Downbeat: Music through Compromise

Nicolas is the Collaborative Director, Conductor, and Founder of Chromos.

Chromos began as an idea; that the process of music-making together informs both the quality and meaning of our art. We are a process-based ensemble, passionately dedicated to the creation of musical-meanings for the benefit of our audiences and community at-large.

Centered around color, inflection, and expressive nuance, we strive to convey the boundary-less, universally human concepts both implicit and explicit in the Western-Classical musical medium. Outward-focused in our intentions, we intend to emotionally enrich our community through performances of both standard and marginalized repertoire that fulfills our desire to create a sensory, visceral, and vital process-based musical culture.

Chromos is, in many ways, intended as a variation on the theme of process in music-making, one based upon democratic principles – that, indeed, it is possible to create a musical consensus through artistic pluralism. While moderate to large conducted ensembles tend towards hierarchic strategies to shape consensus and decisions, we employed a process of facilitation, understanding, and joint-decision making. Our rehearsals were our testing grounds for this experiment in music-making. While rehearsing with efficiency and depth, we also opened ourselves to differences of opinion, discussion, and deliberation, the results of which can be heard in the quality of our performance.

Out of all of the art forms, music is rarely ever created or performed in a social vacuum. Music is social, and an orchestra – as an ensemble formed through the combination of otherwise different, sometimes incompatible, instruments – functions best in reconciling differences through the same process that great societies delicately manage: compromise.

In our contemporary age of globalization, cultural diaspora, and normative conflicts, we present to our audiences a musical-artistic product created as the result of ideological synthesis and uninhibited passion. Our music-making is not attached to any dogma; its creed is one of options and spectral choices, as numerous as a palette of colors. Chromos intends to paint through sound the possibilities of the human psycho-social potential.

— Nicolas Sterner, March 2018