| “American Five” crosses boundaries
at the Katzen BY MATT GETTY Poetry took flight as song. A pianist silently collaborated
with his audience to balance freedom and discipline. A thousand-year-old mathematical pattern provoked a frantic battle between man and machine. 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 the handling of the War on Terror. And that was all just on opening night. Last Friday evening, the Dr. Cyrus and
Myrtle Katzen Arts Center opened its
inaugural concert season 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 associate dean of academic affairs and music professor Haig Mardirosian, whose pieces themselves bridged the genres of literature and music. Performed by Washington National Opera tenor Byron Jones and acclaimed pianist Michael Adcock, 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. “When I looked at the poems, the words just suggested to me what they needed to do musically to come alive,” said Mardirosian on his unique composition process. “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,
however, essence and execution went hand in hand. “Misterioso,” the “real-time composition” he presented at the concert, melded creativity and performance as he sat at the piano tickling out spontaneous solos in response to what he termed “the totality of the audience’s collective mood.” “It’s instinct,” said Sapieyevski on how he read the audience as he played. “It’s like how a photographer can look at someone and instantly know the right way to capture their face to reflect their mood, or the writer knows the best way to describe them . . . I look at the audience, and I sense the best way to play to them to tell their story back to them.” Naturally, as the audience’s attitude evolved throughout the performance so too did the music. Sapieyevski followed the room’s mood from subdued passages into up-tempo segments punctuated by thunderous flourishes. “Each performance travels the risky path of discovery,” he said, “which, I believe, makes it an exciting journey into the controlled unknown.” In direct contrast to “Misterioso,” the concert’s electronic piece, scored by audio technology professor Paul Oehlers, followed a rigid path defined by a geometric concept known as a “magic square.” To create the piece, Oehlers first assembled 36 different computer generated beats, blips, and melodic phrases. He then matched each with a corresponding number in a square filled with the digits 1 through 36 in a pattern so each row added up to the same number. Choosing various paths through the square, Oehlers then allowed the resultant number sequences to mold the composition. The result was “Juggernaut,” a relentless rhythmic assault of sound accompanied by the manic playing of cellist William Jason Raynovich. “He and I have been friends for a long time, and I really composed the piece with him in mind,” said Oehlers on the decision to combine electronic music and live performance. “He’s one of those people who never runs out of energy, so I wanted to come up
with something that would really challenge him.” Music professor Fernando
Benadon’s more traditional, but no less sophisticated “in 3 two” provided counterpoint to some of the evening’s more experimental offerings, demonstrating that even 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. “The [field of study] looks at questions like, ‘at what point does a melody become a melody?’ ‘At what point does a series of beats become a rhythm?’ These are the same questions music theory seeks to answer, but this is a more scientific approach . . . incorporating neuropsychology.” Though Benadon admitted that the field is still too young to apply most of its findings, “in 3 two” posed some of the same questions. In one passage, for instance, a single note repeated at different intervals. As this built to two notes and then three, a melody began to emerge, but soon became veiled by a series of variations prompting the audience to wonder not merely what makes up the melody of the piece, but more so what makes a melody a melody? The evening’s most genre-blending piece, “The Fateful Embrace,” composed by multimedia professor Randall Packer, prompted political questions from the audience instead. 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.” Followed by excerpts from Packer’s “A Season in Hell,” which depicts an America fallen from grace in the wake of the War on Terror, “The Fateful Embrace,” grew out of Packer’s imagined “U.S. Depart-ment of Arts and Technology,” itself a creative statement on the place of the arts in contemporary society. Beyond the political statement made by Packer’s contribution, all of the composers agreed that they hoped “The American Five” made a strong statement about the role the Katzen Center will play at AU and within the Washington-area arts scene. “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.” |
