An educator, composer, steelpanner, and tuner, Khuent Rose is a busy man. When describing how he has navigated creative life during the pandemic, he compares himself to Sylvester Stallone’s celebrated antihero.
In mid-March and early April, the Crown Heights-based musician became even busier when he found himself caring for family members affected by COVID-19.
“I was being Rambo between two houses, trying to also take care of my other grandmother and my immunosuppressed father. I was wearing a gas mask over my face and stripping down to my underwear just long enough to give them a bag of fruit and run back to the other house. Over at my grandmother’s house, she was lying in bed and barely coherent of what her life is and breathing extremely heavily. She is eighty-four,” Khuent explains. His mother was just beginning to recover from COVID-19 as his grandmother fell ill.
“This is the sphere that I’m supposed to operate in,” he explains while maintaining his inspiringly good humor.
Now entering our fourth month of the pandemic, much of public life remains at a stand-still, resulting in dire economic straits for artists across all five boroughs. The psychology of shelter in place has also been taxing. It is now remarkably easy to become wistful for the most inherent components of metropolitan life: sound health, a trip to a bustling barber shop, the time when hand sanitizer was more of an afterthought than a necessity, or the soul-stirring, communal nature of live performances – all of these are no longer taken for granted.
For Khuent — who has been an essential collaborator on Brooklyn Arts Council’s Bringing J'Ouvert to the Forefront program over the years — and countless other Brooklyn artists, NYC Pause has also come with an unexpected paradox. Despite the shutdown, those working in the arts – thanks to abruptly new caretaking roles, searches for steady work, and relief fund applications – are now busier than they’ve ever been. Some, like Khuent, are even experiencing a moment of unplanned professional growth alongside what the artist refers to as the “pinch” of limited financial resources.
As the weeks went by, the pinch subsided as the social terrain shifted. The music courses Khuent teaches at a private school migrated online; his accompaniment gig at an Episcopalian church, lost as gatherings were cancelled citywide, resumed with the production of virtual services. New mediums meant new software, which required new technical knowledge.
“As a teacher, my students had to go from completely instrumental pupils to audio engineers overnight. I had to teach freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors how to use music programs that some of them have never seen before. Some of them wanted to compose and had to get from the point of ‘I can read a few notes’ to writing it down, making it intentional and balanced,” he says.
In the classroom – both real and virtual – he’s keen on growing with his students and meeting them where their creative interests are. “Some of them are doing audio engineering where they are creating beats and singing or rapping over it. Others are extracting old audio from the 1950s to create their own new tracks. As a teacher, it’s my job to retain the attention of as many of them as possible.”
Khuent, a sought-after accompanist, does not take a passive approach to the profession. On Sundays in Brooklyn, he is accustomed to making modest, two-keyboard sanctuaries sound like the St. Paul’s Cathedral.
“I put my composition degree to work and create small orchestras. I’m able to give churches three- to four-minute arrangements of brass bands, harpsichords, or string quartets to make the music more interesting for the church,” he says. With the commencement of online services, the number of songs has been reduced to three, but a good bit of work remains.
“That can take an hour or two per song,” Khuent says. There are usually nineteen to twenty-one songs in a normal service, most of which have to be memorized.”
Though 2020 has come bearing incredible challenges – these unexpected demands on one’s time among them – Khuent has managed to continue creating music for himself. “In the last few weeks of March, some friends of mine who are also used to gigging and I decided to produce music videos. So we would record, then send our recordings to a friend who does the remastering. We’ve actually produced three pretty great videos,” he says.
While discussing the project, Khuent naturally eases into discussing his first love: the steelpan drum. The instrument, creates the bright and rolling signature sound from Trinidad and Tobago. Carefully, he explains how making music electronically goes a bit against his nature.
“From playing pan, it’s become very engrained in my biochemistry to have an instrument physically react to me when I play it. I use applications that will amp up the sound quality of recordings produced with my phone. But to do all of this out of one box has been very unusual,” Khuent says. “It still doesn’t make it real because the meaning of writing the music that way is because I gave it to a human being. But I don’t have a human violinist, or one for my bass, or one for my brass section. I find that a lot of my friends – and I’ve been spending more time learning how to translate and really produce the music in boxes. We’re all relying on interfaces now. That’s not a thing that we even thought about three or four years ago,” he acknowledges. “But now, we’re all becoming mild experts in this field. We’re all taking online classes in how to mix and master.”
While the deeply tactile experience of interacting with analog musicians might be on the backburner for the duration of 2020 and beyond, his years with the steelpan as a performer and a tuner have taught him invaluable lessons about time and patience; lessons that come in handy during a moment of transition and tumult. As deceptively simple and shiny as a sleek computer or smartphone may be, the pan requires much deeper aptitude for creation, for performance, and maintenance. Khuent alludes to several patient masters in the pan community: the late, great Ellie Mannette, largely credited with initiating American academics into all things steel pan; and a hearing-impaired acquaintance who is one of the most adept pan tuners he knows.
“When I have to tune a band, I send them an invoice that gives them an estimated amount of time. That way, they don’t look at me like I’m crazy when it takes me a week to tune a pan properly,” he laughs. “A chromatic instrument has twelve notes. Every instrument in a steel band will have at least twenty-four notes. So if I spend one minute on every note, that will still take me – at the bare minimum – twenty-four minutes to tune a pan,” he poses hypothetically before stating the obvious.
“That’s not realistic.”