This event celebrated the river as a source of cultural inspiration and creativity on May 9, 2015 at Harbor Park in Middletown. “Feet to the Fire: Riverfront Encounter” featured live music, visual art installations, plein air painters, a kids’ activity zone, environmental education exhibits, as well as a craft fair and farmer’s market–all designed to bring patrons closer to the rich culture, history, and science of the Connecticut River.
Click here to view the full album on flickr. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
Feet to the Fire: Riverfront EncounterFeet to the Fire: Riverfront EncounterFeet to the Fire: Riverfront EncounterFeet to the Fire: Riverfront EncounterFeet to the Fire: Riverfront EncounterFeet to the Fire: Riverfront Encounter
A pianist, composer, educator, author, and Artistic Director of Resonant Motion, “Noah Baerman is no stranger to aiming high” (David Adler, Village Voice). With a cast of instrumentalists and vocalists including alto saxophonist/flutist Kris Allen, vibraphonist Chris Dingman ’02, cellist and vocalist Melanie Hsu ’13, bassist Henry Lugo, Private Lessons Teacher and drummer Bill Carbone MA ’07, Ph.D. candidate, and vocalists Latanya Farrell, Claire Randall ’12, and Garth Taylor ’12, Mr. Baerman (on piano, synthesizer, and slide guitar) and his group presented the world premiere of his extended work The Rock and the Redemption on April 25, 2015 in Crowell Concert Hall.
Click here to view the full album on flickr. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
University Professor of Music and dhalang (puppet master) Sumarsam and the Wesleyan Gamelan Ensemble, directed by Artist in Residence I.M. Harjito, presented a Javanese wayang kulit, the puppet play employing intricately carved leather puppets, accompanied by an ensemble of tuned-gongs, metallophones, two-stringed fiddle, xylophone, flute, and vocalists on April 24, 2015 in the World Music Hall. Click here to view the full album on flickr. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
The Connecticut premiere of The Nile Project featured a dozen musicians performing collaboratively composed songs drawn from the diverse styles and instruments of the countries along the Nile Basin—including Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, and Uganda—intertwining these traditions into a unified sound that is “joyous and even raucous” (NPR Music) on April 10, 2015 in Crowell Concert Hall. Click here to view the full album on flickr. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography.
The Nile ProjectThe Nile ProjectThe Nile ProjectThe Nile ProjectThe Nile ProjectThe Nile Project
Asian Cutural Council Senior Advisor Ralph Samuelson MA ’71 performed traditional music on shakuhachi (Japanese flute). Dancer /choreographer Eiko Otake (of Eiko & Koma) joined Mr. Samuelson, performing a variation from her solo project, A Body in Places on April 1, 2015 in the Seminar Room at the Mansfield Freeman Center of East Asian Studies. Click here to view the full album on flickr.
CFA Arts Administration Intern Chloe Jones ’15 talks to the winners of the Wesleyan University Concerto Competition—Josh Davidoff ’18, Harim Jung ’16, and Paula Tartell ’18—who will be performing a free concert with the Wesleyan University Orchestra on Saturday, May 2, 2015 at 8pm in Crowell Concert Hall.
This Saturday, the Wesleyan University Orchestra, under the direction of Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music Nadya Potemkina, presents Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and the winners of the Wesleyan University Concerto Competition.
The concerto competition is open to all undergraduate and graduate Wesleyan students. The three winners have the opportunity to play a piece of their choosing, either a published arrangement or an original composition, accompanied by the Wesleyan Orchestra or Wind Ensemble. This year’s winners are Josh Davidoff ’18 (clarinet), Harim Jung ’16 (double bass), and Paula Tartell ’18 (piano).
Mr. Davidoff is a freshman from Evanston, Illinois. He picked up the clarinet in fourth grade, but it was not until his sophomore year of high school that he realized his intense passion for classical music. He came to Wesleyan after a summer spent touring the country with the National Youth Orchestra, a 120-person orchestra of which he was Apprentice Orchestra Manager. He has continued to pursue music at Wesleyan and is currently studying with Private Lessons Instructor Charlie Suriyakham.
“Music has been very prevalent in my first year at Wesleyan,” he says. “It is related in some way to most everything I do.”
This Saturday, he will perform the Première Rhapsodie for clarinet and orchestra by Claude Debussy, a piece originally composed for the Paris Conservatory’s clarinet examinations in 1910. Mr. Davidoff describes it as incredibly challenging but deeply satisfying to play.
“This piece is particularly significant in music history because it is one of the first to use blankets of harmony, instead of more traditional progressions of chords,” Mr. Davidoff says. “It explores a pallet of sound, rather than a trajectory.”
A New Jersey native, Mr. Jung is a junior pursuing a double major in Music and Psychology. He played cello until middle school where he discovered his passion for bass. He has rigorously studied classical double bass since the age of thirteen, and also plays electric bass as a hobby. At Wesleyan he studies with Private Lessons Teacher Roy Wiseman.
This Saturday, Mr. Jung will perform the first two movements of Giovanni Bottesini’s Bass Concerto No. 2 in b minor, a concerto he has been practicing all year.
“I am particularly drawn to this bass concerto,” Mr. Jung says. “Not only because of its virtuosity, but also for its romantic and operatic compositional style.”
He describes this particular bass concerto as the Paganini of all bass concertos, heroic and strong.
“I imagine a baritone walking on stage and starting with this strong note,” he says. “That’s the image that comes to mind when I play this piece.”
Ms. Tartell is a freshman from Great Neck, New York. She started playing piano as a six-year-old, taking lessons locally until high school when she began commuting to New York City for her music schooling. After taking a break from music her first semester at Wesleyan, she entered the concerto competition as a way to get back into playing.
“I honestly didn’t feel like myself when I wasn’t practicing seriously,” she says.
This semester, in addition to preparing the concerto, she is studying with Private Lessons Teacher William Braun.
Ms. Tartell will perform Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in a minor in this Saturday’s concert. Premiered in Leipzig in January of 1846, it is the only piano concerto that Mr. Schumann ever completed.
“The Schumann really spoke to me,” she says. “It speaks not in a conventional, flashy way but reminds me of the person who is soft spoken yet says a lot.”
Singer-songwriter Omnia Hegazy performed on March 27, 2015, at Crowell Concert Hall. Ms. Hegazy was accompanied by drummer Max Maples, bassist Carl Limbacher, electric guitarist Coyote Anderson, and Natalia Perlaza on Arabic percussion and tabla. Images by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on flickr.
CFA Arts Administration Intern Chloe Jones ’15 talks to Miranda Orbach ’15, Eriq Robinson ’15, and Virgil Taylor ’15 about their theses in Dance, Music, and Studio Art.
With the deadline for theses this Friday, April 10, 2015, Wesleyan seniors from all different majors are hunkering down across campus to complete the projects they have dedicated their year to. Thesis writers in Dance, Music, and Studio Art are presenting their work at the Center for the Arts every week through the end of the semester.
Spring Senior Thesis Dance Concert. Photo by Miranda Orbach ’15.
Featuring new works by eight choreographers, the Spring Senior Thesis Dance Concert took place last weekend in the Patricelli ’92 Theater. Closing the first half of the concert was Miranda Orbach’s form[all] training, a piece in partial fulfillment of her honors thesis in American Studies and Dance.
Ms. Orbach’s written thesis, “Monstrous Form: the Ballerina and the Freak,” draws the ballet and the freak show together to examine how each distinct performance mirrors the other. Her thesis reads the ballet through the lens of the freak show, and the freak show through the lens of the ballet.
“Historically we have separated these forms so far away from each other,” says Ms. Orbach. “Bringing them together actually allows us to intervene in the literature about both of them. It’s not that they are the same, but that they are useful for reading each other, as spectacle, body, and display are central themes to both performances.”
In her thesis, Ms. Orbach tells the story of one ballerina: Caroline Shadle ’16, who performs in the piece with two other female dancers. They dance with one foot in a pointe shoe and one barefoot to a sound score that narrates Ms. Shadle’s story, giving powerful insight into the life of an aspiring ballerina.
“The feeling of freakishness is not so far from the feeling of being trained,” says Ms. Orbach. “The two work in tandem. All of these categories that we oppose so starkly in society—form and deformity, ability and disability—are actually inherent to each other.”
Eriq Robinson’s senior recital, Reality Ends Here: The Beginning of the End, will take place this Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 7pm in Fayerweather Beckham Hall. The recital, featuring a vocal ensemble and a horn ensemble, is one component of Mr. Robinson’s thesis in Music. The vocal ensemble is inspired by South African overtone singing, the music of the Japanese Ainu, and Slavei, an a cappella group on campus that performs Slavic, Balkan, and Georgian liturgical music.
“The performance is a narrative story telling experience with music, based on a cosmological structure that I made up myself,” says Mr. Robinson. His cosmological structure is based on ideas from Buddhism and other Eastern religions, as well as Abrahamic religions and some African religions.
“It’s a story about the beginning of the end of the world,” he explains. “The idea is that humans are the nerve endings of the cosmos. We are all just the end of invisible tendrils that are the cosmos, all part of a giant macro organism.”
In the written component of his thesis, Mr. Robinson gives a short history of Afro-Futurism and attempts to determine if his music fits into that creative lineage.
“Because I’m making up a cosmological structure, I’ve been trying to make music that doesn’t sound familiar,” he says. “The hardest part about it has been trying to make music that sounds unfamiliar, while at the same time not making bad music. What I think makes music good, on an objective level, is having some sort of system and methodology that’s tying it all together.”
Mr. Robinson plans to continue writing his story even after the recital, and hopes this will be the first in a series of performances.
Studio Art major Virgil Taylor’s thesis, Irregular Quadrilateral, will be on display in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from Tuesday, April 14 through Sunday, April 19, 2015; with an opening reception on Wednesday, April 15, 2015 from 4pm to 6pm.
After receiving a Zawisa fellowship from the Wesleyan Studio Art Department last spring, Mr. Taylor travelled to Albuquerque, New Mexico in the summer to study metal plate lithography at the Tamarind Institute. The youngest person in the program, both of his roommates were university professors.
When Mr. Taylor returned to Wesleyan this past fall, he realized he wanted to shift the focus of his thesis from lithography to intaglio prints. Intaglio refers to a printmaking process in which the image is carved into the plate with acid, a scribe, or a needle.
“Even though I did not end up doing my thesis in lithography, I think my work at the Tamarind Institute this summer really informed me on how to think about compositions,” says Mr. Taylor. “It was an opportunity to spend four weeks doing nothing but printmaking.”
His exhibition will fill Zilkha Gallery with intaglio prints of irregular quadrilaterals, which look like rectangles in perspective. In addition, he has created a large-scale composition resembling his prints that will occupy the back bay of the gallery—a 24 foot long piece of steel painted blue will mirror the many blue lines in his prints, and an eight foot tall drywall panel will appear in the shape of one of his plates.
“I’m interested in work that doesn’t require or desire any explicit content, or really any implicit content, but exists as a formal space,” says Mr. Taylor. “That’s why I like being able to make the giant version, because I can emphasize that it’s simply an arrangement of forms.”
CFA Arts Administration Intern Chloe Jones ’15 talks to singer-songwriter Omnia Hegazy, who performs with her band this Friday, March 27, 2015 at 8pm in Crowell Concert Hall as part of Muslim Women’s Voices at Wesleyan.
You began writing lyrics for your first EP on a trip to Egypt in 2010. What about the trip inspired you to start writing?
Omnia Hegazy
I tend to take a notebook with me and scribble wherever I go, and it was the summer before [Hosni] Mubarak was overthrown, so everyone was talking about politics all the time. I was staying in a youth shelter at the time and talking with other Egyptians about what was going on and writing down my observations about how women are treated, about things I felt were unfair in the culture. These are things that I grew up with in America, as well—people take their culture with them. So I started writing things down and not necessarily as an outsider because these things do exist in America too. These inequalities are not just among Egyptians but everybody.
What inspired your second EP, Judgment Day?
I wrote this song after watching a film called The Stoning of Soraya M, based [on] a true story about a woman in Iran who was stoned because her husband framed her for adultery. This actually happened in the 1980s. I was so upset by the film that I wrote a song, not so much about the film, but about what is happening to people of my faith. It was a critique about how I feel some people of my faith have taken religion and made it so evil and how it can really harm people. The song became the title track of the EP.
Judgment Day is a provocative title. What does the title mean to you?
I feel that as a Middle Eastern woman, there is a lot of judgment. We face a lot more judgment than our male counterparts. Our reputation is our biggest asset in a lot of cases. The title was about that feeling of constantly being judged. I feel like every day is judgment day for an Arab woman, a Muslim woman. Everyone else is judging what you should do, what you should say, what you should sing. That’s what I tried to address with the title and specifically with that song.
You say you might have been a journalist, had your life gone a different direction. Thinking about journalism and songwriting as two forms of storytelling, what do you think song achieves that journalism does not?
For me, writing a song can appeal to people’s emotions in a way that hard news just can’t. Often people just want to turn the news off because it’s so depressing, but with song one can elaborate behind whatever story you’re telling to make people really feel. It’s not just the facts, not just what happened. I think the reason song is so effective is that it helps creates empathy in a way that sometimes hard news just doesn’t.
What do you hope people will gain from listening to your music?
I want to make people think. I want people to have a good time, but there’s a lot of music out there that doesn’t necessarily really make people think. To be fair, I think that all music has a place. I don’t think you have to address an issue for the music to be important, like the stuff I’m writing now is more about personal things. I think that’s just as important because I think songwriting attempts to reach an understanding about the human condition. I want people to feel something when they listen to my music. Whether I’m writing about a break up or political evil, I just want them to feel something.
Do you think your songs fall into either a personal or political category, or do you think both the personal and the political are manifest in each song you write?
To me the two are intertwined. How I feel about any given issue is political, and it’s personal. I’m observing, and I recognize that there’s bias in my music. I wouldn’t see it as hard news, so much as an op-ed. It’s personal and political. One of my newer singles that just came out is very personal. It’s about street harassment, about being a woman and feeling unsafe. That is actually something political—there’s a feminist message in the song, [and] it’s talking about the place of women in society—but it’s very personal.
Who are some of your greatest musical influences?
One of the biggest is a singer from Columbia named Juanes. He’s a pop/rock singer-songwriter and a mean guitar player. He’s actually the best selling artist in Columbia, even before Shakira. But if you listen to his older stuff, he was using really catchy melodies to write really meaningful things. He has one song that is so catchy you want to bob your head to it, but then you really listen to it and realize he’s talking about landmines. He made me realize that pop music is actually a really useful vehicle to spread a message, and it doesn’t have to be esoteric or metaphorical to be political. Other than Juanes, I’m influenced by the 1960s—any of the singer-songwriters of the 1960s. Also, India.Arie. She writes some really catchy songs, but there’s a good message behind them. She has soul. I like artists with consciousness, not just political consciousness but any kind.
At Wesleyan, Ms. Hegazy will be accompanied for the first time outside of New York City by drummer Max Maples, bassist Carl Limbacher, electric guitarist Coyote Anderson, and Natalia Perlaza on Arabic percussion and tabla.
