Friendly Rich: Improviser, Composer & Musician Extraordinaire (The Secret Ingredient - 04-09-13)

The Secret Ingredient

Today’s interview with Rich Marsella tackles a number of topics including musical production, collaboration, and community involvement. An improviser, composer, and musician, Marsella talks with us about his recent project Scheherazade which is part of Musagetes Improviser-in-Residence program. It included a wide number of performers from Guelph’s own creative audience to perform Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade dramatically rearranged for electric guitar, orchestra, and whoopee cushion organ, among others. Later, we discuss a passage about a composer suffering from amnesia, from Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia. Through the narrative we discuss the ability improvisational music has to create a presence when people collaborate together. What can we build through music? "I think the secret ingredient for me is people. I know that’s a simple answer but it’s true. There are so many people in this project that have blown my mind and come up through the woodwork and I ask myself why? I just love that fact that they are putting this thing into an area that I couldn’t have imagined." - Rich Marsella Sacks, Oliver W. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.