archives, but how he approaches his work as a composer. Sound archives are not sterile, dead things, he came to understand. They have their own lives. They are connected to living human beings.

Harnetty's 2007 album, American Winter, represented the first expression of this new vision. The first track opens with Graham's infectious banter: She's clearing her throat, asking where to stand and, at one point, begins to talk about Florida. The effect is a rare and unexpected intimacy. Graham then begins, with uncommon force and authority, to belt out a soulful ballad about birds singing in the winter ... on every leaf and vine. The effect, for the listener, is a bit like eavesdropping, though more intimate. We have been invited. We can hear Harnetty listening along, adding his own layer of meaning to this decades-old recording: dissonant piano chords and softly rung bells. "Haunting" might be a fitting way to describe the song's effect, but it would be the wrong word—a two-bit cliché, and the effect is something else entirely: an act of transport to the past without the schmaltzy feel of nostalgia.

Harnetty's second major work, 2009's Silent City, is described as an "otherworldly album that demands—and deserves—undivided attention in a darkened room with some good headphones" by a music critic at Paste magazine. The album revolves around a myth: the imagined small town. It still operates largely as an abstraction. Harnetty is moving toward something different, even if he doesn't yet know what exactly that something is.

Shawnee, Ohio, population 655, was founded in 1872 and once was the largest town in Perry County. Harnetty's maternal ancestors arrived in this village the year of its founding, part of a migration of Welsh miners seeking work in the booming coal fields of the region. His grandfather, Mordecai Williams, grew up here, played saxophone and piano at the high school, then left, after graduating in 1925. Harnetty first visited Shawnee's Main Street, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in 2010, after he had started working with Marina Peterson, a performance cellist and an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. Working with Peterson, an anthropologist who has spent her career integrating the discipline with sound studies, Harnetty completed a doctorate in interdisciplinary arts as he developed a new approach to his work as a composer and began merging sounds archives with ethnography.

Instead of an imagined small town, he spent more than five years coming back, again and again, to Shawnee, trying to understand his personal connection to this place. His performance here is the culmination of those years of "deeply hanging out," as Harnetty puts it, in a real place, with real people. "This whole new process means that I can't detach myself from the piece," Harnetty says. "It's not an abstract thing. It's a very concrete world, and there are people connected to the archives, and I have a responsibility to do a piece that I believe in, something that offers respect and dignity to the people I have been sampling."

Harnetty debuted Shawnee, Ohio, a composition named after the town, with performances at the Wexner Center for the Arts, which co-commissioned the piece, in October. But it is here, in Shawnee's old opera house, built in 1907 and known today as Tecumseh Commons, that the composer has most wanted to perform.

During a potluck dinner before the show in the downstairs lobby, Skip Ricketts, who owns the building, takes a group to the upstairs theater. Standing in the dusty and cavernous space, Ricketts explains how he came to own the tallest privately owned building in Perry County (only the county courthouse is taller) and spent decades trying to revive it. He was running a diner in Shawnee, back in the summer of 1976. Two guys came into the diner for a cup of coffee. They told him their plan to tear the 75-foot-tall building down, only to salvage the building's massive steel I-beams. "For them, the only value in this building was some steel," Ricketts says. He asked the two men how much they were paying. $500. Ricketts immediately went to the owner of the building and talked him into selling it to him for $500, even though he didn't have the money to buy it. He borrowed the cash from his father. "For 20 years, it rained into the building after a fire next door jumped to the roof and put holes in the ceiling," Ricketts says, pointing up to the ceiling. "It's a testament to the structure that it really didn't hurt it." There has been the occasional grant, bake sale, concert, and for 30 years, a basketball tournament to raise money. "A million dollars in here wouldn't even go very far," Ricketts admits.

The walls are bare to the lath. In a corner, a sign says: "TO-NIGHT BASKET-Ball DANCING."

A dusty piano, its guts open, has keys like broken teeth, blackened and crooked. There are signs of progress: new wooden stairs up the three flights from the downstairs lobby; drywall on the right wall of the theater, up to the ceiling over the thin lath—wood planks that run horizontally like music staff. But the stage curtain—Ricketts tells us he suspects it's made of asbestos—has not been moved. The opera house was a place once full of life, from its first event in 1907, a basketball game, to the site of high school graduations and class plays.

It has also been a 210-seat movie theater, with one of the first sound projectors in the state, and after the shows, people would move the chairs and make room for a band, dancing into the night. When Ricketts was growing up in Shawnee, he watched picture shows in the theater every weekend. There are no picture shows in Shawnee anymore.

Downstairs the potluck is ending. A gaggle of kids roam about eating cookies. The adults grab cans of beer and wine from a makeshift bar near a small kitchen, before settling in a semicircle in front of a makeshift stage. A video projector in the back of the room is aimed at a blank white wall. It's too dusty and dangerous to hold concerts with a full audience upstairs, although earlier in the day, Harnetty recorded a session of Shawnee, Ohio upstairs with the eight-person orchestra, which includes flute, saxophone, bass clarinet, banjo, cello and viola, along with Harnetty on piano and electronics.

Harnetty is dressed casually in a flannel shirt and jeans. Tall and bespectacled, he has an imposing presence, yet he speaks reservedly and with complete sincerity when he begins his introduction to the crowd of about 60 or so. Within moments, his 8-year-old son walks up, puts his arm around him, trying to get his attention. "I need to talk right now," Harnetty says, gently. "This is my son Henry; he's going to be really good in the front row." But Henry runs off with a group of kids who play tag outside in a small garden park next to the theater, where a bronze statue of a coal miner stands watch.

Harnetty gives a brief overview of the performance, explaining the score's structure and origins—11 portraits of actual people, told through a montage of archival videos, photos and sound recordings. Many of the tracks focus on Shawnee, stitched together by Harnetty's original score. Some of the videos were found during the many interviews he conducted with people in the region, including a man from Murray City who handed him a video cassette tape after he met him and said: "Either there's some 1920s and 1930s coal-mining video on here, or it's stuff I taped from the History Channel." Harnetty was pleased to discover it was the former. The footage is spliced and cut within the work, mingling with new images and film of Shawnee today created by Harnetty. "The past and the present, sometimes they get a little mixed up," he says, as the lights go down and the performance begins.

It would be impossible to narrate the hour-long performance—it flits and lingers, shifts and cuts within a montage of tragic, celebratory and everyday events: the state's worst mine fire in 1930 at the Sunday Creek Coal Company, in which more than 82 men died, alongside footage of activists singing a protest song at a demonstration against fracking; a boy delivering papers; a murder ballad from the town of Gore, Ohio; a parade of musicians and young children riding bikes down a vibrant Main Street. It is an impressionistic tour de force through this region's past and present, and the lack of any systemization is, in fact, its greatest strength. History rarely has a clean narrative thread—and as it is often told, glosses over the social life of people and place. Harnetty avoids such traps, letting the people of this region, whom he has spent years listening to, speak instead. In doing so, he makes no narrative demands for a coherent storyline: The collage of images and archives conveys instead, and with admirable fidelity, a sense of this place, the struggle of its people and a reverence for the resilience and hope still found here. One comes away wanting all of history to be accompanied by a live score.

A few weeks after the Shawnee performance, I drive to Harnetty's home studio in Clintonville. When he opens the front door, his dog, Iggy, bounds out. As we sit in his living room for the interview, Iggy gnaws with great vigor on an enormous bone at Harnetty's feet. Surprisingly, considering the composer has spent so many years talking to veritable strangers in his field research for his latest project, Harnetty's natural state is reclusiveness. "I have to psyche myself to go talk to people," he says. "In the classical world, there's a lot of hiding out in the studio, in the practice rooms, and those things are so crucial to getting technique down. But you also have to live as a citizen and a human that interacts with other people. It is the only way to bring people into a relationship with the music."

Harnetty was born in 1973. He grew up in Westerville, and although neither of his parents were musicians, music ran through the family on his mother's side. He began taking piano lessons when he was about 6, and throughout his training, he often thought of the dreams his grandfather, Mordecai Williams from Shawnee, most likely gave up as the Depression limited his options—limits Harnetty has not himself faced.

In 1998, Harnetty moved to England. He earned a coveted spot at the Royal Academy of Music in London to study under Michael Finnissy, one of the most influential British composers of his generation. Finnissy, an experimental composer, samples folk music, sometimes hundreds of songs at a time, splicing them into a chaotic collage and creating a kind of musical commentary on how we understand what is rural and what is folk life. Finnissy's compositions operate firmly in the world of notation and classical music, and as such, operate as abstractions. "He was the first person with intelligence and authority in my life that believed in me," Harnetty says.

By 2000, Harnetty had completed his master's degree in music composition at the academy and returned to Ohio, a move encouraged by Finnissy. "He thought there was something here I really needed to investigate, and some questions I needed to answer," Harnetty says. But the young composer drifted. He waited tables at The Monk in Bexley. He became involved in environmental issues. He slowly unwound from the intensity of the Royal Academy, but the inspiration his mentor instructed him to find in his hometown eluded him. He moved to San Francisco and into a three-month residency at an artist's colony. He was the only composer among them. There were visual artists, sound artists and poets. He experimented with sampling and sound archives. A new world—outside of classical music—opened.

While Harnetty still considers Finnissy his primary influence, other composers inform his work, including experimental composers: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Frederic Rzewski, Steve Reich and Pauline Oliveros. "I was always interested in the political aspect of a lot of the composers who dealt with contemporary or political issues. All those things excited me. I wanted to find a way to combine those things into my work."

With Shawnee, Ohio Harnetty has transformed his quiet practice of listening into a novel new form of storytelling. Performance cellist Peterson praises Shawnee, Ohio for how it raised important contemporary questions. "How do we listen to a region? How do we listen to cycles of energy and economics? It was so powerful to see how this process of engagement manifested itself in his work," she says. "Brian is taking seriously human sound—the sound of coal, for instance. It's material, and it has a human angle, and he's taking on questions of political economy, but through sound."
––Mya Frazier, February, 2017

The Old Weird Albion (UK): “Nothing less than a masterpiece”

In the rush to forget, there are those who find themselves compelled to remember. To act, not just as their own memories, but the memories of entire cultures – to act as shaman and scribe. Modernity, as Paul Connerton says, ‘has a particular problem with forgetting. To say this is not to claim that modernity has a monopoly of cultural amnesia … [but] it remains the case that there are types of structural forgetting which are specific to the culture of modernity.’

This couldn’t be more true than it is in America, 2019, in which there is an almost fanatical demand for horizontal time – that each event of the past be like the milemarkers that stand at the side of an American highway; points on the line noted in passing mostly for not having passed sooner. And what has arisen in response is a subculture – I think, perhaps, it’s time to call it a cult; a wonderful, fruitful cult – of remembering.

Brian Harnetty is a shaman, scribe, archivist and archaeologist of these memories, and his latest work – Shawnee, Ohio; the culmination of nearly a decade of research, composition and meticulous remembering – is nothing less than a masterpiece.

The music on this album is based around haunting oral-history recordings made in the 1950s and 1980s with residents of his grandparents’ hometown of Shawnee*, Ohio (pop. 655), and related areas of the rural and Appalachian parts of the state**. These recordings occasionally find the often-elderly interviewees discussing important historical events – notably the Millfield Mine Disaster, the worst of its kind in Ohio’s coal-riddled history. But just as often they are discussions of everyday, now-forgotten lives: ‘Jim’ opens the album, for example, by talking about watching people walk up and down Main Street in his childhood, in doing so creating a Joycean map of now-gone Shawnee. There’s ‘Lucy’, who describes playing music at events we might not today imagine as landmarks of social life, such as a miner’s safety meeting, and complementary ‘Judd’, who speaks of his life as a miner.

Around this, composer and pianist Harnetty has lovingly woven a soft city out of light and shadow, clarinet and cello, vibraphone and squeezebox, banjo and time. Harnetty’s music is like Gavin Bryars with a deep knowledge of the Appalachian front porch and living room; parlour music for a Jarmusch film. But those comparisons are just lures; mentions warranted as much by a shared goal, the re-imagining of collapsed places and the resuscitation of flatlining memories, an act David Southwell might categorize under his slogan, ‘Re-enchantment is resistance’. (I’ll say little about the music here, because others have done so better and will continue to do so.)

In reinvigorating the lives of ordinary people, now-dead, I don’t think Harnetty is aggrandizing the past at the expense of the future – the danger that the cult risks. There is, certainly, a romance to these long-gone ways of being – as when ‘Ina’ sings a localized version of an old murder ballad in untrained lilts, something few could arrange with such tenderness as Harnetty’s music. But his chosen voices are those whose stories map onto our own: when a child quizzes his grandmother about the old days for a school oral-history project (in the 1980s), we hear only the questions. The questions are the only part that matter.

I’m reminded here of one of the most powerful artworks I’ve seen in my days: a performance by college students in West Virginia of Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak. In CME, documentary poems based on the government’s inquiry into a mining disaster are juxtaposed with school curricula about mining and labour. Nowak and the performers had transformed base administrative texts into something so profound, so evocative and nearly religious, of a life commonly thought of as ‘the past’ and yet decidedly connected to the present and future of these peoples’ lives. In ‘Jack’ and ‘John’ Harnetty uses modern recordings, of an anti-fracking rally in Wayne National Forest in Southeastern Ohio, and of a street party in Rendville, Ohio, a predominantly African-American. They sound, both in recording quality and cultural tone, as though they might be from any of the sessions otherwise used on Shawnee, Ohio.

And their message couldn’t be more clear: memory is re-enchantment is resistance.
- Justin Hopper, June 2019

Nexus Newspaper: Brian Harnetty comes close to perfect with new album — 4.5 / 5 stars

You probably won’t hear it on the radio, but Shawnee, Ohio is an amazing work of art. The sixth studio release from Columbus, Ohio-based interdisciplinary artist Brian Harnetty pushes musical boundaries without the slightest hint of awkwardness.

Shawnee, Ohio is a collection of archival soundbites set to music. A mixture of old and contemporary recordings backed by an Appalachian chamber folk ensemble, Harnetty’s latest album paints a picture of the divided culture of rural Appalachian Ohio. Each track tells a bit of the story from a different perspective, and all the songs stand out, but Shawnee, Ohio is incredibly cohesive and plays well in its entirety.

“Boy” is the recollection of a young man asking his grandmother what life was like when she was young, set to a mix of banjo, fiddles, and piano that captures the emotion perfectly. Others tell stories of their youth in a town that never quite recovered from a mining disaster, which are eventually contrasted with current-day protests against fracking practices.

Harnetty’s music is like nothing I’ve ever heard. It is understated yet breathtaking. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it initially, but I listened to the record start to finish for 14 straight days, and was moved to tears numerous times. I’m not comfortable handing out a 5/5 rating, but Shawnee, Ohio comes close.
— Fred Cameron, June 13, 2019

Trust Fanzine: A charming project at the intersection of sociological and ethnological approaches

A very nice job: a small town in the foothills of the Appalachians, which had to undergo a lot of structural change over the past 150 years (mining and dismantling and so on)... In any case, with the help of such a small town, Harnetty draws a vivid picture of industrialization, labor disputes, crises and the associated sensitivities with the help of recorded tapes. Harnetty sets voice recordings as voices in a double sense. Of course, these people tell very concrete things. But they also appear here as instruments that Harnetty incorporates into compositions that, in turn, connect with workman and folk songs that are transposed into often melancholy smoldering string arrangements. A detailed booklet describes background and provides additional material. A charming project at the intersection of sociological and ethnological approaches as well as visual and acoustic arts.
- Trust Fanzine (Germany), June 18, 2019

Rockdelux Magazine (Spain): “A true delicacy”

Oral stories, anecdotal recordings, piano, flute, sax, clarinet, vibraphone, banjo, violin, cello ... "Shawnee, Ohio" is a sonic story that the American Brian Harnetty has made of Shawnee, a mining town in Appalachia where his family is from. He uses archival recordings where neighbors speak of work, love, death, friendship, hope ... Memories that cross paths with songs rescued from the archives of Anne Grimes, a song hunter who toured the region in the 1950s recording locals performing murder ballads and folkloric pieces. The result is a beautiful documentary sound - packaged on a large format CD with photographs, texts and the transcription of the voices - which combines spoken word, chamber music and unadulterated folklore and invites you to investigate thoroughly in the work of this composer and writer, living in Columbus, who worked with singer Will Oldham on three of the tracks of Harnetty’s earlier album, "Silent City" (2009). Between anthropology and modern classical, "Shawnee, Ohio" is a true delicacy that activates the springs of memory and neutralizes the ghosts of oblivion.
– Juan Cervera, Rockdelux Magazine (Spain)

The Sound Projector: “Everything hangs together so well”

I have an old friend who is habitually eagle-eyed when he’s out and about. He fixes his gaze in a 180 degree sweep on the pavement in front of him as he walks, scanning for dropped and forgotten-about items. He mostly turns up accidentally dropped coins it has to be said, but sometimes other kinds of objects; notes, tobacco pouches – that kind of thing. Such is the acuteness of his peripheral vision that he misses nothing of interest. You’d be amazed by the frequency of his finds. I am anyway. This album by Brian Harnetty feels a bit like that; an expectant trawl of the ordinary – although the things he’s stumbled across are personal histories and rural stories rather than the odd pound coin – which turns up the occasional gem which Harnetty then quickly picks up, shoves in his pocket and scurries back to his studio to work into his latest piece…

…All through Shawnee, Ohio it sounds like the compositions are written around the voice recordings; everything hangs together so well. Hearing these voices telling about their experiences is more directly affecting that reading dry text in a history book or a droning narrator from the Smithsonian Channel… It’s a fascinating glimpse into the past and at the same time a reminder that some things never change. More than just a document – a galvanising tool. Recommended.

- The Sound Projector (UK), May, 2020

Vital Weekly:

A small village in Appalachia, that is Shawnee, Ohio and it’s where the ancestors of Brian Harnetty settled in the late 19th century. He doesn't live there, but since 2010 he went back a lot to sift through archives, talk to people, and investigate the history of the town. He found a box of cassettes from the 1980s of people, now probably gone, talking about the past, a boy interviewing his grandmother, recordings of people gathering, but also murder songs and a song about fracking, which is where the region makes its money these days. Harnetty set this to music while playing the piano and receiving help from people on flute, saxophone, bass clarinet, banjo, violin and cello; the latter being played by Paul de Jong, formerly of The Books, and the only name I recognized. Everything is documented in the booklet in this package and makes it a fine and thorough piece of anthropology as well as a disc of some interesting music. Music and text/field recordings/archival recordings surely fit very well together. Harnetty stays close to home with his musical interpretations. At least, that's what I think, as I am not really an anthropologist when it comes to musical traditions in the USA from, say, 1800 onwards until now; what is typical Appalachian music? And to what extent this is not, really? Those are questions I can't answer, of course, based on the near-absent knowledge I have of this music. It all sounds quite intimate like we're sitting in a barn and in one corner there is small ensemble playing sparse music, while in another corner there is a conversation going, or a talk, or such like and you can easily listen to both at the same time. You can also decide to close your eyes and listen to the voices as a supplement to the music. For me, that is also something that worked very well. At the same time, I would think that the music is perhaps also a little outside of our normal musical digest.
- Frans de Waard, April 23, 2019

Radiohoerer Blog (Germany): “A contender for the 2019 CD of the year”

Brian Harnetty has selected 11 different people from Shawnee, including former miners, for Shawnee, Ohio. They tell about their lives, their hard everyday life. This goes from the beginning of the town to the present and to the fight of the region against fracking… With this, Brian Harnetty personally goes in search of the past of his family, who had also worked in the coal mines in this city. True to the motto: Without the past there is no future.

Harnetty edited these interviews, expanded them with samples, and wrote different pieces of music for them. You can call Harnetty an acoustic ethnographer. He listens to people in their places to achieve a transformation in the future. With a small chamber ensemble of selected musicians, he has composed a music that supports these interviews, expanded and put into their service. He has found a distinct mood for each person.

The charm of the authentic has something very touching. People tell their stories, and there is singing that is pure, so pure. There is something here that is hard to resist. Through his treatment and in combination with the music composed for it, these conversations with eyewitnesses experience a new artistic dimension.
- May 2, 2019

Impatto Sonoro (Italy):

Most of the time, one can’t find interdisciplinarity in artistic creations. This is because it is mostly a retrospective “aesthetic” condition, instead of a poetic work: it is a conceptualization that comes after the work done, as if to justify and crush us into external elements that are only postponed to give “meaning” to an otherwise empty production.

But in this case––and it is not declared by Harnetty––we find a micro-history, a project that focuses on very limited geographical areas, to offer a meticulous and analytical reconstruction of the history of small local communities: events, characters and mental attitudes that inevitably escape large scale history, which is made up of great historical processes analyzed by means of general categories (State, social orders, economic systems, etc.) and conventional periods (Medieval, modern and Contemporary).

Brian Harnetty, in his "Shawnee, Ohio," focuses on eleven portraits of local residents of the small town of Shawnee, Ohio. The town was formed around 1870 thanks to coal mining. A century of decline followed for local businesses, and today the residents fight to survive while trying to prevent the town’s decay. Despite this uncertain future, these residents continue to work through environmental, economic and cultural projects. Since 2010, Harnetty has visited and worked at Shawnee. He followed in the footsteps of his family (Welsh immigrant miners in the nineteenth century).

The testimonies collected by Harnetty, accompanied by folk music (although it is not) bear witness to memories, memories and contexts of daily life of a community that lived off a thriving business and is now dying out. The nostalgic mood (sometimes guitar, sometimes piano, sometimes strings) developed with deliberately minimalist techniques is a carpet on which the monologues of the protagonists that give the titles to the tracks develop (Jim, Amanda, Lucy, Judd, Sigmund, etc.).

This disc, almost ethnomusicological (we should say ethnographic or “demomusicological,” since the music played here wasn’t developed or generated in that particular context) is a document, a testimony, a methodological development, a diary, whose music is an excuse, a background on which words, images, the past are mixed together; and which perhaps will become the last reliable document of a community poised between presence and absence.
- Riccardo Gorone, June 4, 2019

Rock e Rilla (Italy): “Neo-classical ambient magic”

In Appalachian Ohio there is the semi-abandoned town of Shawnee, which had its splendor at the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s as an important mining town. With the closure of these extraction centers the village was left by many of its inhabitants and those who remained try to preserve its memory. Brian Harnetty, musician and researcher, has recovered from Shawnee’s historical archives tapes with old vocal recordings of the locals, including narrated daily events, personal stories, and murder ballads that the artist, together with his collaborators, has set to music with delicate piano, clarinet and flute interventions, to create neo-classical ambient magic. CHARMING. 
- Gianluca Polverari, July 2019

Blow Up Magazine: “a series of crepuscular-toned chamber music scores”

Brian Harnetty is a musician, philologist, researcher, and interdisciplinary artist dedicated to the careful work of documentation and protection of cultural heritage through projects aimed at reinterpreting the past with the tools of modernity. And it is precisely on these parallel planes that his latest work entitled "Shawnee, Ohio" is articulated, composed by grafting archival material, personal memories, documentary research, and field recordings into a series of crepuscular-toned chamber music scores. Shawnee is the place where Harnetty's ancestors settled after emigrating from Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century to extract coal in the mines; it is a small Appalachian village that has become a destination of continuous exploration and Harnetty’s greatest source of inspiration. There the author has recovered the taped recordings that constitute the backbone of the work, mostly tapes recorded in the early eighties and kept in tiny domestic archives from which fragments of interviews of residents emerge, songs inspired by work or blood, complaints about exploitation conditions, and sounds taken from the rural context. A succession of auditory memories from which springs a fluid and continuous narrative, integrated with simple and descriptive scores in which the contribution of the strings entrusted to Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Jocelyn Hach, and to the ex Books Paul De Jong stands out. The writing of Harnetty seems to be inspired by the Books, but if in the New York duo everything - sounds, images, words - merged perfectly, here the archive material and the instrumentalists' contribution seem to be placed on parallel planes, like flowing panels in sync at different levels of depth and intensity. 
- Massimiliano Busti, July 2019

Columbus Alive: Brian Harnetty Brings “Shawnee, Ohio” Project to the Screen

For several years now, Brian Harnetty has immersed himself in the rich history of Shawnee and other nearby Appalachian towns of Southeastern Ohio collectively known as the Little Cities of Black Diamonds, a reference to the area’s long relationship to coal mining. Harnetty has turned this ethnographic research into multiple art projects bearing the name Shawnee, Ohio, including an album and a series of performances that combined contemporary chamber music with archival video and audio from the region.

More recently, Harnetty, a Columbus-based interdisciplinary artist, used some of the same material to launch a project he called Forest Listening Rooms, during which participants sit silently in the woods of Southeast Ohio to deeply contemplate the surrounding sounds and the future of the land. A portion of the listening sessions also included some of Harnetty’s original music and interviews with Shawnee residents past and present. 

Now, Harnetty has turned Shawnee, Ohio into a film, which will premiere at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, March 9, at the Wexner Center and will remain available to screen for free through March 23. But it’s possible the entire project — the film, the concerts, the album — would never have happened if someone hadn’t handed him a box of cassette tapes from the 1980s and ’90s containing oral histories collected from the Little Cities of Black Diamonds.

“There was a deliberate effort by the people of Shawnee and these other towns to record the stories of the older generation before they died. And in doing so, it completely changed the stereotypical narrative of what's happening in the region and brought out the richness of the labor history and the environmental disaster recovery — the ways that the towns and people worked to hold their buildings up and hold each other up,” Harnetty said. “There were community members who would listen to those cassette tapes for years afterwards and keep them in mind. And I think that was really the start of the change for the region.”

For the Shawnee, Ohio album, Harnetty spent hours listening to the tapes, pairing spoken-word selections with music to create aural portraits. (He also supplemented the tapes with audio from the Library of Congress collection of Anne Grimes, a musician and folklorist who made field recordings from all over Ohio in the 1950s.) With those pairings already solidified, Harnetty set about making the film version — a project he hadn’t originally intended to pursue, but one that now feels like an essential part of the Shawnee journey.

“Everything was built backwards, with the music being composed as a result of the archival tapes, and then the film and image part of it being added in to fit the music. … It puts the music and the voices front and center and allows for the viewer to really embrace it and feel it very deeply,” he said. “It feels like you’re peeling layers of an onion, and trying to get at the historical stories of the region, but also the emotional stories that are there, too. I think that’s the contribution that art can make to these issues. It's the one thing that I think I can contribute.”

Harnetty divides the one-hour film into three parts: Town and People, Mining and Disaster, Protest and Hope. In the first section, “Jim,” a former Shawnee resident recollects the boyhood version of his hometown, and as he describes the buildings and people along Main Street, Harnetty juxtaposes archival images of Shawnee with modern-day photos. 

The middle portion of the film also includes some of the oldest known footage (likely early 20th century) of Ohio miners coming out of the mines after a workday. “It reminds me of very early cinema, like the Lumiere brothers,” Harnetty said. “There's also a bunch of footage that comes from the ’50s and ’60s from Murray City, which is really close by [Shawnee]. There was an amateur filmmaker there, and that footage was given to me by a resident of Murray City who had digitized it himself shortly before he died.” 

In a remarkable on-camera interview (“Sigmund”), a survivor of the 1930 Millfield Mine Disaster that killed 82 miners still struggles to comprehend the enormity of the tragedy. “Almost every house was touched by death,” he says. “Everybody was numb for weeks.” 

That depth of feeling is threaded throughout the film alongside historical documentation of incidents such as the New Straitsville mine fire of 1884, when striking miners set the mines ablaze. The fire continued burning for more than a century and still smolders underground to this day. Archival photos depict residents frying eggs in a pan over the smoking ground and a sign boasting, “World’s Greatest Mine Fire.”  

Shawnee, Ohio touches on modern-day issues, such as fracking, as well as the racial history of Southeast Ohio, including the town of Rendville, where many Black miners lived in the late 1800s. During the “Protest and Hope” segment, Neva Randolph, the granddaughter of freed slaves who settled in Logan, Ohio, sings “My Station’s Gonna be Changed,” a gospel song evoking the Underground Railroad.   

“Being a film and documentary buff myself, and because this is a virtual, online event, I'm imagining people watching it from that perspective, like they would be watching a documentary, except that there's no narrator, and you hear the stories from the voices of the people themselves. It becomes very deeply immersive for the audience to watch it this way,” Harnetty said. “It's not detached at all. You feel very connected to it.” 

- Joel Oliphint, March 8, 2021

The Lantern: Brian Harnetty is bringing new visual project for his album ‘Shawnee, Ohio’ to the Wexner Center for the Arts

After over a decade in the making, musician Brian Harnetty is ready to show the world his visual project, which explores and navigates the history and town of Shawnee, Ohio in the Appalachian region.  

Brian Harnetty, a Columbus-born musical artist, brings a visual project for his musical album “Shawnee, Ohio,” which has been in the works for the past 11 years, to the Wexner Center for the Arts. The project showcases the mining town of Shawnee, Ohio, and its residents, and it will be viewable online for two weeks, starting with the premiere and live Q&A Tuesday at 5 p.m. 

“This is a new version or iteration of the project, and I’ve turned it into a 60-minute film with archival images and video and contemporary images and video, and all of the music together, and I think it works really well,” Harnetty said. “I really like how the viewer can get really immersed in the world of both the music and the images, and it feels a little bit like a documentary, but on the experimental side, so somewhere in between that and watching a music video.” 

Harnetty said he became interested in the specific Appalachian town because of his ancestral ties to the region and the complex history of the community. 

“I don’t identify as Appalachian, but both my father’s and mother’s families are from Appalachian Ohio,” Harnetty said. “And so my maternal grandfather was from Shawnee. So, I have an ‘insider outsider’ status that has allowed me to have an introduction and talk to people, but I still am a bit of an outsider too, so my connection is through family.”

Even with Harnetty’s connection to the town of Shawnee, he said he was also interested in the general community and dynamic of this area and its mining culture.

The project details 11 residents from Shawnee and other small surrounding towns who talk about their lives and experiences residing in a town with mining culture and how this culture has impacted their lives, Harnetty said. 

“It started a decade ago where I began doing ethnographic research in the region, focusing on sound,” Harnetty said. “Then in 2016, we created a live performance piece including those residents, which depicts in that [visual piece] two centuries of extraction in the region, booms and bust cycles, the towns and the people, as well as mining labor disasters. So those are the themes that we explored, and we took that on tour and performed it in many places.” 

Although this piece is about a specific town in Ohio, Harnetty said the themes and issues explored throughout the short film can be applied to issues faced by a multitude of communities.

“In this moment where there’s a lot of anxiety over energy and energy use and extraction, certainly with the events in Texas, for example, over the past three weeks, I think that this project enters into that conversation, but through a human lens,” Harnetty said. “It shows the very complex situation around extraction and its long history of booms and busts, and yet at the same time, it offers a very personal intimate portrait of different residents that lived there.” 

This project was co-commissioned by the Wexner Center in 2016 and involved Ashley Stanton, a senior producer for the Performing Arts Department at the Wexner Center. Stanton said this project is reflective of the current ways artists are innovating during the pandemic because live performances have been impossible. 

“This sort of reworking of it kind of speaks to the situation that we’re all in with the pandemic and everything and just how various performing artists are really innovating in these really creative, beautiful ways to still showcase their art while we’re not able to all be together live,” Stanton said. 

Stanton said this free program has also been made more accessible for those at home by not requiring registration and including closed captions.

Stanton said the project has relevance for people from all walks of life, despite its focus on small-town life. 

“The piece is so accessible because it’s related to the everyday lives of these people so, you know, I think just feeling the work will be instructive in that regard,” Stanton said. 

Harnetty said this visual project encourages viewers to think about the issues mining has brought to rural towns.

“I think that watching this is a really affecting experience. It sort of touches you emotionally and then leads you to larger questions about rural versus urban communities, about the issues of extraction and boom and bust culture and cycles,” Harnetty said. “And then also how we should use the land in the future. And how can we find ways to get it to recover and then also to help the people in those communities to recover economically as well?”

The live streaming of the visual project for “Shawnee, Ohio” will take place on the website for the Wexner Center. Following the live stream will be a live Q&A with Brian Harnetty, Shawnee Mayor Beverly Trovato and community member John Winnenberg, who will discuss the project and the town of Shawnee.

- Paradise Thomas, The Lantern, March 8, 2021

 Columbus Alive: Brian Harnetty mines southeast Ohio’s past for Shawnee, Ohio

While working on his Ph.D. at Ohio University, Columbus musician and archivist Brian Harnetty conducted ethnographic research (“Basically just deep hanging out,” he said) in southeast Ohio, paying particular attention to a group of Appalachian coal-mining towns known as the Little Cities of Black Diamonds.

After the coal boom, most of the Little Cities went bust, including Shawnee, an architecturally preserved town of around 600 people located about 65 miles southeast of Columbus. Harnetty discovered he had family roots in Shawnee — his grandfather Mordecai Williams graduated from high school there in 1925. 

In 2010, Harnetty, whose previous projects collected audio from the Appalachian Sound Archives at Berea College in Kentucky and from the archives of avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, asked a Shawnee historian if the town had any sound archives. “He said, ‘Well, let me check,’” Harnetty said recently at a Clintonville coffee shop. “He went into his back closet and pulled a box of cassette tapes out. They were full of interviews he did in the 1980s and ’90s.”

Harnetty digitized and cataloged 40 cassette tapes, then went about the work of listening. He also supplemented the tapes with audio from the Library of Congress collection of Anne Grimes, who made field recordings of folk songs from all over Ohio in the 1950s. “There were no recordings from Shawnee, but there were other recordings from some of the other Little Cities,” he said. “There’s two murder ballads, both based on classic folk songs, but they have local lyrics. Both are from this little town called Gore, as in ‘gory.’ I think the name may have come after these murders.” 

Though Harnetty eventually adds his own music as a way of reframing the sounds, he never begins composing right away. For four or five years, Harnetty listened and investigated the context of the audio to make sure he wasn’t culturally strip-mining the archives. “Doing some serious research and also hanging out with the communities connected to the archives doesn’t give you carte blanche to use it however you want,” Harnetty said, though over time, the hope is that “you can find some ways to use it ethically but still have your own artistic voice in there.”

Inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio, Harnetty, a pianist, created a series of aural portraits, focusing on one person for each of the 11 tracks that make up Shawnee, Ohio, which will be released next year. On Thursday and Friday, Oct. 27 and 28, Harnetty and seven other musicians (playing flute, saxophone, banjo, violin, cello, clarinet and other instruments) will perform the songs, accompanied by photo and video projections, at the Wexner Center (a co-commissioner of the piece, along with support from several other arts organizations).

The first portrait is titled “Jim.” “He’s describing the buildings and the people in the town when he was a kid,” Harnetty said, “and in his mind he’s moving from building to building along Main Street, which is totally fascinating. … Part of the visual project is to document the town today, so as he’s recounting this, you’ll be seeing footage of the town today mixed with archival photographs and video. There’s this real mix-up between past and present.”

On another track, “Boy,” a banjo enters, followed by the voice of a child. “I’m going to ask my grandma questions of the olden days,” the boy says. “Um, Grandma? In the mines, do you know how many people died? Do you know anyone that was in the mines? Can you tell me three people? Can you name them?”

A short pause follows each question, but instead of the grandmother’s responses, only Harnetty’s ghostly music is heard; the boy placed the tape recorder next to him instead of near his grandmother. “That gives it a haunting quality,” Harnetty said. “If you listen closely without the music, she’s giving some answers but is very reluctant. So that reluctancy in talking about miners who might have died and people she may have known, that opened the space up for the listener to imagine [her responses].”

Inseparable from the history of Shawnee and other Little Cities of Black Diamonds are the environmental and socioeconomic issues related to extraction in the region. Harnetty investigates what it sounds like when Ohio communities wrestle with what coal-mining and hydraulic fracturing have wrought in the region. “You rulers of the forest, this song to you I’ll tell / Do the impact study, save us from fracking hell,” an activist sings on “Jack.”

“The big problem today is the scale [of drilling], and its connection away from smaller-scale, localized operations to trans-national stuff,” said Harnetty, who, while researching, accompanied one local well-driller who’s been using the same rig for 60 years. Some local drillers give their neighbors free gas. “There’s this sense of generosity that you wouldn’t even think of with a big corporation,” he said. 

For nearly 150 years, southeast Ohio has been booming and busting. Fracking, Harnetty believes, is merely the next phase of the same boom-bust cycle, which comes just as some natural areas are beginning to recover. 

“They’ve been doing all these great things where they put systems in upstream to fight the acid mine drainage, and it’s working,” Harnetty said. “So for the first time in 100 years, a lot of wildlife is coming back. Species of fish have come back, and that brings back the kingfisher, and that brings back other animals. Right at the time when there’s real noticeable recovery, there’s another boom/bust cycle happening.”

Harnetty also realizes not everyone in Shawnee and the surrounding area will agree with his stance on fracking, and he sympathizes with the need for jobs in the area. “I don’t have a solution,” he said. He also acknowledged that no matter how much time he spends in Shawnee or how many hours he spends researching and listening, he’ll always be a Columbus resident, and therefore an outsider.

But he still treasures his Shawnee roots. Before beginning a weeklong residency at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, Harnetty and his band will perform on Saturday, Oct. 29, in Shawnee’s Tecumseh Theater — the same building in which his grandfather once played basketball.
––Joel Oliphint, Columbus Alive, October 26, 2016

Columbus Underground:

Columbus-based composer-musician Brian Harnetty is one of today’s shining examples of making fresh, surprising work that speaks to today and tomorrow made stronger by its direct, explicit connection to what’s come before. Grown up in Westerville, through the years he’s put out records on prominent underground labels like Dust-to-Digital and Atavistic, lectured and performed around the world, gotten a Masters from the Royal Academy of London, but always come back here. His new composition, premiering this week at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Shawnee, Ohio, comes closer to home in a few senses. I had the pleasure of talking with the composer earlier this month.

Harnetty wrote the dissertation for his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts from Ohio University on the coal mining region of southeast Ohio, dubbed “The Little Cities of Black Diamonds.” His mother’s family moved to Shawnee during the Hocking Valley Coal Boom which “left two opera houses in little towns [like Shawnee]. A precursor to the United Mine Workers was founded in the next town South. A dispute led to a mine fire that’s been burning for over 100 years. You’ll still see spots on the hills in winter with no snow.” When that boom went bust before the Great Depression, they migrated toward Columbus.

His previous records showed a deft use of archives, including those from Berea College’s Appalachian Sound Archives (American Winter, Rawhead and Bloodybones) and that of avant-garde composer/pianist/bandleader Sun Ra’s El Saturn Archives (The Star-Faced One). For this look into the region’s past, he started with The Little Cities Archive based on Main Street in Shawnee, assisting in digitizing cassette tapes of conversations local archivists had with the remaining miners and longstanding members of the community. The use of real, untrained voices of the area and photographs from this archive was the key to his Shawnee, Ohio. “I structured the piece around 11 portraits in song based on the people I found.”

Harnetty also worked with the archive of renowned musicologist and collector of folk ballads Anne Grimes. He described Grimes as “an Ohio Lomax” and talked about being struck by the similarities in songs of the region. “The same melody shows up throughout songs of Kentucky, West Virginia…in Ohio, it’s given localized details. The Ohio River, state roads, landmarks, all get mentioned. There was speculation that Gore, Ohio, was named after a particularly grisly murder named in a song I found [instead of the dressmaking term].”

Using the materials of the past doesn’t make these finished pieces dry. Harnetty’s chamber music settings have the integrity of a piece that can stand on its own, with jolts of delight and surprise that don’t come at the historical document’s expense. The region isn’t an exotic flavor, but the contemporary music doesn’t treat it with kid gloves either. His voice keeps the records from just being exercises in collage, but that doesn’t mean the raw material isn’t seen as an equal. Among other things, Harnetty is one of the best composers writing for struck idiophone percussion – vibes, marimba – and reeds. His use of the tonal color of that chiming percussion keeps the listener leaning in, engaged. His reeds writing is also particularly striking.

Along with Harnetty himself on piano and electronics, the ensemble for this week’s shows is anchored by Jeremy Woodruff who joined Harnetty on his Sun Ra piece on record and live in a double bill with Lonnie Holley at the Wex in 2013. Currently based in Istanbul, Woodruff has had world premieres of his compositions in NYC, Boston, Berlin, and Kathmandu, in addition to being Harnetty’s best man. The musicians bringing Shawnee, Ohio, to life also include Paul de Jong, cellist for The Books who put out a gorgeous solo album last year, and Anna Roberts-Gevalt, who does similar fascinating investigations into America’s musical past using archives, on violin and banjo.

This kind of project speaks to the value of institutions like the Wexner Center. Working through Creative Capital, a nonprofit that doles out grants and works in an advisory capacity, Harnetty lined up financing through a combination of the Wexner Center, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, and Durham’s Duke Performances (the latter having given the world brand new work by William Tyler, Jenny Scheinman, and The Bad Plus). This support helped the project achieve the scale it has. Tying back to the personal connection, between the two Wexner Center dates and the appearance at the CAC on November 3rd, the ensemble performs this piece at the Tecumseh Theater in Shawnee. Harnetty’s grandfather played in the High School orchestra and played basketball on weekends in the same theater.

Shawnee, Ohio, isn’t a museum piece. It’s dedicated to “telling the stories of the people there through the stories of those who came before. The past and present at the same time, moving back and forth. Fracking is another piece of the boom and bust cycle that’s been going on since the 1800s. They’re putting old brine into abandoned mines which causes earthquakes [like Nelsonville's in 2013].” At a time in our history when empathy seems more needed than ever, and the past is either held tightly to in a form no one who lived through it would recognize, or discarded with a sneer, Brian Harnetty’s vital work should be seen by everyone.
––Richard Sanford, October 26, 2016

Columbus Makes Art: Personal Essay about Shawnee, Ohio

I grew up in Westerville, and my parents have deep family roots in southeastern Ohio, in Perry County. My favorite memory from childhood is walking in my grandfather’s orchard in Junction City, picking and eating apples until my stomach hurt. In 1998, I moved to London to study music composition. After finishing, my teacher there encouraged me to come back to Ohio; he thought I might thrive better here than anywhere else. Even though I wanted to stay in London, I knew that he was right, so I moved back. I never forgot his advice. I’ve often felt pretty lost since then. Slowly, I built a creative voice here. I started working with local and regional sound archives, and the communities connected to them. In 2010, I began to visit, record, and write about Shawnee, a town in Appalachian Ohio, where my mom’s family emigrated to as coal miners in the 1870s. I did a lot of listening––to people and places––and made a piece called Shawnee, Ohio that traces the history of mining and energy extraction in the region. Now, I am performing this music for audiences in Ohio (including in Shawnee) and around the country. I feel compelled to honor the voices of the people that have lived and worked in Shawnee, to share their stories, and to add my voice in solidarity to those working as stewards of their own places.
––Brian Harnetty, October 25, 2016 

Cincinnati CityBeat: Preview of Shawnee, Ohio

Brian Harnetty is a Columbus-based multimedia artist whose work combines, in his words, “sonic archives, performance, ecology and place.” The place in the case of his latest work is pretty obvious, given its title: Shawnee, Ohio. (The performance piece, which debuted at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, will be presented 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Contemporary Arts Center.)

Once a bastion of the 19th-century coal mining boom, Shawnee is now a decaying reminder of a Rust Belt region in transition. Located about an hour southeast of Columbus, Shawnee is a place where the remaining inhabitants struggle to find good jobs and to keep a healthy sense of civic pride.

Harnetty, whose grandfather was from Shawnee, uses the hard-luck town as a basis to investigate what it sounds like to be from an environment where extraction has been a way of life — first as a coal hotspot, more recently as an adopter of fracking.

“There are a lot of places in the United States that had a monoculture, went through a boom-and-bust cycle and have struggled since then,” Harnetty says by phone from his home in Columbus. “That’s a story that people can identify with. You don’t have to be from Shawnee, Ohio, to identify with the larger story of how capital and industry circulate through our lives and then kind of leave us in their wake.”

Shawnee, Ohio is a natural extension of Harnetty’s work as a “sound artist” who uses a host of archival materials for inspiration — previous projects include collaborations with the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky and the Sun Ra/El Saturn Creative Audio Archive in Chicago. This new project is a true multimedia event that incorporates live music (courtesy of Harnetty and three other musician friends), projected images (including a host of vintage and contemporary photos and video) and audio recordings from former or current Shawnee residents.

“There was a whole box of cassette tapes that a fellow pointed me to and said, ‘Well, that’s not really a sound archive, but these are some oral histories that I made 20 or 30 years ago, and you’re welcome to take a listen,’ ” Harnetty says. “So I digitized all those tapes. A lot of them were really deteriorated, but there were some great recordings on there of people that are no longer living, or were children at the time and are now adults.

“It was a great place to start,” he continues. “I turned a lot of those oral histories and interviews into portraits — musical oral portraits of some of the people from the region. And then I composed the music that goes around that.”

An accomplished pianist who is fluent on a number of instruments, Harnetty studied music composition as an undergrad at Ohio State University. He’s also a writer whose work has appeared in such niche publications as The Experimental Music Yearbook, New Music Box and Sound Effects.

Shawnee delves into controversial issues; the performance includes footage of someone singing a protest song related to the environmentally hazardous practice of fracking.

“I feel like I have to take a position and a stand on it because to try to remain neutral is also just taking a stand on it,” Harnetty says, when asked if he was wary of tackling such a hot-topic political issue. “But it is walking a very fine line. I worry about the environmental stuff, because it is a contentious issue.” 

Harnetty did years of research before completing the final version of Shawnee. He combed through troves of photos and other archival materials and listened to dozens of townspeople tell their stories, all in an effort to represent his subject in a truthful way.

“Sampling is so easy, right?” Harnetty says. “You can sample anything in the world that’s recorded, and it’s very liberating. But to remember that there’s an actual person that went into that recording, and that there are real people that can be affected by that recording, really puts a human aspect to the archive. It puts the one thing back into the archive that’s not there — a living, human presence.” 
––Jason Gargano, November 2, 2016 

Columbus Alive:

Shawnee, Ohio, is one among a group of small southeastern Ohio coal mining communities known as the Little Cities of Black Diamonds. Though once lively with people and industry, they now resemble ghost towns with just the bones of once-booming cities to serve as reminders of the past.

Brian Harnetty, a local composer and artist, is using archival samples of oral histories and images of people in the Shawnee region to examine place in relation to environment in his new composition, Shawnee, Ohio.

“This piece asks, ‘What is the story of this place?’ ‘How does extraction and coal mining affect it and the hopes of the people in it?’” Harnetty said.

Harnetty has been working with sound archives for about a decade, drawing mostly from the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky, and the Sun Ra/El Saturn Creative Audio Archive in Chicago. He began his research for Shawnee, Ohio, in 2010.

“It’s a long process of getting to know the people that live there and studying it as a place,” Harnetty said. “The other component is that I was studying the sounds that are there … [such as] the sounds of coal mining and the sounds of the forests.”

Coal mining has poisoned the region to a point at which very little is living in the streams, creating an eery silencing of the waters. “What does a healthy stream sound like versus an acid mine stream?” Harnetty said. “Sometimes it’s a really subtle difference. There are less sounds the more damage there is, because of the fewer ecosystems.”

In the composition, Harnetty also incorporates archival images to create a visual collage. Some of these images include his own ancestors. Harnetty’s grandfather, Mordecai Williams, grew up in Shawnee where he played music with a local orchestra. Harnetty is using these images to determine the instrumentation he will incorporate in the composition. His family history in Shawnee plays an important role in his inspiration for the piece.

“It was like rediscovering my family roots,” Harnetty said.

Shawnee, Ohio, is being commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts, which recently was awarded a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to support creative residency artists. Harnetty is one of three nationally acclaimed artists who are receiving support from the grant.

Charles Helm, director of performing arts at the Wexner Center, said he is excited for the premiere of the composition, scheduled for Oct. 28, 2016. “It talks about issues like environment, Appalachian culture, the history of coal mining, organizing labor and fracking’s impact on population decline,” said Helm. “He’s dealing with this material in a very profound and artistic way. That’s exactly the kind of project we want to embrace.”

The premiere will feature a live performance with Harnetty and a handful of other artists, along with an accompanying video. The album is scheduled to be released next year.

“The Wexner Center for the Arts has a strong commitment to local artists, and I think that it’s pretty amazing for Columbus,” said Harnetty.

Harnetty quotes Wendell Berry, a Kentucky poet, activist and farmer who writes about agrarian and environmental issues.

“He said that he used to think that art was a refuge from all the troubles in the world, but he no longer thinks that way,” Harnetty said. “Art is his place and he lives in it. I took that pretty literally.”
––Amber Hague-Ali, December, 2015

Ohio Alumnus, Sound Artist Brian Harnetty Receives 2016 Creative Capital Performing Arts Award

Ohio University Compass Magazine

Brian Harnetty, a sound artist, composer, and scholar was selected from more than 2,500 national submissions for a 2016 Creative Capital Award. One of 46 projects receiving support this year from the national arts funding organization, Harnetty’s sound collage work “Shawnee, OH,” commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio, is currently in development for a live performance premiere later in the year. 

Harnetty, Ph.D. 14’, an alumnus of the School of Interdisciplinary Arts, began his ethnographic study of the sounds of Appalachian Ohio in 2010, informed in part by his family’s roots in the region, and drawing on oral histories from the Little Cities of Black Diamonds archives, and field recordings collected at various locations.  

“The award will help me develop the project further, and set up performances; to help pay musicians to perform it with me. Creative Capital also works hard to help artists network with others and promote the work in larger cultural centers, and to national audiences,” said Harnetty, who was elated with his win. 

Continuing a decade long exploration of sound archives, “Shawnee, Ohio” grew out of his dissertation research considering the histories of South-Eastern Ohio. Evoking place through sound, the compositions juxtapose the audible present alongside traces of the past, combining field recordings, transcriptions, images, and historical recordings into newly re-contextualized sound collages. 

“In 2010, I began studying in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts—my  advisor was Marina Peterson, who was doing work with the Little Cities of Black Diamonds organization. I began an ethnographic study of this group’s archives, which eventually became a part of my dissertation.” 

“It took awhile for me to make sense of what I was learning in my research; as a result, much of my creative project happened after my research was complete.” 

“Shawnee, OH” critically engages layers of history and memory with the sounds of mining, fracking, and of a town fighting to survive after a century of economic decline and environmental degradation. The work fits into a practice considered “sonic ethnography,” the study of culture, people and place through sound.

Shawnee’s history includes coal, gas and clay extraction, and the formation of early labor unions. The town’s downturn and partial restoration act as an ethos of the struggles and hopes of the larger region, now immersed in a controversial fracking boom.  

"What’s unique with his work, is the emphasis on sound, his skillful listening, an extension of his own composition practice. This dovetails nicely into ethnography, the practice of listening and experiencing. Engaging with a range of subjects, leading to a combination of research and creative work," said Marina Peterson, associate professor, School of Interdisciplinary Arts. 

"Harnetty's Creative Capital Grant is a validation of his project, bringing the significance of the history of this region to a wider view. Performing his work at the Wexner Center is a fantastic kind of world stage, it opens up the history of Southeastern Ohio to a larger public." 

In a previous project, “Star Faced One,” Harnetty re-composed sound recordings from the Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection of the Creative Audio Archive in Chicago, earning him the 2013 Underground Album of the Year award by Mojo Magazine. In yet another project, he worked with the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives.   

Selected with the help of curators, consultants, and arts professionals, the monetary Creative Capital award is a highly competitive honor supporting innovative and adventurous artist projects under development. Drawing on venture-capital principles, the organization is known for seeking out artist projects that are bold, innovative and genre-stretching, and then providing the tools they need to realize their visions and build sustainable careers.  

An album version of Harnetty’s project will be released next year. He is also planning for the world premiere performance of "Shawnee, OH," with an ensemble of live musicians at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus on October 28, 2016. 

The Creative Capital official award announcement can be read online at: http://creative-capital.org/projects/view/872 .
––Daniel King, February, 2016