Music

Jack Chelgren ’15 reviews the Annual Organ Romp

by

Jack Chelgren ’15 reflects on the many contrasting performances from the Annual Organ Romp, held on May 3, 2012. 

Sitting in the pews of Memorial Chapel during the Annual Organ Romp, I came to realize that I don’t listen to enough organ music.  I arrived at this conclusion amid a thunderous torrent of sound gushing from the pipes at the front of the hall, as I discovered that, however doggedly I tried to divorce myself from such associations, the sound of an organ kept evoking for me a clichéd sense of impending doom or peril.  I’m a little ashamed to admit this, because I worry that it reveals in me a kind of musical callowness akin to someone who associates the saxophone with Kenny G or Beethoven with a St. Bernard, and it occurred to me that if I listened to more organ music, I might be disabused of this rather inaccurate association.  I have the sense that I’m not alone in my ignorance, however: the organ, as I understand it, holds a specific and somewhat ironclad place in the public consciousness as the soundtrack to either a church service or a horror film.  And although it was billed as a performance of “new music and non-standard organ repertoire,” the Organ Romp did not necessarily reject such stereotypes about the organ and organ music, or even avoid them.  Instead, the performances seemed to contend that while the organ can and has filled such roles, it is certainly does not need to, and is in any case a vital and diverse player in contemporary music.

As if to establish right away that the concert wasn’t out to topple tradition, the program opened with a few Baroque hard-hitters, beginning with a first-rate rendition of J.S. Bach’s BWV 543: Prelude and Fugue in a minor, performed by Visiting Professor of Music Brian Parks.  It was an even blend of power and reserve, metrical precision and tempo rubato; swirling sixteenth-note passages hurtled furiously toward the bass—some sliding down chromatically, others descending a staircase of disjunct intervals—then leaping back up to begin the descent anew.  The fugue spooled out tightly coiled melodic threads that promptly unraveled into wider and wider intervals, phrases that were then woven together in an intricate contrapuntal braid.  Olivia May ’14 followed with more Bach, BWV 615: In dir ist Freude (“In You Is Joy”), a major key chorale that glowed with a kind of autumnal wisdom, during which I realized that there is something incredibly knowing, almost prophetic, to Bach’s music.  Though people often describe Beethoven as having a kind of inevitable quality to him, there is also something extremely inevitable in Bach.  Bach is lighter, certainly, than Beethoven, but no less profound.  The next piece, Buxtehude’s Prelude, Fugue and Chaconne in C, performed by Vivien Lung ’14, kept to the Baroque style, although, though no fault of Lung’s performance, it failed to reach the same levels of insight and verve of the prior two pieces.  The prelude featured full, heavy chords and tight melodies corkscrewing over low pedal tones, but these aspects were more or less perpetuated in the fugue and the chaconne; rather than acting as independent components of the song, the latter two sections felt like mere extensions of the first.  Again, however, this slight blandness was no doubt the doing of Buxtehude, not Lung.

Then things started to get a little weirder.  Organist Daniel Parcell and cellist Jessie Marino took the stage to perform an excerpt from Vivaldi’s Sonata VI for ‘cello and organ, Parcell in an antiquated tailcoat, Marino looking like the Corpse Bride in a white wig and a gaudy white dress, both completely deadpan as the crowd dissolved into giggles at the sight of them.  Marino, who is a member of the experimental music collective Ensemble Pamplemousse, took the lead voice, asserting the stately, handsome melody over measured downbeats in the organ.  Yet Marino soon began “bleeding” from her mouth as she played, globs and bubbles of fake gore sliding down her chin and staining her dress.  When they finished the piece, she and Parcell took a deep, deep bow, from which Marino, as though dead, did not straighten up until Parcell gave a tug on the back of her dress.  They left the stage, still totally expressionless, to cackles and gleeful applause.

“How are you gonna follow that?” somebody asked Alex Cantrel ’14 as he climbed up from the audience to perform his own composition, On Bliss Hill.  Yet Cantrel didn’t seem to feel any pressure to compete with Parcell and Marino’s antics; he made no attempts to be showy, but merely approached the bench modestly, sat down, and began to play.  His piece sounded a little bit like the overture to a film score, set in a lively compound meter with racing, expectant arpeggios that unfolded over a lower sustained melody.  It was admirable work, though, and lucidly rendered the sense of summery optimism connoted by the title.  Rain Tianyu Xie ’14 subsequently took on the American songbook, performing Vernon Duke and E.Y. Harburg’s What Is There to Say? with a weird filter on the organ that made it sound like a cross between a violin and a bamboo flute.  Xie executed the wistful, sentimental tune keenly and conservatively, and surprised me when she took what sounded like a short improvised solo between choruses of the melody.  Ashlin Aronin ’13 kept up Cantel’s precedent by performing a piece of his own, Elegy, accompanied on bassoon by Jeremy Webber ’13.  An adventuresome work full of close, new-agey harmonies, the song set off with a free meter exposition before settling into an almost sea shanty-esque canter.

Next up was Alan Rodi ’12, who had an almost playful manner onstage, quoting Monty Python—“And now for something completely different!”—as a projector screen lowered from the apse above the organ.  Rodi proceeded to play a beautiful medley of Philip Glass compositions, including the famous Mad Rush, while a clip from the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi (itself scored by Glass) played on the screen.  Jason Sheng Jia ’13 finished off the show with French organist and composer Jehan Alain’s Litanies, a forceful yet light-footed piece of fleeting dissonances and resolutions, traversing musical styles from Baroque to Latin in moving toward its tempestuous climax.

With its playful, almost anarchic connotations, the term “romp” is an apt descriptor for what took place last Thursday night: a concert that both embraced and toyed with the conventions of organ music.  And indeed, the evening had a self-aware, almost Nietzschean character of accepting the very thing one knows to be flawed, at times adopting the well-known dramatic side of the organist (as did Parks, May, and Lung) and at others exploiting and lampooning it (as did Parcell and Marino).  Yet the concert offered still another direction, that of Cantrel, Xie, Aronin, Rodi, and Jia, which neither opposed nor played into the stereotypes surrounding the instrument, and it was these performances that best represented the prevailing tone of the evening: one of inclusivity, a celebration of music.

Jack Chelgren ’15 reviews Jay Hoggard and the Sonic Hieroglyphs Ensemble

by

Jack Chelgren ’15 attended the Jay Hoggard Quartet concert as part of the 11th annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend, and reflects on his impressions.

Jay Hoggard. Photo courtesy of Santina Aldieri.

Last Saturday night, vibraphonist, composer, and Adjunct Professor of Music Jay Hoggard gave a concert that found Crowell Concert Hall more crowded than any performance I have been to all year.  The room was unambiguously packed, inundated with a healthy blend of students, families, friends, faculty, and a host of others scarcely connected to Wesleyan beyond their interest in the performance.  A student combo of musicians from the Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra (which Mr. Hoggard directs) opened the show, playing faithful but lively renditions of standards by Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Jordan, and Sonny Rollins.  There was a short lull, and then Mr. Hoggard’s band took the stage, the man himself with a theatrical strut, sporting an ultramarine suit and a flashy silver vest.  Silence reigned after the initial applause had died down and the band readied its gear; you could hear people fidgeting in their seats as Mr. Hoggard took out his glasses case and slipped his spectacles inside.  Then he glanced up at the audience, as if just realizing we were there.  “Thank you, and goodnight,” he said flatly, and the ensuing chuckles broke the ice.

The group opened with “Swing Em Gates,” a bluesy, up-tempo chart Mr. Hoggard wrote for Lionel Hampton, one of the most significant voices in big band and an early pioneer of jazz vibraphone.  Mr. Hoggard shared the melody with Marty Ehrlich, who played soprano saxophone, and each member of the group improvised.  “Overview” followed, a slower, more expansive piece for which Mr. Ehrlich switched to bass clarinet and delivered one of his best solos of the night, a dextrous, well-crafted display that showcased his rich, vivid tone on the instrument.  The next song, “Joyful Swamp,” brought out harpist Brandee Younger and hand percussionist Kwaku Kwaakye Obeng, kicking off at a breakneck pace with a scurrying marimba and percussion intro before dropping into its slinky, meandering melody, again in the vibes and soprano.  This piece, Mr. Hoggard revealed, he wrote for another jazz great, the monumental drummer Max Roach.  Next came “Soular Power,” an off-kilter, lilting tune that smacked heavily of Dave Holland’s quintet work with vibraphonist Steve Nelson.  This, in turn, was followed by “You’re In My Heart All the Time,” a duet for piano and vibes and the most candidly gorgeous piece of the evening.  The song had a stunningly spontaneous quality, floating in the air like a cloud between the performers, who, though not rhythmically or melodically in sync with one another, played with an astounding understanding and singularity of purpose.  The subsequent medley “The Right Place / Lessons from My Dad” gamboled from a nostalgic, shimmering opening into a desolate solo by bassist Santi Debriano, whose hoarsely melancholic tone recalled the throatier, more progressive side of cellist Erik Friedlander, before giving way to yet another sinuous groove led by the soprano and vibes.  “Convergence of the Niles” closed the first half of the show, a driving McCoy Tyner-esque bop on which Mr. Hoggard let loose with a fiery solo, pulling farther and farther away from the stormy rhythmic and harmonic structures of the song without for a second coming unmoored.

The group was joined by one last guest for the shorter second half of the concert, saxophonist-composer and Professor of Music Anthony Braxton, who kicked off the song “Piety and Redemption” with a soprano sax solo of his own, lashing out flurries of thirty-second notes and blur-like glissandi. Mr. Hoggard then lead the group into the world premiere of his multi-part composition Sonic Hieroglyphs From Wood, Metal, and Skin, the title of which sounds like a cross between Sun Ra and a Fluxus score.  The group played only three of its four movements, beginning with the brightly optimistic “Let Me Make It Clear (We Need Nuclear Peace This Year)” before proceeding into “Live, Breath”—a serenely open piece with brooding and dissonant undertones which featured qigong artists performing onstage alongside the musicians—and then finally to “The Mutilation of Our Mother, Earth, by Perpetual War and DISPOSABLE CONSUMPTION,” a jaggedly collapsing tune à la Michael Formanek.

It was, in all, a highly memorable evening.  There were times when I wished the orchestration had been a little lighter—it could have been the room or where I sat in it, but the ensemble sound often felt rather cluttered and muddy.  I also noticed that communication among the musicians often seemed a little disjointed.  Mr. Hoggard would frequently look up to cue transitions or solos and have to struggle to get the rest of the band’s attention.  Yet the group held together nicely through these rough patches, in large part thanks to the indefatigable rhythm section of Yoron Israel, Mr. Debriano, and Mr. Obeng, giving a show at once through-provokingly erudite and fundamentally accessible.

To learn more about Jay Hoggard, visit his website.  Click here to watch him performing “Joyful Swamp.”

Sarah Wolfe ’12 interviews Lily Haje ’13 about “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights” (April 26-28)

by

The Wesleyan Theater Department is presenting Gertrude Stein’s “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights” this weekend. Ms. Stein’s play uses the traditional Faust story but departs to examine technology and industrialization as well as perceptions of the self. Earlier this week Sarah Wolfe ’12 sat down with cast member and Assistant Director Lily Haje ’13 to discuss the upcoming performance. The show opens this Thursday, April 26 and ends Saturday, April 28. 

Cast members of "Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights"

The Faust is a popular German legend that has been told most famously through Goethe’s “Faust” and Christopher Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus.” Can you give me a brief description, in your own words, of both the original legend and what Gertrude Stein has done to it?

The traditional Faust story is about a human scholar who tries to make a pact with the devil to exchange his soul for either ultimate knowledge or ultimate power. The Stein story is rather different. Instead of beginning with the moment of the pact, as the Goethe and the Marlowe do, she begins at the moment of collection. We don’t actually see Faustus make the pact with the devil. Also, rather than exchanging his soul for knowledge or power, this Faustus exchanges his soul for the ability to create electric light. Ms. Stein had been living in the U.S. when electricity had first come into common usage. She then moved to Paris, back to a place where they did not have universal electricity, and re-experienced the introduction of electricity and wrote this play. There’s a lot in it about the process of industrialization and man’s relationship to nature and man’s relationship to himself and to religion.

There is another character in Ms. Stein’s play named Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel. She exists outside of Faust’s urban, industrial, technical world, and she is both four women and one woman. The way we have her in the play she’s sometimes one, sometimes four, sometimes two, and sometimes five women. This brings up this idea that the play grapples with: what is the self and how are identities both singular and multiple.

The play is less about characters in a traditional realist sense than it is about the language, which is beautiful. There are very few words in the play that have more than two syllables. It’s very simple, very much everyday language that then is constructed in completely bizarre and wonderful ways. For example:

I am I and my name is Marguerite Ida and Helena Annabel, and then oh then I could yes I could I could begin to cry by why why could I begin to cry.

And I am I and I am here and how do I know how wild the wild world is how wild the wild woods are…

How has Wesleyan adapted Gertrude Stein’s intentions for this play?

What Ms. Stein was writing about was the newest kind of technology. For her, electric light, which we take for granted now, was a completely innovative thing which opens up the world of what light is like. So we’ve been trying to take a similar approach to the show in terms of thinking about what is technology now. So we have lots and lots of lights, doing all kinds of crazy things. And we have a lot of projections, which is the most exciting new technology in theater that is still connected to light. It is all light, it is just a very different way of using light.

Furthermore, a lot of the production is not trying to hide what is not real. We have actors operating puppets, we have actors operating flashlights to operate the puppets. All of the masking goes away and you can see actors sitting on the side of the stage. All of the lighting instruments are visible. It’s very much about creating a theatrical event that is consciously a theatrical event. We have many people playing many different characters. With the exception of Mephisto [the devil], who is played by the same two people for the duration of the piece, pretty much every character gets played by multiple people, often at the same time. So it isn’t just Marguerite who is one and four and two and five, but Faust is also played by almost all of the men in the cast at one point or another. There are often two Fausts on stage at the same time.

The Theater Department has branched out in terms of design for this project. Designing sound is Demetrio Castellucci, of Dewey Dell. Designing lights is Ji-Youn Chang, a graduate of Yale School of Drama who previously collaborated with the Theater Department on The Tragedy of Richard III. Can you describe the experience and challenges of working with designers who were spread across the globe?

One of the things that’s both been cool and challenging about the process is that it is such a tech-heavy show. Demetrio only got in a week ago and Jiji was here a little before then. Everything that we’ve created has been videotaped and put on Dropbox so that Demetrio could be in London, seeing what we were doing and creating scores for it and same thing with Jiji and the lighting. It’s been fascinating to see how you can put a show together over huge distances. It has been a challenge given how much we interact with the lights and sound and projections, to not get those elements until very late, but now that we have them we’re working very intensely with them. 

What should the audience expect to take away from the show when they see it this weekend?

I think that it’s a show that benefits from watching it at face value first. Because it isn’t character driven in the traditional sense and because it isn’t plot driven in the traditional sense, I think the best way to watch it is without trying to make sense of it until it is over. There’s so much to look at and to hear and to engage with in it on its own terms before trying to analyze it. It does have a logic. It does make sense. But you kind of have to let it make sense instead of trying to make sense out of it.

Come see “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights” at the CFA Theater, from Thursday, April 26 to Saturday, April 28. The show starts at 8pm.

Jack Chelgren ’15 reviews electro-pop duo Tanlines

by

Creative Campus music blogger Jack Chelgren ’15 reviews the headlining act of Zonker Harris Day 2012, Tanlines.

Photo courtesy of Wesleying.org

“You all have great smiles,” beamed Jesse Cohen, looking out over the crowd assembled in the WestCo courtyard.  Cohen, who is a percussionist and producer, is half of Tanlines, the Brooklyn electro-pop duo formed in 2008 with singer and guitarist Eric Emm.  Tanlines was the featured act of this year’s Zonker Harris Day, Wes students’ unofficial celebration of psychedelia and hippie-dom and one of the more historically controversial fixtures of WesFest weekend.  Fortunately, the band seemed to know what they’d gotten themselves into.  “We got an email warning us about this event,” Cohen smiled.  “Reminds me of how I spent four years of my own life.”  Cohen bantered playfully with the narcotized audience throughout the show, turning adjustments to the sound system into an open “comments section” with the audience, which in turn concluded that what the band really needed was “more denim” (both men wore dark blue jeans, and Emm was sporting a washed-out denim jacket as well).  Emm was the quieter of the pair and made only a few scattered remarks, including one rather awkward shout-out for Ray Bans.  Between songs, Cohen switched on a bizarre recording of wind chimes jangling in a breeze, perhaps to toy with or indulge the blissed-out spectators.

The band put on a good show, a fuzzy, sun-splotched crowd-pleaser replete with straightforward melodies and danceable percussion.  Tanlines peddle almost exclusively in major-key pop grinds, which they spice up sagaciously with mild syncopations, calypso polyrhythms, and samples of conga drums.  Cohen and Emm aren’t out to push the boundaries of songcraft and genre, and though they’re often billed as “experimental pop,” there’s nothing in their repertoire that would pull the average listener up short.  (Cohen has noted that Brothers, a single from their new album, Mixed Emotions, reminds him of a Bruce Springsteen song.)  This is music built on simple, conjunct melodies, well-crafted choruses, and the occasional steel drum synth, but most of all, it’s music built on rhythmic intensity; the secret to Tanlines’ success, hallucinogens aside, is tasteful, persistent repetition.

Particularly in the moment, however, certain aspects of the performance bothered me.  Though Emm’s rough and leathery voice proved just as compelling in person as on record, his pitch wavered throughout the show, particularly in the low end.  The audio mix also left a lot to be desired—from where I was standing, you could barely hear the guitar at all.  Most of all, I was struck by how little of the music seemed actually to have been performed onstage; more than once, I looked up at the stage and realized that, although a percussionist and a half’s worth of rhythm section was pounding away from the speakers, neither Cohen nor Emm was anywhere near a drum or drum pad.  The effect was even more comical later on, when Emm’s vocals were suddenly buttressed by a backup singer not present onstage (even though Cohen had a mic and took care of the backup vocals on other songs).  Especially in the moment, this irked me; I waxed indignant on behalf of musicians who actually subject themselves to the contingency of performing all of their music on the spot and without computerized assistance.  My mind drew parallels with the 2004 scandal when Ashley Simpson was caught lip-synching on Saturday Night Live.  I realize in retrospect, though, that the difference between Ashley Simpson and Tanlines (or rather, one among many) is that Tanlines made no attempt to conceal their tactics.  “We play a lot of stuff live, and a lot of time you can’t really tell which is real and which is fake,” Cohen told NPR.  “That’s sort of a thing that we like to play with” (see Tanlines: Grown-Up Problems, With A Beat, NPR Music).

I acknowledge that, in assailing Tanlines’ musicianship based on their generous use of samples, I’m representing a relatively conservative camp in the music world.  Maybe I’m wrong when I assert above that Tanlines aren’t out to challenge listeners and their preconceived notions about music; maybe they are innovating in precisely a way that I’m not prepared for: by shaking up the expectation that good musical performance is all about creation in the moment.

In the end, my criticisms may be too harsh.  As I watched the show and mulled over my reactions to it, I was reminded of an article I read a few months ago in The New Yorker, in which Sasha Frere-Jones mounts a lukewarm defense of Lana Del Rey.  “Del Rey is not likely to be good onstage,” Frere-Jones conceded, “but this puts her in the company of about fifty percent of recording artists.”  It’s a valid point.  On a list of qualities that constitute “good music,” perfectly riveting and errorless live performances might be lucky to make the top ten.  And Tanlines, I should grant them, made a far better than average display.  Perhaps they were just having an off day.  Or perhaps it was just me—everyone else I talked to found the show “fantastic,” “really cool,” and “awesome.”  In any case, Tanlines make an excellent listen on record and put on an exceptionally enjoyable live show, and that, when I think about it, is more than enough to ask for.

Be sure to check out footage of Tanlines performing longtime hit Real Life here at Wesleyan, as well as their remix of Au Revoir Simone’s Shadows.

Ritual, Health, and Healing: In the Classroom with Shira Engel ’14

by

A personal account by Shira Engel ’14 of “Ritual, Health, and Healing”, a course which is part of the Creative Campus initiative of the Center for the Arts.

Photo by Hailey Still.

“Ritual, Health, and Healing” is an interdisciplinary class that transcends disciplinary boundaries. It is cross-listed in Anthropology, Science in Society, and Dance. It is co-taught by Anthropology professor Gillian Goslinga and Artist in Residence Jill Sigman. Gillian Goslinga has an academic background in ethnographic research on ritual practices. Jill Sigman comes to Wesleyan from New York City, where she is a choreographer working in performance and installation, and directing her company jill sigman/thinkdance. She is currently engaged in her Hut Project. She also has a background in philosophy. The course is a true blend of the disciplines it is cross-listed in as well as the disciplines of the professors. As a student in the course, I find my mind being constantly expanded to think not in terms of a singular discipline, but to creatively combine them in ways that allows the material to sink in.

The course is divided into two segments. The first quarter of the semester, we learned about ritual, health, and healing and what these broad terms means to different cultures. This comprised the necessary theoretical component of the course that feeds into the service learning we are currently doing in Williamsburg-Greenpoint, Brooklyn (but I will let my lovely classmate Hannah elaborate on that in posts to come).

The course is also comprised of a three-hour seminar on Mondays and a movement lab on Tuesday evenings. On Monday, we discuss readings on the cultural and theoretical significance of ritual, health, and healing and on Tuesdays, we embody those readings and theories in movements that transcend the definition of dance.

Because we are constantly encouraged in this course to be self-reflexive, I will come out and say that I was attracted to this course in large part because on WesMaps, the description said that people without any dance experience are encouraged to apply. I do not consider myself a dancer and this course allows for a lack of labels. It allows for a blurring of the lines between disciplines, as well as a blurring of the lines between self-identified labels of artistic identity. After class, I talked to Jill Sigman about what makes this course creatively unique and she said, “This isn’t strictly a dance class. We may be using dance in the context of learning about other things, but there are people who are totally not here to learn to point their foot and that’s what makes it fascinating to me.”

This course shifts disciplinary boundaries in ways that make us – the students – uncomfortable, thrilled, challenged, self-reflexive, and on our toes. It challenges preconceptions of academic work, teaching us that it is inherently creative. Jill Sigman’s studio in Brooklyn is called “The Border.” In many ways, we exist on the border between disciplines, definitions of art, activism, and service in this course as we grapple with definitions of ritual, health, and healing. I am excited to see how these definitions will continue to unfold as we progress into the service learning, creatively translating the work we have done in the seminar and movement lab into practice, while realizing that all is part of the same process.

Feet to the Fire Commissions by Sam Long ’12 (Mar. 31) & Ethan Cohen ’13 (Apr. 14-22)

by

Sewon Kang ’14 talks about student commissioned works by Sam Long ’12 (March 31) and Ethan Cohen ’13 (April 14-22).   

The Center for the Arts Creative Campus Initiative is proud to present two student commissioned works that address the ever-growing challenge of environmentalism in exciting new blends of art and science. These student commissions are part of Feet to the Fire programming, a major undertaking on Wesleyan’s campus to examine critical environmental issues through art and science.

At 2pm on Saturday, March 31, 2012 in Memorial Chapel, Sam Long ’12 will perform his senior thesis project, which combines environmental studies and music in a special collaborative performance inspired by the Connecticut River, one of Middletown’s most spectacular local resources. The performers call themselves The Honey and the Sting and will play all original music on a stage powered by students on bicycle energy generators. Celebrating what the earth provides without contributing negatively to the problem, such a performance has never been attempted at Wesleyan before.

Scoreboard is an installation by Ethan Cohen ’13 that brings together the romanticized American image and the aesthetic of energy efficiency. It replicates the “home” score, an isolated section of the standard football scoreboard, first using traditional incandescent light bulbs. This ideal is then contrasted with a version of the same board that utilizes more energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs. The comparison of the two nearly identical boards side by side challenges viewers to decide for themselves whether or not the soul of an object can be retained in energy efficient form. Scoreboard will be installed in the Science Library during Wesleyan’s Earth Week Celebration – Saturday, April 14 through Sunday, April 22, 2012.

Swerved Installation in Usdan through April 19

by

Swerved invites you to a display of Wesleyan student artwork, on display in Usdan until Thursday, April 19, 2012. There will be a selection of 3D and 2D pieces, curated entirely by Wesleyan students. Swerved is an organization that seeks to promote and display all manner of artwork from Wesleyan students. Their website serves as an excellent repository of submissions, displaying the many outlets of Wesleyan creativity. Here is a list of the student artists and their pieces.

Nick Kokkinis ’13

Untitled, Polyester blanket, canvas, wood, and hardboard
Cora Engelbrecht ’12
Untitled
Monoprint
Ariana Todd ’14
Growth, Digital Photograph
Aaron Forbath ’12
Master Bedroom, Princeton, NJ, Digital Photograph
Harry Hanson ’12
Emily, Digital Photograph
Max Skelton ’12
Untitled, Woodblock Print
Gabe Gordon, ’15
Lost at Sea, Oil on Canvas
Timmy Lee ’12
Amethyst, Oil on Canvas
Alex Chaves ’12
Untitled, Oil Pastel, Watercolor, and Charcoal on Paper
Wyatt Hodgson ’14
It’s Complicated, Technology
DonChristian Jones ’12
Untitled, Oil on Canvas
Brittni Zotos ’12
Untitled, Etching

Swerved also has released a mixtape available on Soundcloud, made up of songs from Wesleyan student musicians. Artists and groups include Sankofa, The Appledaughters, Robert Don ’15, Milo Grey, Faith Harding ’14, Kilbourne, Cybergiga, Khari, Don Jones, and Alaska Chip.

Katherine Clifford ’14 talks to Artist in Residence Hari Krishnan about the Spring Faculty Dance Concert (Mar. 2 & 3)

by

Katherine Clifford ’14 interviews Hari Krishnan, Artist in Residence at Wesleyan University, on the Spring Faculty Dance Concert: March 2 & March 3, 2012 at 8pm in the CFA theater. Hari Krishnan is teaching the Bharata Natyam and Repertory and Performance classes this spring. The Spring Faculty Dance Concert will feature the U.S. premiere of “Quicksand” and the world premiere of “Nine.”

inDANCE. Photo by Miles Brokenshire.

The Wesleyan dancers performing the world premiere of “Nine” will include Abigail Baker ’12 and Aditi Shivaramakrishnan ’12 (both performances); Arianna Fishman ’13, Allison Greenwald ’14, Christian Lalonde ’13, Francesca Moree ’14, Cristina Ortiz ’15, Sarah La Rue ’12, and Rachel Rosengard ’14 (March 2); and graduate students Taylor Burton and Natalie Plaza, Dawanna Butler ’15, Arin Dineen ’13, Jessica Placzek ’12, Claire Feldman-Reich ’12, and Tess Scriptunas ’14 (March 3).

Q: Tell me about the piece “Quicksand,” which will be performed in the Spring Faculty Dance Concert; what does it explore, and how does your work combine South Indian Classical Dance, or Bharata Natyam, with contemporary influences?

A: Both pieces are about the search for identity, the search for selfhood. This is the overarching theme that binds the pieces together. “Quicksand” is a piece that I choreographed in March 2011 for a high profile dance festival in Canada. The work I do usually challenges dominant discourses about culture. I try to subvert popular culture, and I try to challenge stereotype and cliché. “Quicksand” is a prime example of this prominent theme. The inspiration of the work came from nine archetypal emotions popular in Indian classical dance. These nine emotions are usually hyper-exaggerated and done in a specific way by a classical dancer, usually female. I decided to subvert that popular depiction by using nine contemporary male dancers, and by creating a postmodern interpretation for those nine emotions.

“Quicksand” is like a metaphor for my life; my name is Hari Krishnan, my ethnicity is Indian, I teach Bharata Natyam and contemporary dance at Wesleyan. I have a dance company that does a whole range of work in Toronto, Canada. I choreograph and perform around the world: in Europe, Malaysia, Singapore, and India. Wherever I go and perform my work, some of the comments I get are that my work is not Indian enough, it’s too Western, or that my work is not Western enough, it’s too Indian. All those opposite reactions to my work put me in an interesting location as a dance artist and in terms of my identity. I use “Quicksand” as a metaphor to demonstrate that complexity; it is a personal meditation on identity and selfhood. From a dance point of view, it is an engaging, physical, high-energy work by nine top Canadian male dancers who are going to showcase a new, unique movement vocabulary that blends Indian classical gesture and contemporary dance body movements.

Q: What inspired your other piece “Nine,” and how does it further explore these themes?

A: As a parallel story to “Quicksand,” the Repertory and Performance class at Wesleyan will do the same interpretation as “Quicksand”, but in a “classical” mode, using nine dancers and the same nine emotions. By “classical,” I mean a classical Indian style of movement, but with contemporary presentation in terms of lighting design, spatial dynamics, and the dancers’ relationships with each other.

Q: What is unique about the show and how do the two pieces come together to form one coherent meaning?

A: What’s unique about this show is that it’s one idea, nine emotions, and two interpretations of this idea: one postmodern and one classical, which are displayed through radically different works. It is the culmination of my own artistic, research, and pedagogical practices. It also allows me to blend my two worlds; I’m artistic director of inDANCE, the Toronto-based dance company, and I’ve been at Wesleyan for over ten years now.

Q: What do you hope people will gain from the show? Why should people come see it?

A: This show is for anyone who is interested in dance, design and music. We have a U.K.-based composer who composed the music for “Quicksand.” He has combined electronic and computer-generated music with music from popular culture. “Nine” consists of an amazing Indian classical dance call, which is very lush and rich. Visual design and costume design are also very strong; “Quicksand” is a multimedia work. The lighting design for “Nine” has been specially lit by Theater Professor Jack Carr.

This is for anybody interested in movement and high-energy physicality. It is about celebrating diversity and experiencing humanity in various hues, colors, and tints. It is a bizarre look at life, and a fun, accessible, and engaging evening of dance. The dance department reflects the concert in terms of its openmindedness and the eclectic dance courses we offer in the dance department: from Javanese to Ballet to Modern to Bharata Natyam to West African. This is the kind of concert that can really thrive at Wesleyan, and it’s a testimony to the open-minded, progressive attitude at Wesleyan.

Finally, I tell people that it is a must see for “anyone interested in dangerous liaisons and delicious diversity.” I hope that the audience will come in with an open-minded attitude, and not expect either Indian or contemporary dance; this is “Wesleyan dance.”

Jack Chelgren ’15 on Max Tfirn’s graduate recital “Pieces From Nature”

by

Jack Chelgren ’15 on Max Tfirn’s graduate recital “Pieces From Nature”.

Max Tfirn is a tall and spindly grad student with Led Zeppelin hair and a casual, unassuming air.  Out of context, one would more likely take him for the drummer of a heavy metal band than the composer of erudite electronic music.  He was lurking in the audience when I arrived at Crowell Concert Hall last Friday night for his Masters Recital, “Pieces From Nature,” but he made his way to the front of the hall as the house lights dimmed.  Squinting up at us, he asked that we all please turn off our cell phones—not just put them on silent, but turn them off—because the technology he was working with onstage was very sensitive, so much so, in fact, that any cell phone activity could actually cause it to catch fire.  “And we wouldn’t want any pyrotechnics up here,” he concluded.  It was difficult to tell if he was joking—while he seemed completely earnest, the idea of a mixer spontaneously combusting on account of a stray cell phone call seemed more than a little far-fetched.  It wasn’t too much to ask, though, so I joined the small handful of people around me in turning my phone off, completely and utterly off.

Tfirn specializes in music based on L-systems, a kind of formal grammar used for modeling plant growth and fractals.  First proposed by a Hungarian biologist named Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968, L-systems take simple terms called axioms and expand them into long strings of symbols, which can then be graphed as geometric structures. Tfirn then goes a step further, using these shapes and sequences as the structural basis for his compositions.

The six pieces he performed on Friday night were at once varied and similar, amorphous and constant.  They were works of geologic proportions, strata of highly textured sound shifting and evolving like the grinding of tectonic plates.  The opening piece, 32°(F+F)F[+F][-F]F[-F[-F][+F]F], began as the sparse interplay of a handful of tones before sweeping into an enormous hurricane of noise, chaotic and fluctuating, evoking variously an air raid siren, an oncoming train, electric guitar feedback, and the roar of the ocean.  In the listless and agitated Sounds of Auditory Hallucination, Tfirn let loose a high-pitched drone that bored through my skull and swirled around inside it, underpinned by an array of splotches, shrieks, and twangs reminiscent of Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon (1967).  He was joined on vocals by fellow grad student Liz Albee, whose throaty hums and ululations he distilled into a stream of metallic clangs and whistles.  The most conventional display of the evening was A Meeting of Florets, a piece for prepared piano performed by Seung-Hye Kim and Tfirn with a sprightly atonality à la Anton Webern and a spiraling repetitiveness à la Frederic Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge (1969).  Through the insistent reiteration of the seven short motifs that make up the piece, however, Tfirn elicited the same balance of stasis and constant upheaval that pervaded the entire concert, maintaining a prevailingly mercurial air even in this seemingly more traditional composition.  The evening concluded with Florets, a piece for laptop ensemble in which each performer works in real time to match the frequencies mapped visually in an image.  It was perhaps the most intangible of them all, a fog of entangled, slowly rising voices suggesting a vague yet mounting apprehension.

Tfirn’s work is fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing equally on the linguistic, the visual, and the musical.  A string of symbols becomes the outline of a tree and then the form of a song, each one accentuating intrinsic but otherwise imperceptible qualities in the others.  Ultimately, Tfirn demonstrates the extent to which our experience and understanding of the world is shaped by the lenses through which we perceive it.

For more information about Max Tfirn, or to listen to his music, check out his website or SoundCloud.

WORKS CITED

Ochoa, Gabriel.  “An Introduction to Lindenmayer Systems.”  Fachbereich Biologie.  School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, 2 Dec 1998.  Web.  21 Feb 2012.

Jack Chelgren ’15 reviews .twiddlebuf and the Experimental Music Concert Series

by

Jack Chelgren ’15 reviews .twiddlebuf and the Experimental Music Concert Series.

One face-stingingly cold night not long ago, I extricated myself, a few minutes behind schedule, from the piles of homework blanketing my bed and hurried across campus to Russell House.  I arrived slightly late, and as I sped through the main gate and up the walkway was unnerved to see that the parking lot was practically empty.  I began to worry I’d come to the wrong place.

Fortunately, I hadn’t—climbing the steps to the front door, I spotted a poster taped hastily to one of the panels: “.twiddlebuf / music for violin and electronics.”  My tardiness was similarly not an issue; I slipped inside several minutes after the show was supposed to start to find the audience standing around in the reception area, munching on cheddar and apple slices.

This was the second concert in a series put on by Wesleyan’s student-run Experimental Music Group, the first of which I went to back in October.  That show featured acclaimed Berlin improvisers Madga Mayas and Tony Buck performing under the name SPILL, and it was incredible.  Using highly inventive extended techniques on their instruments—which are piano and percussion, respectively—Mayas and Buck created captivating and original music, great sprawling pieces at once violent and deeply spiritual.  It was a stunning night.

Having enjoyed SPILL so thoroughly, I went to .twiddlebuf with rather high expectations, and happily, I was not disappointed.  The two concerts were worlds apart from each other both in terms of sound and overall feeling, but they also shared a number of key characteristics that made each one enjoyable in its own distinct way.  .twiddlebuf, like SPILL, is a duo, comprised of electronic artist Sam Pluta and violinist Jim Altieri, and in both groups’ performances this configuration lent an intimate, conversational tone to the proceedings that facilitated extensive communication between the musicians and the audience.  The largely improvisational nature of the music was also critical to its success.  This helped to free up the musical conversation, creating an open, receptive environment for the musicians to share and interact with each other while we, the listeners, looked on, reflecting and just trying to keep up.

The greatest parallel between the two shows, however, was their manipulation of conventional instruments to explore unfamiliar sonic voices.  Mayas and Buck did this acoustically, placing objects and wires in and around their instruments and playing them in unusual ways, by scratching the piano’s strings, for instance, or rubbing large metal gears against the head of the snare drum.  .twiddlebuf took an electrical approach, using computer software and a fancy touch controller called a Manta to harness and distort the sound of Altieri’s violin.  Working effortlessly in tandem, the two of them blew apart the instrument’s traditional sound palette, evoking a myriad of textures and images from a passing train to a shakuhachi flute to the splotchy, moist work of modern electronic producer Balam Acab.  John Cage’s Rozart Mix (1965) was also fresh on my mind from the Alvin Lucier Celebration, and these choppy exchanges recalled that piece vividly for me as well.

Unlike the SPILL concert, which put me into something of a meditative reverie, I left .twiddlebuf feeling energized and invigorated.  I wasn’t very affected in an emotional sense, but in retrospect I don’t think that was the point.  It’s not that Pluta and Altieri’s music is frivolous, or that they don’t their craft seriously as other artists, say Mayas and Buck, do; it’s just different.  As their strange and playful name implies, .twiddlebuf is about experimentation its own sake, and also, arguably, for sound’s sake.  And that’s okay.  We need art with meaning, art that probes our lives and emotions and shows us what we cannot see, but we also need art that knows itself, that explores its own limits and potential and in doing so helps keep progress and innovation alive.

In light of these remarkable first two shows, I look forward to whatever the Experimental Music Group offers next.  My only criticism so far is that they’re too quiet about themselves; aside from day-of posts on Wesleying and a smattering of last-minute signs around campus, there was precious little publicity for either of the amazing and totally FREE little gems they’ve put on.  (Hence the empty parking lot at Russell House.)  But fear not—I recently discovered their group Facebook page, which you can like to hear about upcoming concerts in the series.  Keep an ear out.

To learn more about any of these artists, visit their websites:

Sam Pluta: http://www.sampluta.com/

Jim Altieri: http://tweeg.net/

Magda Mayas: http://magdamayas.jimdo.com/

Tony Buck: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Tony+Buck