Event Calendar & News: Faculty News

MSU Sesquicentennial Commissions to Spotlight Music Facility
First it was the MSU Sesquicentennial Tour that began in 2001 and continues through 2005, featuring School of Music ensemble performances throughout the state. Now, a new program, entitled Sesquicentennial Commissions, will give music faculty an opportunity to showcase their talents in commemoration of MSU’s Sesquicentennial, which takes place in 2005.

The Sesquicentennial Commissions program, which started in fall 2004, encourages music faculty and ensembles to submit applications for new commissions each fall. The $40,000 project is jointly funded by the MSU Foundation via the Vice President for Research & Graduate Studies and the College of Arts & Letters. Over the life of this five-year project, $200,000 will have been dedicated to the commissioning of new music.

“The increased visibility of our performers and our commitment to the creation and advancement of 21st-century music will significantly enhance the research stature of MSU in the arts world, said Patrick McConeghy, interim dean for the College of Arts & Letters. “We expect this investment to result in cutting edge musical compositions and an increase in gifts and grants to the university.”

Premiere performances will be held on campus as gala events. Works will be selected for funding based on the following criteria:

• Significance of proposed work in the world of contemporary music
• Reputation of the composer and performing artist(s)
• Quality of anticipated performing venues and likelihood of acceptance

Three works have been selected for funding in the initial round:

Work for Jazz Band and MSU Symphony Orchestra by Wynton Marsalis

Grant Writer: MSU Director of Jazz Studies Rodney Whitaker

A co-commission work with the Wharton Center on the MSU campus. Details to be worked out during the 2004-05 academic year.

Dante’s Inferno: A Video Sonata for trombone, tuba, electronics, and video

Grant Writers: MSU faculty members Ava Ordman, associate professor of trombone, and Philip Sinder, professor of tuba euphonium

The composer, Stephen Rush, and videographer, Michael Rodemer, are both MSU graduates and currently on the faculty at the University of Michigan. Rush is director of the Digital Music Ensemble and music director of the Dance Department. Rodemer is a professor at the School of Art and Design.

About Dante’s Inferno: A Video Sonata

Envision an opera with –instead of singers – a more abstract narrative; one involving electronic images on a screen with music and sounds articulate enough to conjure up images that tell a complete story – in this case, Dante’s Inferno.  Combine this synthesis of video projection with live and electronic music, and not only have you got A Video Sonata, but an entirely new genre –one never before introduced into the concert hall.

A Video Sonata derives its structure and images from Dante’s Inferno. The visual and sonic elements engage in a dialogue, each contributing its unique voice to the evocation of the powerful imagery in Dante’s epic work. Playing before a vibrant visual set, the musicians interpret the work, their presence, and articulation of the music, forging an esthetic whole. The visual element will complement the music with nearly abstract images derived from the filming, computer manipulation, and animation of colors and forms.

“This work positions the trombone and tuba in a new artistic light, with a combined literary, visual, and musical palate that we hope to be engaging and stimulating,” said Sinder.

“Until now, the DVD player has yet to journey into the concert hall,” said Rush. “With the combined use of multi media, this performance is all over the block in terms of what it is ­–essentially a borderline opera in which multi media has taken the place of the voices. I recorded myself doing the activities that the sounds in the work will portray, such as walking through woods and paddling a canoe, and sounds such as a waterfall and the crackling of a fire.”

A Video Sonata is scheduled to premiere at MSU in February 2005.

Song Cycle for Soprano and Symphony Orchestra

Grant Writer: Melanie Helton, assistant professor of voice and director of

the MSU Opera Theatre at MSU

Song Cycle for Soprano and Symphony Orchestra will be set to five poems of e.e. cummings, running the gambit of full symphonic to transparent chamber music. Ricky Gordon will compose the cycle, and is well known for his settings of American poets, among them Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

“In many ways he (cummings) appears to be a language poet, which could be construed as an intellectual term, but instead he’s is an extremely emotional poet – like a painter – able to paint in five words the most joyous or devastating picture, of which other poets may take many pages to describe,” said Gordon.

Gordon feels that cummings often incorporates ‘gratitude’ in the body of his writings, and senses that the word will somehow shape the trajectory of the song cycle.

“Even when cummings writes about loss, he portrays a certain gratitude for having had it in the first place,” said Gordon.

Gordon’s Music is quintessentially American in that it draws from all vocal genres: classical art song, musical theatre, jazz and opera. He has written for well-known classical sopranos such as Renee Fleming, Harolyn Blackwell, and Elizabeth Futral, and for Audra McDonald and Kristin Chenwith from the world of musical theatre. As quoted in the The New York Times, “If the music of Ricky Ian Gordon had to be defined by a single quality, it would be the bursting effervescence infusing songs that blithely blur the lines between art song and the high-end Broadway music of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.  It’s caviar for a world gorging on pizza.”