Practicing in the margins

What happens to musicians’ rehearsal spaces as Madison redevelops?

Various buildings in Madison’s fading industrial pockets give our locally based musicians a place to be loud. These practice spaces—rented by the month, appointed with widely varying degrees of sound treatment (none and upward), and often not the primary purpose of a building’s owners and operators—serve a crucial role in any music community. People without the luxury of a home studio, a large basement, tolerant neighbors, or indulgent roommates/partners need somewhere else to go.

These spaces most often take root where industrial and commercial interests have pulled out, property values and rents are cheap, and residential neighbors are far enough away to not complain about the noise. If you know about the cycle of gentrification, you can guess where this is likely to go in time. Those same neglected areas eventually become prime targets for redevelopment. Creativity thrives in places where most people aren’t looking, but eventually someone starts looking and sees a business opportunity, and creativity is once again out on the street.

To further complicate things, several musicians I’ve spoken to want to keep the locations of their spaces off the radars of city officials, for fear of being shut down. They negotiate a very tricky line between the public and the private, much like Madison’s ever-vulnerable DIY venues, and bring up some of the same quandaries for local journalists writing about them. Some rehearsal spots go about things in a more openly commercial way, and others musicians tend to split up and inherit by word of mouth.

This, in turn, doesn’t bode well for musicians having a voice as the city rapidly redevelops and tries to fill in new housing. How many of these spaces will have new residential neighbors soon? Does the city’s enforcement process for building codes, largely driven by complaints, bring down the hammer when said neighbors call the city about the noise and late-night comings and goings? Where do those musicians go if this all ends up leading to conflict, and/or if the buildings where they practice eventually get torn down themselves? 

At some point, we’ll need to figure out how to balance the city’s dire need for more housing and greater density with the need to give musicians and artists enough places to do their thing. Or we can, you know, continue to drive our creative folks away from Madison with rising costs and a mockery of a support structure. Musicians and artists need practice spaces and studio space in addition to venues to perform for the public. They also need to be able to afford to live here. These goals are not at odds, but entangled with each other. 

Of course, the need to provide housing and reduce rent burdens for present-day Madisonians (and tens of thousands of future residents) has to come first. Balancing that with cultural needs doesn’t seem like too much to ask: “Rent’s cheap, but you’ll be bored to tears” is not the pitch anyone in Madison wants to be making. So, yes, it’s actually worth it for local officials to do some outreach and do some planning to ensure that musicians have access to practice spaces, and don’t feel the city is just waiting for an excuse to drive them out or shut them down.

Artists and musicians are at best peripheral, more often invisible, when the city and county make policy decisions. Most of our elected officials love to give lip service to the arts, but do virtually nothing to increase funding for the arts or to meaningfully address the fact that culture does, in fact, intersect with a multitude of “serious” policy issues in all sorts of complex ways. We’re approaching the height of the city and county budget season. See what changes this time around. See if any of the people you voted for even bother to bring these things up. 

When the city does consider arts and cultural affairs, it’s often through the lens of larger arts non-profits, larger for-profit events companies, and philanthropists who have a pretty limited view of the cultural landscape. In other words, not the arenas where new or adventurous artistic pursuits get their start. A band playing a venue like The Sylvee this year might have been playing to sparse crowds in divey clubs 10 or 20 years back. Any concert promoter or venue owner will tell you that music careers go through a whole pipeline of growing, developing, tapping into different niches. A city that wants to have a thriving cultural life needs to nurture all the points along that pipeline. If we only maintain the Live Nation end of the pipeline and let the earlier points collapse, we end up with something dull, predictable, over-commercialized, drained of agency and identity. Something trucked in and sold to us to generate shareholder return, not something that grows from and feeds back into the fullness of life in our communities.

Because the City of Madison draws so much of its piddly arts funding allotment from a mechanism that’s couched in tourism, it’s not really getting help to the people who need it most. And by the way, the city and Dane County have already paid people to tell it that it needs to create more space for musicians. A report the Greater Madison Music City Project released in 2022, partially funded with city and county dollars (and tied, perhaps somewhat awkwardly, to the purported tourism benefits of music), flagged a number of systemic issues that hamper the ability of musicians to survive and develop their work in the Madison area. Among them: “There is a significant lack of performance opportunities and venue spaces to play or practice, for local and all-level musicians.” This even comes up a second time in the same document: “There are not enough places for musicians to play, collaborate, hang out and practice.” 

A lot of civic and business leaders seem to be invested in the narrative that Madison Has A Vibrant Arts and Culture Scene—not in actually improving the conditions under which artists live and work. The City of Madison and Dane County need to allot vastly more funding for the arts, while also pursuing aggressive affordable housing strategies so that artists and everyone else have an easier time sticking around. More funding efforts need to go toward direct, ideally unrestricted grants that put money right in the pockets of artists themselves to enable them to pay their bills and spend time on their work. When there is an intermediary organization getting funding, there should be clear criteria and transparent reporting around how much of the money is used to pay artists directly. Right now, too much of the public arts funding local government does allocate goes toward the Overture Center (which barely bothers to explain how it actually uses those funds), administrative costs, professional-development offerings, and a big annual event where lots of musicians play for free. All of which have their merits, but this is badly out of balance.

The one practice space I’ve rented in my time in Madison, years ago, was a fairly neglected portion of a building in one of those industrial pockets I described earlier. The spaces on my floor didn’t have sound treatment of any kind, just worn tile flooring and walls that met the basic requirements for being walls. Some were set up a bit nicer, probably owing to the buildings being carved up among several different renters and subletters. Still, it was a place where I could get stuff done. I could work out my dumb little guitar loops and make noise and fiddle around in my recording software without driving my then-girlfriend to murder. (If you’re a big believer in the “people who write about music should also have to play music” thing, all I can say is be careful what you wish for.) Through those extant but not particularly thick walls, I overheard other musicians at work, some of whom I ended up meeting and admiring. Over the years, musicians I wanted to cover have also asked me to come by their practice spaces for interviews, at various locations around town. 

If you follow local music at all, you’ve almost certainly watched quite a few artists play songs they rehearsed in one or other of these buildings. You have very likely listened to albums and EPs people recorded in these spaces. If you value music and all the ways it enriches your life, these humble spaces are anything but peripheral.