Playground Ensemble Celebrates Twenty Years of Playing Around With Chamber Music

Conrad Kehn might be the founding director of Playground Ensemble, a collective of professional musicians, daring composers and innovative educators dedicated to presenting chamber music as a living art form, but he prefers to keep focused on a team mentality. “Playground has certainly lived on the maniacal way I approach things, but the group is the thing,” he says. “We don’t use that term ensemble lightly.”

The Ensemble currently has ten performing members, plus a board of eight working to keep the organization running, and a third roster of teaching artists for its K-12 outreach, some of whom cross over into performance as well. While Kehn is the only remaining original member from the group’s inception two decades ago, several currently playing have tenures of ten or even fifteen years.

It’s that spirit of musical teamwork, drawn from old customs brought into the new century, that the Playground Ensemble will show off in its twenty-hours-for-twenty years MARATHON starting at 7 a.m. Saturday, March 21. The event will be broken into four blocks, each at a different venue in Denver. “MARATHON will be structured to highlight all that we do as an ensemble and organization,” says Kehn. “Concerts, community music-making, sessions for music educators, healing arts events, and an improvised communal cool down in the early hours of Sunday morning.”

Now an associate professor of Music and Recording Arts at the Community College of Denver, he got his start in a popular heavy-goth band called Skull Flux, whose music was an “all-or-nothing Joy Division-meets-Soundgarden mix of glowering intensity and nailbiting grind,” according to a 1999 Westword article. The band had formed in 1993 and grew a faithful following through the years, playing gigs in Denver nearly every weekend. “We were definitely part of the Denver rock scene in the ’90s,” says Kehn. “We played everywhere, including the early years of the Westword Music Showcase.”

For Kehn, his musical life and career started a new chorus when he was studying at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. “Someone played me Krzystof Penderecki’s ‘Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima’ and there was this level of darkness and dissonance and crazy cool sounds that I didn’t know you could do with classical musical instruments,” he recalls. “So I’d been into this hedonistic goth metal thing, and all of a sudden I hear this big orchestra piece, and some other chamber pieces, and I’m like wait, that’s what I want to hear. I graduated with my voice major, but came back immediately to grad school to pursue a composition degree.”

That’s when he dove into “all the twentieth-century eastern European avant-garde classical music stuff that was coming out in the early and mid-century,” he says, “and how that all came to America in the years following World War II. Got super excited about all that.”

As part of the program, students were expected to put on shows, which was why Kehn put together Playground Ensemble. “I formed this group, and we’d do like one show a year, featuring my music,” he says. “As a composer, you’re always completely dependent on the performers you have in order to see your vision realized. Eventually, I went to the group and said, ‘Hey, I’d like to expand this, turn this into a real thing, make a season out of it.’ One of the members looked at me, I remember, and said they expected me to say that a long time before.”

Kehn laughs: “They were like, what took you so long? They were probably right.”

But the vision for this act wasn’t traditional. “I didn’t want Playground Ensemble to be just a classical music group,” says Kehn. “I wanted us to function like a rock band, where we just gig all the time, and really have a different aesthetic to it.”

Kehn readily admits that this approach isn’t unheard of today, but when he was growing up — he’s almost 54 now — kids into music came in pretty much three flavors: orchestra, marching band or a rock band playing in someone’s garage. “The change didn’t really come when we as kids started to blur those lines,” says Kehn. “It was really when those of us who had been doing all these different things got into teaching. That’s when things really started to shift. All of a sudden, musical counterculture wasn’t just allowed — it started to be encouraged.”

Playground Ensemble offered its first season in 2006. “One of our earliest pieces was at the Edge Gallery when it was still right next to the Bug Theater,” Kehn says. “It was a graphic score piece of mine, and we’re going to do that in the MARATHON on the 21st. So that’s pretty cool.”

Originally, the group primarily performed Kehn’s compositions, with an occasional repertoire piece. “But pretty soon the other players wanted to have more of a say in the programming. They had stuff they wanted to play, too. So it grew from there into this whole different animal based on the group.” The Playground Ensemble gained non-profit status in 2008, became an SCFD organization and even earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant, which it’s using to help produce MARATHON.

The event will kick off at 7 a.m. at the Kalamath Building, 800 Kalamath Street, with a yoga gong bath and a breakfast for musicians and composers. “Then we’re going to do this cool thing where we break into three different rooms and do spontaneous composition team workshops,” says Kehn. “So everybody in these separate rooms will have an hour and a half to create a piece that we’re going to play for each other at around 10:30 that morning.”

Then comes the first venue change, and the members have put together a musical playlist for the drive over to the next event space, the Stanley Marketplace, where they plan to do a family music-making workshop with Friends of Chamber Music at 1 p.m. “So we’ll have a Beat Making Station, a Weird Instrument Petting Zoo,and a Graphic Score Station where kids can draw things, and we’ll have a group of musicians to interpret and play music based on that art,” Kehn notes.

He’s especially excited about the next event at the Stanley: a group sing based on Pauline Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation. “It’s about one paragraph of text instructions for it,” he says. “It’s this amazing performance that creates these cascading harmonies. We’re going to try to get everyone there to come sing with us. How incredible would it be to get the whole crowd in Stanley Marketplace singing?” After that, Kehn says there will be a string quartet concert in one of the vacant storefronts, featuring Mexican composers as well as Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Raven Chacon and Caroline Shaw.

“Then we’ll drive to the Holiday Theater with another playlist,” Kehn says, “which is where we have the one private event in this. After twenty years, we’ve had players retire. We’ve gone through something of a culture shift, too. Over this last summer, one of us mentioned that we didn’t get together as a group so much anymore, to share a meal or just hang out. So we decided to have dinner together as part of the day, just sit down together and celebrate each other.”

Following that will be a series of concerts at the Holiday, at 2644 West 32nd Avenue. “We’ll have local composer Nathan Hall,” says Kehn, “and then a set of modern art songs by our soprano Leah Podzimek and pianist Joshua Sawicki. And then at eight o’clock we’ll do our Playground at 20 concert, which is just so much great stuff.”

The final block of the MARATHON event takes participants — yes, with one last playlist — to Glob, at 3551 Brighton Boulevard. “We’ve got a DJ set by Isaac Linder,” says Kehn, “and then we’re going to do the set we put together of the ‘Music from The Shining‘ back when we opened for Sleepytime Gorilla Museum up at the Stanley Hotel. Chamber music and rock set — full-on distorted guitar.” After that, the Playground Ensemble will slide into some electronic music and multimedia works, capped by a drone show to carry everyone to three in the morning.

“It’s going to be a long day,” grins Kehn. “I haven’t stayed up that long since I was in my twenties, and back then I was doing it with artificial help. But there are four of us who are going to go the full twenty. It’s gonna be memorable. A twenty-hour MARATHON is a huge lift, and Playground Ensemble is family. Once we make this happen, we’re going to get some sleep and take a moment and ask ourselves: What’s next?“

MARATHON runs from 7 a.m. Saturday, March 21, to 3 a.m. Sunday, March 22. For more details, see the Playground Ensemble website.