History
History
Karl Berger Conducts the Creative Improvisers Orchestra
In 1971 musicians Karl Berger, Ingrid Sertso, and Ornette Coleman founded the Creative Music Foundation as a 501(c) 3 nonprofit organization. Its initial advisory board, composed of legends from all aspects of music, the arts, and philosophy, included composer John Cage, conductor/musician Gil Evans, philosopher/educator Buckminster Fuller, composer George Russell, painter Willem DeKooning, and composer/conductor Gunther Schuller. Their goal was to establish a nonprofit organization focused on improvisation and musical cross-pollination that complemented musicians’ academic studies, a place where music as a universal language could be explored and participants could develop their own relationship to the elements that are common to all music. They called it the Creative Music Studio, or CMS.
Ingrid Sertso
Ornette Coleman
CMS was launched in 1973 and had its home in multiple locations in the Woodstock, New York, area. Musicians from all over the world lived, played, interacted with each other, and created a body of music broad and deep. Hundreds of guiding artists, including several MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award winners (George Lewis, John Zorn, Cecil Taylor, John Cage, Charlie Haden, Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, and Steve Coleman) lived, played, and shared musical wisdom with thousands of participants, many of whom are now well-known musicians, from Steven Bernstein and Cyro Baptista to Peter Apfelbaum and Marilyn Crispell. Over 550 concerts were recorded and were digitized as part of the CMS Archive Project. In 2012, Columbia University Library purchased the CMS Archive to preserve it for posterity. Some of the performances in the archive are included in recordings made available to the public. Two three-CD sets were produced in 2014 and 2015 and garnered rave reviews from critics worldwide, including being named ‘Best Historical Release’ by Cadence and Jazz Times magazines. In addition to the CMS Archive Project and CD compilations, CMS programs at this time included the CMS Oral History Project, a partnership with Columbia University Jazz Studies Program; Improvisers Orchestra Performances; and ongoing residencies, workshops, and performances. Even when CMS was without a physical ‘campus,’ it has been remarkably active. During the years 1984-2013, when CMS had ostensibly gone dormant, cofounders Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso continued to present workshops and to spread the CMS message around the world.
In 2013, CMS held a fortieth anniversary celebration and workshop in the Catskills after not offering any for several years. It was the beginning of an immensely fruitful arrangement with the Full Moon Resort in Big Indian, New York. From 2013 until 2019 CMS conduct semiannual four-day workshop intensives at the Full Moon. Artists at these workshops included Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, Steve Coleman, Henry Threadgill, Dave Douglas, Joe Lovano, John Medeski, Steven Bernstein, Billy Martin, Pauline Oliveros, Mary Halvorson, Fay Victor, Don Byron, Henry Threadgill, Arturo O’Farrill, among many others. Throughout its history, CMS has drawn participants from everywhere on the globe. Many of those were able to come because of scholarship programs.
In-person workshops were suspended in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. This became an opportunity, however, for CMS to begin offering more workshops, performances, and instructional content online. Billy Martin, who took over CMS leadership in 2017 made it a priority to reach out to a new generation of improvisers, musicians who grew up in the digital age and who, although were just as hungry for creative and universal exploration of music, might have had a very different social and cultural frame of reference than earlier participants.
In 2023, cofounder Karl Berger passed away. The CMS leadership team and board of directors have since worked diligently to forge a new path forward while maintain the guiding principles that have made CMS the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ premier study center for creative music. In 2024, gabby fluke-mogul assumed the top CMS leadership role.