“American Five” launches boundary-breaking creativity at the Katzen
BY MATT GETTY
Poetry became song. A pianist played his audience. A mathematical pattern created a sonic juggernaut. A cello, a violin, and a bass clarinet explored the link between music and psychology. The secretary of a fictional government office launched a multimedia assault on politics.
And that was all just on opening night.
The American Five: from left, Randall Packer, CAP, CAS; Haig Mardirosian, performing arts, CAS; Fernando Benadon, performing arts, CAS; Paul Oehlers, CAP, CAS; and Jerzy Sapieyevski, performing arts, CAS
The Katzen Arts Center opened its inaugural concert season last fall with “The American Five,” a showcase of AU’s five resident composers and a testament to the new center’s commitment to crossing boundaries through creativity. Approaching music from three different academic disciplines, Haig Mardirosian, Jerzy Sapieyevski, Paul Oehlers, Fernando Benadon, and Randall Packer united classical music, electronic experimentation, performance art, and improvisation to explore what music can be.
“I think the fact that we have five composers here and only three of them are associated with the music program makes a tremendous statement about our interdisciplinary approach to the arts,” said acting dean of academic affairs and music professor Haig Mardirosian, whose pieces themselves bridged the genres of literature and music.
Mardirosian’s “Thou Who Art Over Us,” “To Autumn,” and “So Quick, So Hot, So Mad,” reimagined the poetry of Dag Hammarskjold, John Keats, and Thomas Campion. “The words just suggested to me what they needed to do musically to come alive,” said Mardirosian. “The struggle for me then is taking that ideal and translating it into sheet music . . . It’s kind of like having the idea for a complete novel appear suddenly in your head. You may spend the next 10 years of your life getting it down on paper, but the essence is there from the beginning.”
For music professor Jerzy Sapieyevski, essence and execution went hand in hand. “Misterioso,” the “real-time composition” he presented at the concert, melded creativity and performance as he created spontaneous piano solos in response to “the totality of the audience’s collective mood.”
“It’s like how a photographer can look at someone and instantly know the right way to capture their face to reflect their mood,” said Sapieyevski, whose performance followed the room’s mood from fluid melodic passages to wild up-tempo flourishes. “I look at the audience, and I sense the best way to play to them to tell their story back to them.”
“Juggernaut,” scored by audio technology professor Paul Oehlers, followed a more rigid path. To create the electronic piece, Oehlers assembled 36 different computer generated beats, blips, and melodic phrases. He matched each with a corresponding number in a “magic square,” (a square in which the digits 1 through 36 are arranged so that each row adds up to the same sum). Choosing various paths through the square, Oehlers then allowed the resultant number sequences to mold a juggernaut of frenetic sound and rhythm accompanied by a live cellist.
Music professor Fernando Benadon’s more traditional, but no less sophisticated, “in 3 two” proved that even more conventional arrangements can cross boundaries. Performed on violin, cello, and bass clarinet, the piece explored the intersection between psychology and music theory.
“I’m interested in the field of ‘music perception,’ which is a blending of cognitive science and music,” explained Benadon, whose piece slowly built notes into phrases to probe the question, “At what point does the human mind recognize sound as melody?”
The evening’s most genre-blending piece, “The Fateful Embrace,” composed by multimedia professor Randall Packer, prompted political rather than musical questions. Combining song, video-editing, and political activism, it cast a remixed version of President Bush’s 2004 State of the Union Address against Richard Wagner’s “Liebestod” to, as Packer put it, “reveal the theatrical nature of politics.”
Varied as their pieces were, each composer had the same desire for “The American Five.” The range of music on display, they hoped, showcased the Katzen’s dedication to creativity in all of its various forms.
“My hope for the Katzen Center is that we can make it more than just a nice building with great facilities for the arts,” said Sapieyevski. “I truly want to see that it becomes known as a center for artistic creativity—that the entire building just exudes the feeling, the energy, and the passion of creativity.”
Reprinted from American Weekly, Oct. 18, 2005.
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