| artist statement |
My creative practice is intertwined with how I want to live. At times, I choose tending to relationships, my body, my spirituality, ahead of my creative work. Returning to sound from these practices of care, I make work that emerges from intuition and my humanity. I approach material with curiosity and playfulness, experimenting with how to amplify it, frame it, and share it.
I re-found my creative agency while a participant in a collective composition workshop. Now as a facilitator of these projects, one of my favorite creative postures is to be alongside the other makers, constructively contemplating the material we’ve generated together. The nature of these projects is open, specific, and responsive to whoever is in the room. We cultivate trust in collaboration - the process of combining our creative agencies - as a force, and it leads us through the project.
When crafting a space of making for myself I tune into my raw experience, pairing it with rigor and feminine boldness that I am now discovering. When crafting a space of collaboration for myself and others, the discipline is to hold boundaries and pressures at bay to allow the process to unfold organically and to make space for belonging. Belonging, in all our human-ness.
get in touch! - rr.mangold@gmail[dot]com
| bio |
Rachel Mangold plays the bass, composes experimentally, writes text, leads collective composition workshops, and collaborates with artists in other mediums. Guided by inquiry, she is curious about performance as a medium, using situation, relationship, and time as compositional elements. She is a working-class musician.
Her compositional work has been featured on the piano+ series, in the international game magazine Synzine, and on the Sounds Unexpected podcast. She performs regularly with the experimental ensemble LCollective and produces localized concert series’. Her work as a cross-arts collaborator has included developing a feminist sound and theater piece with actor Rachel Clausen, and an improvisational mask and music performance with actor Raphael Eilenberg.
As a collective composition workshop leader, she facilitates the process of making new music with groups of people, starting from a small idea which gradually grows into a full work. She has led this transformative process in workshops across the U.S. in New York City, East Hampton, Baltimore, Portland, and Grand Rapids, as well as internationally in the U.K. and Argentina. She collaborates frequently with Evelyn Petcher, Jill Collier, and Liza Barley in doing this work.
She holds a Bachelor’s in Double Bass Performance from Peabody Conservatory, and a Master’s in Creative Leadership from Guildhall School of Music and Drama.