Steve Parker’s Fight Song, at SPACES

CAN asked Paul Cox—writer, percussionist, former Dean of Creative Arts at Tri-C, lecturer/visiting assistant prof. of Music at Oberlin College and Case Western Reserve University, and even before that Associate Director of Performing Arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art—to visit and write about Steve Parker’s Fight Song, on view through April 18. –Ed.

So, I crossed Detroit and walked into SPACES, to see Steve Parker’s Fight Song.  

Once inside, I wandered past the videos of NCAA marching bands moving quietly across the monitors. These subtle meditations focused on the often-overlooked role of the marching band in NCAA football culture. In the scheme of the exhibition, the videos of marching bands performing sonic healing mediations function as a prelude to the large installation in the back gallery.

Taking up about a 20-foot square in the main gallery, the installation is made up of partially deconstructed brass instruments. The salvaged instruments were attached to a device that translated electronic signals from a visitor’s forehead into sound, through the instruments–say a trombone or French horn. Other horns served as vessels for recordings of chatter by indistinct voices giving the installation a haunted feel, perhaps the spirits of frustrated fifth graders trying to play the trombone for the first time. Some instruments, like the hanging cymbals seemed hung purely for decoration.

I should say a word about the artist himself. Steve Parker is a music professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio who teaches trombone — which tracks, given how much of his art involves deconstructed brass instruments. He attended Oberlin, class of ’02, with a double major in music and mathematics, and confesses that “Everything I do is largely a product of my Oberlin education.” He subsequently won a Fulbright (2005) and a Rome Prize in 2020. Knowing this, the rigor and ingenuity of “Fight Song” makes perfect sense — a mathematician’s precision applied to the most intimate instrument of all: the human brain. 

After walking through the maze of hanging instruments and admiring the careful installation, I came face to face with the EEG device designed to measure one’s brainwaves, which sends their signals to the instruments. I hesitated to put it on with its blinking lights positioned over my forehead, pretty sure I looked like a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica.

Parker’s installation uses neural impulses from the EEG to trigger sounds in the gallery. With the EEG device balanced on my bald head extending from my brow to my temples, it rested on top of my ears like sunglasses. Once I was connected, my brainwaves were on full displayed on the gallery wall. A second monitor showed the types of waves and their frequencies: Delta, Theta, Alpha, Beta and Gamma their frequencies. My inner brain on full display!   

I remember reading that these wearable devices could be used to help folks regulate their brain activity. I picked up a meditation guide put together for the show, “inspired by Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier.” There were seven brief prompts, “Comfortably stand behind the podium and listen to the sounds coming from the sculpture. Breathe slowly and deeply.” This was the prompt that helped me calm my brain activity, with nary a peep from the brass section.

I’ll be honest, I felt very exposed wearing the headset, like my inner thoughts were being broadcast in a dissonant haze of sounds. Would they suspect my chronic anxiety from the sounds coming through the horns? And as if on cue, chattering voices started up, my “monkey brain,” I thought. However, once I knew I could calm my mind, I felt more in control, until I entered a conversation with one of the Spaces staff. What I heard was a racket of sound after she asked a question. My brain worked hardest formulating an answer and a follow-up question at the same time. Sheesh, I thought, my brain was putting in overtime trying to carry on a conversation. That was illuminating.

Doctors for years have discussed the benefits of this kind of neural feedback. But I was surprised by how quickly I could change my “EEG energy.” I was thinking of this when I attended the first “on-site activation” with RA Washington’s performance on Saturday, February 21^st. Wearing the EEG monitor, RA recited poetry in dialogue with the horn sounds, which were generated by his thoughts. I noticed he was clenching and unclenching his fists, a known way of generating neural activity. He then melded his poetry with the sounds in ways that felt intentional. One climactic section built around a repeated phrase: “We take and take and take and take,” he chanted in unison with the horns. Another was a riff built around the phrase, “Health Care, Health Care…Care health?” Calmly walking around the installation, Mr. Washington put on a masterful performance that felt both rooted in our political chaos and spiritually uplifting at the same time, fulfilling the work’s themes of “collective healing” and “embodied sound.”

What I found most remarkable about this experience was learning about neural feedback and practicing it (without a doctor’s appointment!). And the joy of using my brain to play music with the installation. In my experience, this show felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience, especially wearing the EEG device.

Stephen Parker: Fight Song
February – 13-April 18, 2026

Additional on-site activations, all on Saturdays at 1 pm:
Ben Eberle March 7
Marcia Custer March 21
Uno Lady April 4
Poet Kisha Nicole Foster April 18.
Free with registration.

SPACES Gallery
2900 Detroit Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44113
216.621.2314