Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Major thanks to Ethan Hein for writing about the Disquiet Junto music community I’ve moderated for the past 14 and a half years (or more to the point, the past 748 consecutive weeks). Here’s a link to Ethan’s newsletter issue (from which the above quote was extracted) about the Junto, in which musicians respond each week to a composition project that I send out.

The semi-annual “trios sequence” in the weekly Disquiet Junto music community is underway. We’re just past the midway point, with some time left (about a day and a half as of this writing, on the morning, Pacific time, of Sunday, May 3 — see further updates at the end of this article), for the second of the three consecutive projects.

The Junto has had many newcomers recently, so here is some background on the Junto in general and the trios sequence in particular:

The Disquiet Junto is a series of weekly projects in which a music composition prompt goes out (via email newsletter, among other means) early each Thursday, just after midnight. Anyone who wants to participate then has until the following Monday, at 11:59pm their local time, wherever they happen to be in the world, to upload a recording in response.

This week’s currently unfolding project is the 748th consecutive weekly Junto project, the overall community having begun its activities way back during the first week of January 2012.

Every single Disquiet Junto project can be considered as “standalone,” in that (1) you can begin a given week’s project without prior knowledge of or experience with previous projects, and (2) for the most part, you could probably log on a few hours before the Monday deadline and get something done in time (though a little more consideration is encouraged).

That all goes as well for the “trios sequence,” but there are some unique aspects at work for this subset of projects, and I’ll detail them here.

In the trios sequence, there are three consecutive projects. You don’t need to do all of them. You can do any one or two, or all three, or just listen and observe from the sidelines. In the first week/project of the trios sequence, musicians recorded solos, leaving room for the second week/project, currently underway, when other musicians might potentially add a second line to make it a duet — all that in advance of another musician, in the third week/project, to potentially turn a given duet into a trio.

Usually each Junto project just sort of happens: I post the project instructions, people read them and then upload music, conversation occurs on llllllll.co (aka Lines), and I add any SoundCloud-housed tracks to a playlist. That’s about it.

This trios sequence benefits from some additional monitoring on my part, and it’s a pleasure. That monitoring means a bit more activity by me on the Lines discussion board, as well as the maintenance of a spreadsheet. Now, this spreadsheet is intended to make the process of the trios sequence go more smoothly than it might otherwise, but I recognize that the very existence of the document, let alone its seeming complexity, can make things appear more complicated than they are. This balance is something I’m aware of and that I do my best to manage. If you find the spreadsheet daunting, I apologize. In two weeks, when the trios sequence will be over, everything will go back to normal (i.e., no spreadsheet required).

This here is what the spreadsheet looks like at the moment, when there are 22 solo tracks (out of 54) from the first project in the trios sequence yet to (potentially — as it doesn’t always work out for all tracks) become duets in the currently ongoing second week/project of the sequence. You don’t even need to be able to read the text in this sheet to see the forward motion and the patterns of activity. Note that there are numerous solo tracks branching out into multiple duets, which is awesome.

Some additional notes on the spreadsheet:

• The tracks highlighted in yellow on the left side are the remaining solos yet to become duets, in advance of, next week, potentially becoming trios.
• The small blue square (with “46” in it) toward the center (row 54), just to the right of the dark grey vertical line, is another example of color-coding I employ. The blue fill makes it easy for me to recall the most recently added track, in this case the 46th entry in week two. In week one, new tracks are simply added one after another down the spreadsheet. In week two, however, a given track may appear anywhere up and down the sheet, since placement aligns with the track to the left on which it is based. That’s why this blue square becomes useful to me starting week two.
• The rows that may appear, in this resolution, as blank on the left side are situations when a second, or third (or additional), duet has been made of the same solo track.
• The font of the tracks on the left that have become duets (on the right) is changed from black to a light gray, just to signal to participants that they’ve already been utilized. Anyone can use any track for their first duet, but if they choose to do a second duet, the hope is they’ll select one of the solos that hasn’t yet become a duet (again, the ones highlighted in yellow).
• The single cell bounded by a thin red line on the left toward the top (row 13) means nothing special. That’s just where my cursor happened to have landed when I took this screenshot.
• And of course, the spreadsheet will continue to change as the project progresses, during the second week (duets) and on through the third week (trios). And then for project 0750, we’ll step back out of spreadsheet mode entirely. Whew.

Update: As of 10:49pm on Monday. May 4, we have 71 duets. Of the 54 original solos from the previous project, all but 10 have become duets. Of those 44 solos that became duets, 19 had two or more duets made.