ArtsFest continues with plethera of musical offerings

Sunday, October 30, 2016
Courtesy photo Among the array of interdisciplinary events scheduled this week for ArtsFest 2016, are four School of Music performances, including a Faculty Select Series concert by the DePauw Chamber Players (from left) cellist Eric Edberg, pianist May Phang and violinist Tarn Travers.

Among a feast of arts offerings this week during DePauw University’s campuswide ArtsFest 2016, “Art & Utopia,” will be four performances by the DePauw School of Music.

Those will begin Wednesday, Nov. 2 at 10:20 a.m. with a free Student Recital Hour, specially curated for the festival by senior Alec Barker, which will be followed on Thursday, Nov. 3 at 7:30 p.m. by the Faculty Select Series concert by the DePauw Chamber Players. Saturday will bring the DePauw Percussion Ensemble to the Kresge stage at 7:30 p.m., and the 15th annual festival closes Sunday, Nov. 6 with the 3 p.m. choral concert conducted by Kristina Boerger.

All four School of Music performances this week will be given in the Judson & Joyce Green for the Performing Arts on the DePauw campus.

Probing the utopian/dystopian theme of ArtFest 2016, the DePauw Chamber Players will present an evening of music centered around Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Piano Trio No. 2,” an intense emotional whirlwind of a work written during the height of World War II. This piece will be paired with Toru Takamitsu’s “Between Tides,” based, as the name suggests, on the rise and fall of the ocean’s tides.

In response to the ArtsFest theme, the DePauw Percussion Ensemble celebrates music as the international language: as one peaceful world.

“Musicians have been communicating through music without language barriers for thousands of years,” Ming-Hue Kuo, director of the percussion studio at DePauw, said, “especially since the 20th century advent of global media.”

Among the works the ensemble will present is revolutionary thinker John Cage’s Third Construction, a composition born during a period of war, in 1941, that has since become a classic work of the percussion repertoire with its global array of instruments and “micro/macrocosmic structure” in which the whole is reflected in the individual parts.

“The very foundation of the choral instrument in the West was utopian at its impulse,” says Kristina Boerger, director of choirs at DePauw. “It began with individuals’ attempts to unite their voices with perfection sufficient to reach the ear of God, to articulate and carry their strongest aspirations for the good.”

A contemplation of utopia and dystopia from a variety of perspectives will be heard in the final performance of ArtsFest, “More Perfect,” a program of poems, belief statements, political projects and musical expressions created by DePauw’s combined choirs, directed by Boerger, in collaboration with DePauw Pre-Law students advised by Christine Munn.

Julie Dolphin’s setting of William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” offers the poet’s evocation of the perfect life. Contrasted with it will be Yeats’s apocalyptic vision in “The Second Coming.” Johannes Brahms’ first motet joyfully proclaims the perfected state attained in the afterlife by the faithful, while Giles Swayne’s anguished and satirical “Missa Tiburtina,” a Mass of unbelief, rejects faith on the evidence of human suffering on earth.

Choral music from South Africa carries forward a record of the successful overthrow of Apartheid, and traditional polyphony from the island of Corsica models the exquisite listening and responding required for utopian communal existence.

Benjamin Yarmolinksy’s oratorio “The Constitution,” which closes both the concert and the festival, presents words hewn by our nation’s founders and leaders in their attempts to construct the best society on which they could agree. After singing several Amendments of interest, DePauw Pre-Law students will present reflections on the Amendment’s utopian successes — and on unintended, dystopian consequences.

Admission to Student Recital Hour and the Percussion Ensemble performances is free. General admission is $10 to the Faculty Select Series concert and $5 to the student choral concert. Tickets for seniors, children and all students are free.

For more information and online purchases, visit music.depauw.edu. The venue’s box office is also open beginning one hour prior to the every concert.

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