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The birth hour of this unusual musical partnership was in 1988, in an equally unusual place – CalArts, short for the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.

CalArts is an internationally renowned, progressive and experimental workshop-laboratory of all the arts, where practicing and acknowledged artists teach in all disciplines of the arts. The founder of the institute, Walt Disney, stated: “The future holds bright promise for those whose imaginations are trained to play on the vast orchestra of the arts-in-combination.”

This boundary transcending approach brought Julie Spencer and Gernot Blume to explore and shape their creative potential in this unique environment. It quickly became clear, that the two shared an immoderate insatiability for the broad palette of artistic expression, and so found each other side by side in African, Indian, Indonesian, and contemporary music ensembles, in jazz bands as well as courses on jazz composition, music history and ethnomusicology.

It took some debate among the professors to allow Gernot to make the exception of enrolling in lessons on so many different instruments at the same time. But the results justified conforming the curriculum to his unusual needs and skills. With an extraordinary work ethic, he fulfilled the requirements for his first degree two years early.

Meanwhile Julie taught other students while pursuing her own studies, as an already known specialist on her instrument, the marimba. The colleagues of the two artists recognized the astonishing dynamic between the two personalities and their complementariness long before the two acknowledged it themselves. But art and life had already melted together into a harmonious unity.

“The angels were dancing on the roof, when we met there for the first time, I’m convinced of that,” said Julie Spencer. “That was a piece of work to make that happen!” And Gernot Blume remembers: “Julie always sensed the next artistic impulse, the next creative idea, which were so completely compatible with mine that I was flabbergasted from the beginning. We knew that being us made us happier being who we are. That was the foundation for our collaboration and our family!”

“Experiencing soaring individuality never felt so free as when our unspoken togetherness began to coalesce into a communion of thought. Aspirations were easily articulated, dreams so clearly shared, visions breathed into existence, because they were the very breath of the creative need of our souls. This is our wish, as musicians, as people: to be part of a larger chain of interconnectedness, to inspire with our joy of working together, the idea of equal partners, collaboration in all the arts, sciences, politics, and families of the world, regardless of gender and nationality: Peace and hope through the gratitude for life, expressed in creative play.”

Julie Spencer & Gernot Blume