Two years ago, Brian Lindgren got hit by a car. He broke several bones, but the most important was his left pinky. Lindgren is a violist. He needs his left pinky.
This was the summer of 2020, the height of the pandemic shutdown. Musicians were already struggling. Lindgren was heading into the final year of an M.F.A. at Brooklyn College in New York, and he wasn’t sure what would be waiting for him on the other side. In some desperation, he took a step he never thought he’d take: He applied to Ph.D. programs.
As a master’s student, Lindgren’s main project was to design and build an electronic viola. He’d first had the idea as an undergraduate at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, but it had lain forgotten for over a decade, as Lindgren made a life for himself writing, performing, and producing music in New York City. He grew up playing the viola; he studied viola at Eastman; he loved the viola. But Eastman also introduced him to the world of electronic music. With electronic music, he says, you get to work with an “infinite sonic palette.” The world of electronic music also seemed more accessible, more open to experimentation, than the sometimes rarefied world of classical strings. But back then, he didn’t yet know how to combine these things he loved.
At Brooklyn College, he found a way. “I was a hybrid person,” Lindgren says, “which can be very challenging in our assembly-line kind of world. But this program”—an M.F.A. in Sonic Arts—“was really geared towards musical explorers.” He took a class with Doug Geers, famous for his own technologically charged compositions, all about building electronic musical instruments. That first semester, he hacked together the first prototype of his new instrument. It was an a heavily modded acoustic viola, all black, with heavy white cables snaking out from the fingerboard and the new pickups he had constructed. Orange, green, blue, and white wires tangled around the tuning pegs. Lindgren describes it as “Borg-like.” This was EV 1, and it worked.
But he wasn’t satisfied, and he spent several semesters more in independent study with Geers, refining the concept. Another of his teachers challenged him: The music he was creating with his new instrument sounded just like something he could have created without the instrument, he said. What was he really trying to do here? (That teacher was Morton Subotnick, a pioneer in the world of electronic music and a co-inventor of one of the earliest analog synthesizers, so the challenge was one to take seriously.) He re-envisioned the instrument from the ground up. He learned CAD and circuit design. He experimented with ways of combining analog and digital sounds. He joined a long line of composers who invented instruments to achieve a sound no existing instrument could produce. In a mad dash at the end of his degree program, he finished EV 2, a sleek black wedge, like a viola’s fingerboard without a body, built from scratch on a 3D printer.
Then he put it in a drawer. As he began his Ph.D. in composition and computer technologies at the University of Virginia last fall, he wanted to start with a blank slate. It was time to figure out what was next, and he wanted to open himself up to the opportunities the new environment would offer. But his passion for the instrument has continued to smolder.
Lindgren’s pinky healed, thankfully, though it now has a permanent bend to it. The Telemetry Music Series, which showcases experimental sounds, provided Lindgren a few opportunities to perform this year—at The Bridge, at Old Cabell Hall, and even outside on the Downtown Mall. He’s slated to play this fall at a conference in North Carolina and a festival in Connecticut. He’s bursting with new ideas for composition.
As we talked, Lindgren sat in one of UVA’s makerspaces and the 3D printer hummed away behind him. EV 2.5 would be ready in three more days.