You might struggle to describe Piotr Orlov's career in music, but he has a word for it: He's a "musicker," his riff on the term "musicking," which was coined by the author Christopher Small.
"It's this idea that music doesn't just happen when musicians play it, but as a reciprocal act that happens when listeners experience music," Orlov, who is a lecturer at NYU, told me. Under Small's theory, he explained, music is made by "everybody who's involved in the creation of music as an event."
"So in a modern context, that would mean the producers of the show, the ushers who lead you to a seat, or the people who tell everybody, 'Hey, you should go to the show,'" Orlov said. "It definitely means everybody who's ever been involved in the DIY community."
Orlov has curated genre-defying music shows at museums and galleries, put on concerts and concert series, and written for the New York Times and Rolling Stone. Small's concept put all of Orlov's work into perspective: "I was like, oh, this is what I've been doing my entire life, even though people have known me mostly as a writer or as a producer of quote, unquote, music-related content."
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