Baltimore City Paper
Dec. 12 memorial service at the North Baltimore Mennonite Church in Roland Park.
The 4 p.m. service will be followed by a potluck and an English country dance.
The 4 p.m. service will be followed by a potluck and an English country dance.
The sudden death of local musician, composer, and arts journalist Dawn Christine Culbertson has united in mourning friends and admirers from far-flung corners of the Baltimore arts community—much as the 53-year-old Charles Villager brought them together when she was alive. Culbertson collapsed and died late Thanksgiving day while chatting with friends after an English country dance at a Pikesville church. The medical examiner ruled her death an apparent heart attack brought on by arteriosclerosis, her sister Terry Culbertson says.
“She seemed a little quiet that night, but she often does,” says Mike Franch of the Baltimore Folk Music Society, which hosted the dance. “She had a good time, we had a nice dance, gave each other a hug afterward, then I turned to cleaning up and that was the last contact I had with her.”
Culbertson had no known history of heart disease, her sister says. Friends who had recently seen her also say she had appeared healthy and in good spirits.
Word of Culbertson’s death appeared Thanksgiving night on Artmobile, and the local online arts-oriented discussion group quickly became a gathering point of emotional tributes and reminiscences from people of disparate parts of the local art community—itself a tribute to the eclecticism of Culbertson’s interests and diversity of her fans.
Childhood friend David Beaudouin wrote in to Artmobile on Saturday, “We’d always wave from our little orange boats to each other. But Dawn paddled harder than just about anyone else I’ve known. If summed up over the last three decades, her contributions to the city’s music and arts scene are simply enormous. And right now, I am torn in two by the thought that her toughness, joy, and talent are gone. Yep, I’m crying.”
Though the suddenness of Culbertson’s death was a shock, many also found comfort in it.
“I think the thing that was touching to me is that the last afternoon and evening of her life seemed to be one of doing enjoyable activities with friends, and she seemed to die without any pain [or] more than momentary distress,” Franch says. “It’s clearly too young, but it was a nice way to go.”
“She was a performer,” Terry Culbertson says. “And she went out with that sense of being a performer, of finishing a dance.”
A classically trained lutenist, Culbertson performed the traditional early French, German, and Italian repertoire of the Renaissance-era instrument but also rocked “punk lute” renditions of popular music in the persona of her doppelgänger, Evil Pappy Twin. She sang both sacred music in church choirs and profane anti-war tunes in Vox Asylum, a group she founded this year. She worked as a caller at English country dances and performed with Fluid Movement, a local performance-art outfit.
Culbertson was as eclectic in her compositions as she was in performance, says Paul Schlitz, a friend of 20 years and fellow member of Vox Asylum.
“She was very into avant-garde music,” he says. “She once wrote a piece for trombone and television set. She also played in this thing called the Big Band. They used flags to direct themselves.”
The Towson native had a master’s degree in music composition from the Peabody Conservatory and in 1993 founded the Baltimore Composers Forum, a group created to support local composers.
Schlitz says he believes Culbertson’s interest in obscure and neglected music was a function of her personality.
“Dawn didn’t fit in a lot of places in life. She was one of these people who was so quirky that people could find her standoffish, or kind of scary, and a lot of times she had a lot of melancholy,” he says. “She didn’t mix well in a crowd. But in [Vox Asylum] she really fit in well, maybe because we were all crazy.”
A lifelong sense of being a misfit made Culbertson a natural advocate of myriad alternative scenes, her sister says.
“That’s why she founded the Baltimore Composers Forum. I think there was this sense of advocacy or justice, of promoting things that got left behind, because I think that’s how she experienced herself,” Terry Culbertson says. “Sort of left behind or not understood.”
Her empathy for fellow struggling artists found expression in her art and music criticism. She contributed to Baltimore OUTLoud, the Afro-American, the now-defunct Alternative, Link, Radar, and City Paper, among others.
“Musicians can be pretty catty about each other, but Dawn as a critic was very honest and generous,” Schlitz recalls. “She never felt like she had the right to crush somebody. She was a very kind critic, although critics by nature are not always kind.”
Culbertson’s ubiquity at events around town will be particularly missed, says David Crandall, who worked with Culbertson while he was an editor at Link and Radar.
“My reading of Baltimore is that people tend to stick to their own social groupings,” he says, “but she was everywhere. I can’t think of another individual in Baltimore who bridged more communities than she did.”
Though she celebrated the alternative in art and music, Beaudouin describes Culbertson as an essentially central figure. “She really was the kind of axis or point of intersection for all these groups,” he says. “Their edges would not have touched had it not been for Dawn’s presence.”
Baltimore artists and audiences will have another opportunity to be brought together by Culbertson at a memorial service Dec. 12 at the North Baltimore Mennonite Church in Roland Park. The 4 p.m. service will be followed by a potluck and an English country dance.
A new recording of her music will also be available there, with proceeds going to establish the D.C. Culbertson Memorial Fund, which will underwrite performances by local composers, as well as provide financial support to struggling artists.
http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=9422
“She seemed a little quiet that night, but she often does,” says Mike Franch of the Baltimore Folk Music Society, which hosted the dance. “She had a good time, we had a nice dance, gave each other a hug afterward, then I turned to cleaning up and that was the last contact I had with her.”
Culbertson had no known history of heart disease, her sister says. Friends who had recently seen her also say she had appeared healthy and in good spirits.
Word of Culbertson’s death appeared Thanksgiving night on Artmobile, and the local online arts-oriented discussion group quickly became a gathering point of emotional tributes and reminiscences from people of disparate parts of the local art community—itself a tribute to the eclecticism of Culbertson’s interests and diversity of her fans.
Childhood friend David Beaudouin wrote in to Artmobile on Saturday, “We’d always wave from our little orange boats to each other. But Dawn paddled harder than just about anyone else I’ve known. If summed up over the last three decades, her contributions to the city’s music and arts scene are simply enormous. And right now, I am torn in two by the thought that her toughness, joy, and talent are gone. Yep, I’m crying.”
Though the suddenness of Culbertson’s death was a shock, many also found comfort in it.
“I think the thing that was touching to me is that the last afternoon and evening of her life seemed to be one of doing enjoyable activities with friends, and she seemed to die without any pain [or] more than momentary distress,” Franch says. “It’s clearly too young, but it was a nice way to go.”
“She was a performer,” Terry Culbertson says. “And she went out with that sense of being a performer, of finishing a dance.”
A classically trained lutenist, Culbertson performed the traditional early French, German, and Italian repertoire of the Renaissance-era instrument but also rocked “punk lute” renditions of popular music in the persona of her doppelgänger, Evil Pappy Twin. She sang both sacred music in church choirs and profane anti-war tunes in Vox Asylum, a group she founded this year. She worked as a caller at English country dances and performed with Fluid Movement, a local performance-art outfit.
Culbertson was as eclectic in her compositions as she was in performance, says Paul Schlitz, a friend of 20 years and fellow member of Vox Asylum.
“She was very into avant-garde music,” he says. “She once wrote a piece for trombone and television set. She also played in this thing called the Big Band. They used flags to direct themselves.”
The Towson native had a master’s degree in music composition from the Peabody Conservatory and in 1993 founded the Baltimore Composers Forum, a group created to support local composers.
Schlitz says he believes Culbertson’s interest in obscure and neglected music was a function of her personality.
“Dawn didn’t fit in a lot of places in life. She was one of these people who was so quirky that people could find her standoffish, or kind of scary, and a lot of times she had a lot of melancholy,” he says. “She didn’t mix well in a crowd. But in [Vox Asylum] she really fit in well, maybe because we were all crazy.”
A lifelong sense of being a misfit made Culbertson a natural advocate of myriad alternative scenes, her sister says.
“That’s why she founded the Baltimore Composers Forum. I think there was this sense of advocacy or justice, of promoting things that got left behind, because I think that’s how she experienced herself,” Terry Culbertson says. “Sort of left behind or not understood.”
Her empathy for fellow struggling artists found expression in her art and music criticism. She contributed to Baltimore OUTLoud, the Afro-American, the now-defunct Alternative, Link, Radar, and City Paper, among others.
“Musicians can be pretty catty about each other, but Dawn as a critic was very honest and generous,” Schlitz recalls. “She never felt like she had the right to crush somebody. She was a very kind critic, although critics by nature are not always kind.”
Culbertson’s ubiquity at events around town will be particularly missed, says David Crandall, who worked with Culbertson while he was an editor at Link and Radar.
“My reading of Baltimore is that people tend to stick to their own social groupings,” he says, “but she was everywhere. I can’t think of another individual in Baltimore who bridged more communities than she did.”
Though she celebrated the alternative in art and music, Beaudouin describes Culbertson as an essentially central figure. “She really was the kind of axis or point of intersection for all these groups,” he says. “Their edges would not have touched had it not been for Dawn’s presence.”
Baltimore artists and audiences will have another opportunity to be brought together by Culbertson at a memorial service Dec. 12 at the North Baltimore Mennonite Church in Roland Park. The 4 p.m. service will be followed by a potluck and an English country dance.
A new recording of her music will also be available there, with proceeds going to establish the D.C. Culbertson Memorial Fund, which will underwrite performances by local composers, as well as provide financial support to struggling artists.
http://www2.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=9422
