Saturday April 18th 2026, was the first installment of new project Music to Grow Things. Monica Diodati made delicious food and I played some music all inspired by the Lemon. Everyone left with a lemon seedling. Lemon Sonata.
All grown from seeds and drenched in sound.
Music to Grow Things is a long-duration participatory sound project by Craig Colorusso that brings together music, ecology, and community through the shared act of cultivation. Combining immersive live performance with the gifting of living seedlings, the work expands music beyond a temporary event and into an ongoing system of care, attention, and connection.
Emerging from the artist’s personal practice of growing plants from the seeds of consumed fruits and vegetables, the project is influenced by Brian Eno’s notion that composing resembles gardening: scattering seeds with intention but without certainty. What began as a modest response to the environmental impact of travel evolved into a larger question—how might a musical work continue to live, change, and demand responsibility after the final note?
At the center of the project is an extended composition for bowed electric guitar, bass clarinet, and electronics. Built from sustained tones, subtle harmonic shifts, and breath-like textures, the music unfolds slowly, creating immersive sonic environments rather than traditional concerts. These performances function as atmospheres of shared duration, asking audiences not simply to hear, but to remain.
Each event extends beyond listening. Audience members are invited to take home seedlings grown and cared for by the artist, transforming them from listeners into caretakers. The act of cultivation becomes a continuation of the musical experience, unfolding over weeks, months, and years through attention, patience, success, and failure.
In a culture shaped by speed, disposability, ecological vulnerability and increasing social isolation, Music to Grow Things proposes care as its primary medium. The work asks participants to engage in the increasingly unfamiliar disciplines of maintenance, long-term attention, and shared responsibility. Plants may fail. Participants may disengage. It is precisely this uncertainty that makes care the true material of the piece.
Through simple digital platforms, participants remain connected across locations, sharing growth, images, questions, and knowledge. Over time, these exchanges form a distributed community grounded not in geography, but in a collective commitment to tending something alive.
Music to Grow Things ultimately asks what it means to sustain rather than consume, to remain attentive beyond novelty, and to create an artwork whose most important life begins after the performance ends.
