Today we’d like to introduce you to Carmen Maret.
Hi Carmen, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Our story began in the fall of 2002 at Michigan State University, where Andrew and I met as graduate students. Our first meeting was very quiet. We sat together on my futon and listened to Andrew’s compositions. Afterward, we played the tango charts I had brought with me from my years of learning to play and dance the tango in Kansas City, MO, where I did my undergraduate studies.
As we formed our duo, the process was organic from the beginning. Our rehearsals just seemed to work. In our first few years, we had a reciprocal process. We played Andrew’s compositions and songs, learning to adapt them for flute and guitar, and we also played the tango music I wanted to perform for dancers.
Only a few weeks after we met, we landed a gig at a Cuban restaurant in Lansing, MI. Suddenly, we had a reason to keep playing and developing new music every week. Michigan State University was also a welcoming place for new music. We challenged ourselves to learn and perform newly written pieces for graduate composition recitals. We had a lot to chew on back then, but it taught us a lot about imagining what was possible for our instruments.
The flute and guitar combination is an untapped genre, unlike the string quartet genre, which has volumes of published music. The possibilities for our duo combination are vast and unexplored, which excites us.
In the summer of 2003, we embarked on our first performance tour in the West. We played in small halls, libraries, and churches, camping all the way to Oregon and back. Now, some twenty years later, many want to know how we still manage to book our own tours, write all the music, and camp along the way without killing each other!
We both appreciate being outside and enjoy the challenge of not taking things like temperature-controlled environments, a consistent power source, independent transportation, relative safety, and health for granted. Consciously placing ourselves every night in a tent on the ground in unfamiliar environments helps us see things about ourselves that we wouldn’t see in ordinary (truly privileged) day-to-day reality. Laying our heads on the ground is a gold mine for creativity! It also makes us nicer and more understanding humans.
Eventually, our touring goals became loftier, and we booked tours in Europe, Argentina, and Chile. Our ultimate tour was probably the road trip we took in 2011 when we drove from Michigan to Fairbanks, Alaska, and played concerts all the way through the US and Canada. That’s some crazy mileage. We just laugh now when people ask how we can stand to drive all the way through Nebraska!
Twenty-plus years later, we’re based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We’ve played over 700 concerts, written more than 70 original compositions together, and released nine albums. Andrew still writes the music, I still pick up new flutes, and we still camp on tour. The work has gotten deeper but the process hasn’t really changed from those early days on my futon in East Lansing.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The most difficult part is that we have to draw all our own maps for a route we don’t already know. When we were studying music, the path was clear: study, practice, audition, go to graduate school, try to land a major ensemble position or a university faculty job. Success in an academic sense has boundaries and traditions and expectations you can climb within. We were always curious about too many things for that, though, and we’ve always gravitated toward what’s on the other side of a standard path.
We’ve inhabited the outside of that path since we met, and it’s always a balance between struggle and freedom. People hear “self-managed” from a musician and don’t know what that means, and certainly don’t equate it with a respectable position. But it’s actually like running a small creative company. Between the two of us, we handle everything. We’ve written over 70 original compositions for the duo. We release albums on our own label, Folias Music. We run a music school together. We publish our own sheet music, design our own artwork and marketing materials, build and maintain our websites, and book every tour from scratch, right down to researching the venues and writing the press kits.
The challenge isn’t any one of those things. It’s doing all of them while still being the musicians at the center of it.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
We specialize in original music for flute and guitar, self-composed and self-produced. The flute and guitar combination is still a surprisingly unexplored corner of chamber music, which means almost everything we play, we wrote. That’s been true from the beginning and it’s still what drives us.
What we’re most proud of is that this is a life, not just a career. We’re married, we tour together, we create together, we run a business together. Twenty years of that is something, but the longevity is actually part of a larger accomplishment, which is making all of it work at the same time. It is really complicated being married, running a business, and being artists together. We’d have to write a book to even begin to narrate how it works. But it’s beautiful, and it’s the best thing we can give to the world. We keep going.
What sets us apart is that we’ve built something sustainable at a small scale that works in the music industry right now, on our own terms. It’s fun and challenging to keep learning, to stay flexible enough to change and adapt, and yet still hold on to our musical ideas as artists.
What matters most to you? Why?
What matters most is the music itself. The act of making something original and sharing it in a room with people. Not recorded, not streamed, but live and in person. This is what we’ve always gravitated toward. It’s at the heart of everything we do.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://foliasmusic.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foliasduo
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/foliasduo/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/foliasduo
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/foliasduo
