This is a past event.
Tue, Sep 27, 2022 8pm
Moore Musical Arts Center, Bryan Recital Hall
BGSU composition students will present their new works, performed by fellow music students. This event is free and open to the public.
PROGRAM
Great Grandma Mac (2022)....................................Jacob McFarland (1999)
Fixed Media
Aging is an inevitable part of life. We watch our older family members struggle with it. Their health may begin to decline, they may struggle moving around like they used to, their memory may not work as well as they would like. It can be difficult to watch, especially when it happens to those you grew up with. This piece focuses more specifically on one of the most difficult challenges that can arise during aging, dementia. At the time of writing this, my great grandmother is 99 years old and still going quite strong. In my family we affectionately call her Grandma Mac. In recent years, Grandma Mac has been diagnosed with dementia that has slowly been getting worse. My grandfather still calls his mother daily and sometimes shares some of the strange conversations they have. They can be quite difficult. This piece takes a very short recording of her playing piano that was taken in early 2020, just before the pandemic began. Every sound heard in the piece comes from that original sample. The piece begins with lush pads underlining the pure sound of the piano. Over the course of the piece, the sample begins to distort and chopped up into little pieces and reordered like a mosaic of sound. Like the brain of someone with dementia, something that was once clean and orderly, slowly falls into chaos until its almost unrecognizable. The piece ends as the piece finally distorts so much that it becomes clicks and crackles like that of a record player. The sound that was once great, is now no more than dust.
Embrace (2019).................................................................Aaron Lett (1999)
Conductor: Aaron Lett
Flute/Pic: Mikayla Farmer
Flute II: Erin Raynewater
Oboe: Martha Hudson
Clarinet I: Emily Foltz
Clarinet II: Zoe Scott
Bassoon I: Brandon Golpe
Bassoon II/Contra: Ashley Mania
Soprano Sax: Jimmy O’Donnell
Alto Sax: Kirby Leitz
Tenor Sax: Garrett Evans
Bari Sax: Jordan Marbach
I have always had a great love for woodwind instruments. This woodwind choir is a simplistic piece meant to show off the depth of warmth that is achievable, much like that of an impactful hug.
Voices (2022)................................................................Aaron Chung (1997)
Alto Sax: Carl Ng
Piano: Sotirios Kaimakamis
According to the Human Rights Foundation, more than half of the world lives under tyranny. Silencing dissent is a common strategy used by authoritarian governments to establish and secure their power. Those who courageously speak out against their government often face retaliation ranging from harassment, imprisonment, and even murder. For this piece I collected dozens of voice recordings from people living under the oppression of tyrannic regimes, including people from Belarus, Hong Kong, Iran, Myanmar, and Ukraine, who speak of their dreams and hopes for their homeland. In this piece, a megaphone, a tool often seen in protests, serves as a symbol of the action of voicing out.
It was necessary for safety reasons to edit the Cantonese recordings for the world premiere in Hong Kong. In today’s performance, you will be able to hear these speeches. My sincere gratitude goes to all those who have contributed to collecting and producing the recordings, whose names shall remain anonymous for the sake of their safety.
Crossing the Forgotten Bridge (2022)...................Thomas Johnston (2004)
Clarinet: Ricky Lee Jurski
Clarinet: Emily Foltz
Bassoon: Cruz Stock
An Indeterminate Schism (2022)...................................Julian Green (1995)
Fixed Media
"An Indeterminate Schism" portrays the capabilities of the human voice extending beyond traditional vocal techniques, while attempting to coexist with the abstract capabilities of electroacoustic sound.
Time’s Dark Creek (2022).......................................Hayden Mesnick (2022)
III. starlight rains
Violin: Malika Brower
Violin: Sujin Kim
Viola: Gracie Hayes
Cello: Joshua Lyphout
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2002)
B. H. Fairchild (b. 1942)
In his fifth year the son, deep in the backseat
of his father’s Ford and the mysterium
of time, holds time in memory with words,
night, this night, on the way to a stalled rig south
of Kiowa Creek where the plains wind stacks
the skeletons of weeds on barbed-wire fences
and rattles the battered DeKalb sign to make
the child think of time in its passing, of death.
Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.
Later, where black flies haunt the mud tank,
the boy walks along the pipe rack dragging
a stick across the hollow ends to make a kind
of music, and the creek throbs with frog songs,
locusts, the rasp of tree limbs blown and scattered.
The great horse people, his father, these sounds,
these shapes saved from time’s dark creek as the car
moves across the moving earth: world, this world.
