ArtsFest continues with traditional jazz to choral collaborations at DPU School of Music

Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Courtesy photo Among the events this week for ArtsFest 2017 are four School of Music performances, including “In the Beginning…” a collaborative choral concert coordinated and conducted by Kristina Berger, with faculty and students of Modern Languages, who will join the University Choir and DePauw Chamber Singers in this combined performance at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 5 in the Green Center’s Kresge Auditorium.

Among the “Art and Origins” themed events offered this week as part of DePauw University’s annual ArtsFest, which continues campuswide through Nov. 5, are four performances by the DePauw School of Music.

Beginning Wednesday, Nov. 1 at 10:20 a.m., there will be a special student-curated Recital Hour coordinated for the festival by music students Shannon Barry ’18, Anna Martin ’20 and Zoe Yeshayahu ’19, followed on Thursday, Nov. 2 at 8:30 p.m. by a performance of the Traditional Jazz Orchestra in conjunction with Jazz at the Duck’s fall schedule.

On Saturday, come out to hear the DePauw Percussion Ensemble when it takes the stage at 5 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium, and on Sunday, Nov. 5 at 3 p.m., the 16th annual festival’s closing concert conducted by Professor Kristina Boerger. Three of these School of Music events will be offered at the Green Center for the Performing Arts at DePauw University, with Jazz at the Duck at its usual venue, The Fluttering Duck, located inside The Inn at DePauw.

The Wednesday morning student ArtsFest presentation will highlight musical firsts in history. Some selections include Haydn’s String Quartet, Op. 1; Beeta Prophenies chant and polyphony; and “Lord Make an Instrument” by Libby Larsen. Student musicians will examine the importance of their piece and how it shaped the musical tradition that followed.

On Thursday, members of the Traditional Jazz Orchestra — Jeff Helgesen, cornet; Randy Salman, clarinet; Barry Wagner, trombone; Mike Miller, banjo/guitar; and John Tubbs, bass — longtime collaborators from both sides of the Illinois/Indiana border play hot tunes from the early 20th century when jazz was young, including the music of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and other popular composers from the period.

In celebration of this year’s theme, the DePauw Percussion Ensemble will explore one of John Cage’s inventions: the “prepared” piano.

Instead of playing only the keyboard in Cages’ Second Construction,” explains Ming-Hui Kuo, who directs the percussion studio at DePauw, “the performer also scrapes the strings, which are ‘prepared’ by placing objects such as nuts, bolts and cardboard on or between the piano strings to create new percussive sounds.”

Saturday’s 5 p.m. program will also include “Mallet Quartet” by another remarkable composer, Steve Reich, one of the originators of the repetitive music that emerged in New York City in the mid-1960s, later known as Minimalism. Reich has been hailed by Alex Ross of The New Yorker as “the most original musical thinker of our time.”

Sunday’s choral concert, titled “In the Beginning…,” will open with the contemplative, Medieval strains of the “Stabat Mater” of Jacopone da Todi. “This literary monk is considered the originator of Italian poetry,” says Boerger, director of university choirs, “from which tradition so much important vocal music has arisen — most notably madrigal and opera.”

Collaborating with Boerger on the first half of the program will be DePauw faculty members Cristiana Thielman and Francesca Seaman and students of Modern Languages, who will be featured in dramatic orations and new translations of classic Italian poems to be sung in Renaissance polyphony by the University Chorus. The vocal ensemble will follow with Frank Ferko’s setting of Padraic Pearse’s “The Mother,” extracted from his “Stabat Mater,” closing out the set with a presentation of Richard Peaslee’s “Miracolo d’amore,” a seven-movement cycle of contemporary settings of classic madrigal texts.

The DePauw Chamber Singers will shift the focus to the Spanish poetry of García Lorca in four settings by Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, then turn to German Romantic verse in Brahms’ beloved “Fünf Gesänge.” These poems will be orated by German students of Professor Inge Aures. Opening and closing the final set and the festival will be jaunty tunes of travel: The seafaring song “Ayo visto lo mappamundi,” from the mid-15th century, and J. David Moore’s funky arrangement of “The Rock Island Line,” made famous by Leadbelly.

The Recital Hour, Jazz Orchestra and Percussion Ensemble performances are free and open to all to attend.

General admission is $5 to the collaborative choral concert with free tickets for seniors, children and students.

For online purchases, visit music.depauw.edu. The GCPA box office is open M-W-F from noon to 4 p.m. and 90 minutes prior to ticketed performances. A complete schedule of ArtsFest 2017 events can be found at www.depauw.edu/arts/artsfest-2017-art-origins.

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