Big Weekend at the CFA (Nov. 18-19)

Eugene O'Neill, Cape Cod, 1922

I was one of the lucky people to have a ticket for The Great God Brown last night, the Theater Department’s production directed by Associate Professor Yuriy Kordonskiy. I can tell you it’s a massive undertaking in which an extraordinary ensemble of our top student actors explore the duality of personalities: our struggles between indulgence and restraint; who people expect us to be and who we truly are; our rational and irrational selves.  All played out on an inventive, flexible set that is dramatically lit to move the action forward.  As of this writing, there are still tickets for the Saturday matinee.

The Great God Brown
By Eugene O’Neill
Directed by Yuriy Kordonskiy
Designed by Jack Carr, Marcela Oteiza, and Leslie Weinberg

Wednesday, November 16 through Friday, November 18, 2011 at 8pm
Saturday, November 19, 2011 at 2pm & 8pm
CFA Theater
$8 general public; $5 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $4 Wesleyan students

Bebe Miller Company: "History"

The Dance Department and Center for the Arts welcome Bebe Miller Company to the Patricelli ’92 Theater this weekend for three performances. Bebe is a master contemporary dance choreographer who has influenced the work of numerous dance makers who have worked with her over the years. In her newest work, History, she asks the question: how are dances made and how can we give our audiences a window into our creative process? Audiences coming to the ’92 will be invited into an installation and then engage in a performance by veteran company members Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones.  In Bebe’s words:  “Dance works are made of a complex mix of ideas, physical practice, forgetting, remembering, minor epiphanies and daily discoveries, joined together piece-by-piece in the evolving circumstance of creative research over time. [History is] an archeological dig into our continuously evolving manner of asking questions about people, relationships, and the culture in which we live.” She’s collaborated with long-time dramaturg, Talvin Wilks, and video artist (and Wes alum!) Lily Skove, in the making of the work.  Wesleyan audiences will be invited to give Bebe feedback about the work in a Q&A session following each performance.

Bebe Miller Company: “History
Friday, November 18, 2011 at 8pm
Saturday, November 19, 2011 at 2pm & 8pm
Patricelli ’92 Theater
Pre-performance talk with dance scholar Debra Cash on Friday at 7:15pm, Memorial Chapel
$23 general public; $19 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students

Joshua Roman. Photo by Jeremy Sawatzky.

Finally, tomorrow night, you’ll have the opportunity to see cello virtuoso, Joshua Roman, at Crowell Concert Hall.  Because of his charismatic presence, at age 27 he’s already been dubbed a “classical rock star” by the press. He was the principal cellist for the Seattle Symphony at the young age of 22 and since then has earned a national reputation for performing a wide range of repertoire with an absolute commitment to communicating the essence of the music at its most organic level. This year he was named a 2011 TED Fellow, joining a select group of Next Generation innovators of unusual accomplishments with the potential to positively affect the world.  You really have to hear this young man live to understand his power…and you can see what Yo-Yo Ma had to say about him here

Joshua Roman
Friday, November 18, 2011 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Pre-performance talk at 7:15pm by Julie Ribchinsky, Wesleyan Private Lessons Teacher
$22 general public; $18 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students

Hope to see you this weekend.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

AnDa Union: A Band That Will Leave You Breathless (Sept. 23)

Music concerts at the Center for the Arts are programmed by the CFA’s Concert Committee, made up of faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students in Music, and CFA staff. We are so delighted to be opening the Crowell Concert Series with the magnificent AnDa Union, a group of young musicians from Mongolia whose virtuosity and artistry will, quite simply, leave you breathless.

Andrew Colwell, a PhD student in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan whose research focuses on Mongolian music sent me a ringing endorsement after seeing them at a recent stop on their U.S. tour:

“This friendly bunch of established musicians … were a hit with the crowd, who clapped and clapped for more throat-singing, horse-head fiddle playing, and singing about what matters most: nature, horses, your beloved, family bonds, and heritage. Few bands from the Mongolian world of music–which also encompasses independent Outer Mongolia and parts of Russian Siberia–commune with their nomadic roots in the innovative and all-encompassing ways that this highly flexible, ten member band does on the international stage. To boot, few bands from the distant Mongolian grasslands of Inner Asia even make it out as far as Middletown, Connecticut.”

The tour has been organized by a group of major research universities in partnership with Arts Midwest and the Chinese Ministry of Culture.  Wesleyan is the only liberal arts college on the tour!

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

AnDa Union
New England Premiere
Friday, September 23, 2011 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall

Pre-concert talk at 7:15pm by Andrew Colwell
$22 general public; $18 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff, and non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students

Fall events include U.S. & New England Premieres, Navaratri Festival, Lucier Celebration

Center for the Arts Fall 2011At a time when so many of us are turning to YouTube to see performances by our favorite artists, we can lose sight of what it’s like to experience live performance. This fall, the Center for the Arts offers you a wide range of performances and exhibitions that will connect you with some of the brightest minds in contemporary art-making, transport you to foreign lands, and inspire you to think about the world in new ways—and the performers will never be more than 69 feet away!

We recognize that it has become increasingly difficult to classify a work as strictly music, dance, theater, visual art, or film as more artists are blurring the boundaries among disciplines. So we have merged our visiting artist performances into a single Performing Arts Series. We hope this will lead you to cross the boundaries of your own comfort zone and discover new artists and art forms.

Highlights of the fall season include the American premiere of the ground-breaking Italian movement theater collective Dewey Dell and the return of Philadelphia’s Rennie Harris Puremovement, that has been a trailblazer in taking hip hop forms from the street to the concert stage for nearly twenty years. We’ll also host two New England premieres: the astoundingly brilliant throat-singers and musicians from Inner Mongolia, AnDa Union and, continuing our collaboration with the College of the Environment, we’ll welcome Water is Rising, a breathtaking performance by a group of 35 dancers and musicians from the Pacific Island atolls, the first islands predicted to be submerged due to climate change. In November, the Music Department and CFA join forces to celebrate Alvin Lucier, internationally renowned composer who has just retired after serving on our faculty for four decades. Alvin Lucier: A Celebration features a major symposium, concert series, film screenings and an exhibition curated by Andrea Miller-Keller.

With performances and exhibitions by visiting artists, students and faculty, there is an extraordinary amount of good work to see at Wesleyan this fall, with 60% offered free to the public or at ticket prices that make us one of the most affordable venues in the state. Tickets are on sale now online. Starting at 10am on Tuesday, August 16, you can call or visit the Wesleyan University Box Office at 860-685-3355 to receive a 10% discount on your purchase of four or more Performing Arts Series events (and if you buy six or more “Performing Arts Series” events, you’ll save 15%!) Starting August 16, you will also be able to buy subscription packages for both the 35th annual Navaratri Festival (a 15% savings) as well as the Alvin Lucier Celebration (a 25% savings!)

Please join us. We appreciate that you believe, as we do, in the power of the arts to add meaning to our lives and to remind us of the capacity of the human spirit. Thanks for making Wesleyan’s CFA your center for the arts.

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts

New Repertoire for the Guitar

A preview by Center for the Arts Intern and Music Major Lucia Strother ’11

When you enter Crowell Concert Hall this Friday, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will not be performing traditional guitar repertoire. The vast majority of the pieces the Quartet have chosen to perform were not written for the guitar, much less an ensemble of four guitars.  The only two pieces on the program originally written for guitar were actually written specifically for the Quartet by living composers! The industrious Quartet writes all their own arrangements, and I look forward to hearing their refashioned renditions of beloved pieces written for other instruments.

The Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will play Windy, one of Piazzolla’s beloved Argentinian tangos. Piazzolla was a virtuoso bandoneon player (an accordion-like instrument popular in Argentina) and developed his own style called “Nuevo tango,” which combined the traditional tango with elements from jazz and classical music. His widely popular music has been arranged for all kinds of ensembles and instrumentation, and Yo-Yo Ma’s wildly successful 1997 album Soul of the Tango brought the music of Piazzolla to even wider audiences. It will be interesting to hear such familiar music in an ensemble arrangement that is somewhat unusual and unfamiliar to me.

An equally beloved piece, Debussy’s Petite Suite was written in 1889 for piano, four hands, and rewritten by Henri Busser in 1909 for full orchestra. It was written early in Debussy’s career, and its simple yet expressive melodies contrast much of his other work, which is more impressionistic and harmonically adventurous. The unassuming beauty of the four short movements of this piece appeals to wide audiences, so I look forward to hearing another well-known piece reworked for this unique ensemble.

A thread that runs through Friday’s program is the intersection of folk music and classical tradition. Three Finnish Pieces was written by living composer and accordionist Maria Kalaniemi, who was classically trained but focused her attention on performing and composing music based on Finnish folk music. Three Finnish Pieces will certainly satisfy Wesleyan’s population of world music aficionados.

Additionally, Joaquín Rodrigo’s Cuatro Piezas, originally composed for solo piano, extensively incorporates themes from Spanish folk music. It’s interesting to me that the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet would choose this Rodrigo piece to perform, since he composed so much music for guitar and played such a central role in establishing guitar in classical mainstream repertoire. (Interestingly, his Concierto Andaluz is one of the few pieces actually written for an ensemble of four guitars.)

The program will also feature three Baroque trio sonatas, two by Purcell and one by Corelli, both original arrangements by the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet. I am eager to see the Quartet’s interpretation of these pieces. I assume that they will perform them on their modern classical guitars, the dimensions of which weren’t established until the 19th century, but it will be interesting to see whether their other musical choices, especially with regards to voicing, attempt to preserve Baroque performance practice or create an altogether different effect.

Finally, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet will also perform two pieces commissioned specifically for them by living composers. A Scottish Fantasy was written in 1996 by David Crittenden, a classical guitarist (formerly a member of the Quartet) and composer based in St. Paul, MN. Additionally, the Quartet will perform Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Ghetto Strings, written in 2001. Roumain is a Haitian-American composer who combines elements of classical music with features from contemporary black popular music. I am excited to hear these two, and I’m sure they’ll be well received since Wesleyan audiences have such a voracious appetite for new music.

Friday, February 18, 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall
$23 general public; $18 seniors, Wesleyan faculty/staff, non-Wesleyan students; $6 Wesleyan students
Pre-concert talk at 7:15pm by Carver Blanchard, Wesleyan Private Lessons Teacher

Master Class with Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, featuring performance by Wesleyan alum Lu Yang ’10
Daltry Room (Rehearsal Studios 003)
Saturday, February 19, noon
Free admission

A Talk with Jazz Legend Charles LLoyd

William Carbone, Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, connected with Charles Lloyd prior to his upcoming tour of New England made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts. Lloyd and his quartet will play at the CFA on January 28th. What follows is a summary of their conversation:

There is a sundry collection of compositions and sounds on the Charles Lloyd Quartet’s latest CD Mirror, yet one sound rings constantly throughout: peace.  Lloyd, a veteran saxophonist, and his much younger band mates—pianist Jason Moran, drummer Eric Harland, bassist Reuben Rogers—waste no notes, uniting their songs and improvisations with an endlessly persevering focus on melody.  In those moments one might expect a burst of fiery showmanship and the thrusting forth of an individual identity, Lloyd and company sink in more deeply, creating space and allowing eighth notes to become quarters, halves, then whole; clearly, their relationship is one of absolute trust.

Hence Lloyd’s reaction when I inquired about who would accompany him on his upcoming Northeast tour: “Is this a trick question?” Unlike many, or even most veteran jazz musicians, Lloyd’s band is a band, and Moran, Harland and Reed are those who we should expect to see.

Lloyd has a condition that makes lengthy phone conversations uncomfortable, but he agreed to speak with me regarding his upcoming tour via email.  Because his biographical informational is readily available already, I chose to ask Lloyd, who holds a Masters degree in music, more about his thoughts on jazz and education, particularly in university settings. His answers were brief, yet they allowed some insight to the inclusive approach that characterizes his work.

Charles Lloyd exploded onto the U.S. jazz scene in the early 1960s, first in collaborations with drummer Chico Hamilton and saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. Soon after, he shepherded a quartet of newcomers: Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett and Cecil McBee, all of whom are now household names in jazz. They broke boundaries musically with their effortless intermingling of jazz and avant-garde, non-Western and rock music; demographically by engaging the young and spiritually hungry audience of the late ‘60s; economically with the first jazz album to sell one million copies; and geographically when they departed on a non-statesponsored tour of the Soviet Union.

Though Lloyd’s success was nearly unparalleled in jazz, he soon withdrew.  As he told me in our recent dialog: “I performed at Carnegie Hall when I was in my 20s, as well as the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Royce Hall in Los Angeles. Claude Nobs [the founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival] always likes to say that I was the first international ‘star’ to perform at the Montreux Jazz festival in 1967. By the end of the 60s, I was playing in stadiums and sports arenas, but I got off the bus because I did not like where the business of music was trying to direct me. It had nothing to do with music.”

After stepping off “the bus,” Lloyd retreated to the central California region of Big Sur and for a decade recorded and performed in public only sporadically.  The few recordings he released under his own name during this period reflect both an extension of Lloyd’s inclusive view of music and the spiritual search he was undertaking in the mountains: Geeta (1973) features Lloyd on flutes and saxes accompanied by a combination of Western and Indian musicians performing both Hindu-themed material and a Rolling Stones medley; on Big Sur Tapestry (1979), Lloyd performs Chinese oboe and flutes and is accompanied only by harp. Though his time at Big Sur has often been characterized as an escape from the pressures of popularity, Lloyd also performed and recorded with the Beach Boys during this period.

Gradually, Lloyd reemerged in the 1980s, establishing a connection with the ECM record label that is now in its third decade.  Since then, his work as a leader for the label includes ensembles featuring similarly maverick jazz performers—Billy Higgins, Brad Mehldau, Cedar Walton, John Abercrombie, Geri Allen—who glide comfortably into the borderless explorations of music Lloyd says are intrinsic to his being.

“Most of my childhood was spent on my grandfather’s farm in Mississippi,” notes Lloyd, “so I was steeped in the blues. Phineas Newborn was my earliest mentor. He heard me win an amateur show when I was about nine and got me started with lessons with Irvin Reasson. Later, when I was 11 or 12, he had me join his father’s band. I stand on the shoulders of all who came before me—Howlin’ Wolf, Bobbie Blue Bland, Johnny Ace, Willie Mitchell, Bird [Charlie Parker], Prez [Lester Young] and Lady Day [Billie Holiday], Trane [John Coltrane], Mr. [Coleman] Hawkins—they are all a fiber of my expression. Everything that I am today is the sum of my life’s experience.”

Lloyd holds a Master’s degree in music from the University of Southern California but suggests that the musicians of his generation primarily “learned ‘real time’ with on-the-spot training on the bandstand.” He adds: “We had to bake a cake without the advantage of technology.  Today there are so many options that are just a fingertip away.” Other than a brief stint as a middle school teacher in the late ‘50s, Lloyd has not been a formal educator yet he notes, “I give master classes [at colleges and universities] from time to time, and the students seem hungry for information and direct experience.”

Given his stature and experience, Lloyd could easily settle into a role as an “elder statesman” and run a repertory band with a rotating cast of musicians, yet he has continuously surrounded himself with consummate improvisers who challenge him to reach new heights nonetheless. “I am a student everyday; I have a beginner’s mind,” says Lloyd. “Eric and Jason and Reuben are old souls to me. The chronological age does not impede the flow of the ancient and modern.”

Pamela Tatge
Director, Center for the Arts