NixWorks Academy

“Memory Hoard” A multimedia presentation by Michael Nix

Saturday, 9/7/24, noon - 2 pm
The LAVA Center
324 Main St, Greenfield

Musician Michael Nix presents “Memory Hoard”, a multimedia presentation incorporating video, recordings, photos, and readings from 1983 to 2023. "Memory Hoard" explores Nix's wide range of creative work as a composer, guitarist, banjoist, and writer.

This is a free event, funded by the Crossroads Cultural District and Mass Cultural Council (MCC). Donations are appreciated.

Recent health challenges having forced changes to my daily instrumental practice and performance rituals. I am able to spend time revisiting my composition catalog, the span of my career dating back to the early 1980s. Rather than cancel a concert at the LAVA Center for the Arts, our local arts incubator, I came upon the idea of curating my own creative retrospective concert.

This project is personal in nature.

Using a multimedia format comprised of video, recordings, photographs, and live reading of poetry, Memory Hoard explores the multifaceted relationship I have had with music composition, performance, the written word, video production, classical music, folk music, world music, and a wide cast of characters who became my friends, confidants, and colleagues throughout the years. It surfs the creative influences that led me to design two seven string classical banjos, and the development of my New Classic Banjo project, which supports compositions commissions, and the recording of newly composed music for the banjo.

Memory Hoard is not only the title of the retrospective, but simultaneously the title of a poem, taking a central place in the retrospective. The poem explores the nature of my memories, family, and good friend Rick Fiske, as a springboard for my personal relationship to creativity, and my sometimes schizophrenic professional life In the 1980s and 90s, with one foot in the Bluegrass and folk music world, the other in the classical composition and performance world.

One reaches the time in life where parents and many friends have been laid to, and the priorities of life shift. One earns the right to take journeys - high school, and college friends batch posting images of exotic travels as a reminder to all of us who celebrate their accomplishments and the wonder of their lives. This year my journey was inward, the results viewed on a theater projection screen.

The event will be video taped and available for viewing for those unable to attend.

Photo: Rick Byam 1989