Month: April 2019

Spring Photos: Pheeroan akLaff and Angelica Sanchez: Art of the Improvisors

by

On Sunday, April 7, 2019 The Russell House hosted the New England debut of ‘spirit of clavier’, an inventive duo concept for percussion and piano developed by Pheeroan akLaff and Angelica Sanchez. Drummer and Wesleyan Private Lessons Teacher, Pheeroan akLaff, has been a contributor to the Wesleyan community for 25 years, employing non-standard procedures of improvisation and creativity and inspiring hundreds of students worldwide.

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

Spring Photos: This Is It! The Complete Piano Works of Neely Bruce: Part XVII

by

On Sunday, March 31, 2019 at Crowell Concert Hall, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Neely Bruce presented the seventeenth and final concert in a series of CD-length recitals of his piano music, featuring the Fifth Piano Sonata; the rest of the Friendly Fugues, including “A Double Fugue for Kay Briggs” (the widow of Professor Emeritus Morton W. Briggs), plus three world premieres including “A Fugue for Elena Bruce;” and the world premiere of a bonus fugue by Robert Carl on the name “Neely Bruce.”

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

Spring Photos: Alsarah and The Nubatones

by

On Friday, March 29, 2019 at Crowell Concert Hall, The Nubatones — leader and singer/songwriter Alsarah, percussionist Rami El-Aasser, bassist Mawuena Kodjovi, oud (stringed instrument) player Brandon Terzic, and background vocalist Nahid — performed lavish, joyful East African retro-pop, full of Arabic-language reflections on identity and survival.

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

Spring Photos: lucky dragons: Other Transformations Performance

by

On Sunday, March 3, 2019 A performance by Los Angeles-based experimental music group lucky dragons and Wesleyan community members took place on the final day of the Audible Bacillus exhibition.

Other Transformations is an experiment. It asks: What is fundamentally necessary for an image to be read as music? How do images translate between musical idea, performance, and the experience of listening? By sourcing from a vast archive of graphic musical representations, can we discover common patterns to use as access points and guidelines for performance? By reducing symbolic musical language to its basic forms, interpolating between different representations, and generating hybrids, mimics, and transitional shapes, what new models can we build for thinking musically with images?

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

Spring Photos: Art History Symposium: Canonicity Revisited: Archaeologies of Knowledge

by

On Saturday, March 2, 2019 As part of the symposium Canonicity Revisited, Archaeologies of Knowledge featured talks by Kishwar Rizvi from Yale University, and Claire Grace and Benjamin Chafee, both from Wesleyan University. The symposium was envisioned as a critical interrogation of the problem of canons and canonicity in art history. This subject was a matter of intense debate in the mid 1990s, unfurling across the pages of a number of major publications in the field. By then, revisionist approaches had already begun to transform the discipline’s operating assumptions about what constitutes its canonical texts and artifacts, and about the very meaning and value of canonicity itself. Art history’s reevaluation has only increased in recent years thanks to the crucial work, now decades in the making, of feminist, postcolonial, and queer interventions, and to the development of visual and cultural studies. Nevertheless, it seems to us that canons and their variants in many ways still shape—or perhaps haunt—both the teaching and scholarship of art history. What accounts for their persistence? And how do they bear down on art historical thinking today?

Photos by Richard Marinelli. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

 

Spring Photos: Jon Barlow Remembered: His Legacy in Music and the Liberal Arts

by

On Saturday, February 9, 2019 a concert in Crowell Concert Hall commemorating Jon Barlow took place, closing a full day of events. Jon Barlow was a visionary musician and teacher, whose mind ranged freely through an immense field of topics. A remarkable pianist, and an authority on topics as diverse as mathematics and the history of baseball, he had a profound impact on several generations of Wesleyan students. Participants will include John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Neely Bruce, Professor of Music Ron Kuivila, Alex Waterman, and Jonathan Zorn ’02 MA ’07.

Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.

Spring Photos: CONTRA-TIEMPO: joyUS justUS

by

On Friday, February 8, 2019 the New England premiere of joyUS justUS (2018), a participatory urban Latin dance theater experience, took on joy as the ultimate expression of struggle and resistance against hardship and injustice, reclaiming the narrative of people of color by embodying stories about the beauty and power of hope, faith, and family. Los Angeles-based CONTRA-TIEMPO has created physically intense and politically astute performance work since 2005—collages of salsa, Afro-Cuban, hip hop, and contemporary dance with compelling text and original music.

Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.