Media – Page 10

Picture of the Day – June 29, 2012

Eunsun Jung performs Eun Sook Baek’s Poverty to Liberty on this year’s Electro-acoustic Concert. The piece is composed for the gayageum, a string instrument from Baek’s homeland Korea. According to the composer, “the title Poverty to Liberty is used to describe the immigrants arriving on a foreign country, America. When the immigrants arrived at New York, their first encounter was the Statue of Liberty. As these people witness the Statue of Liberty, they start to imagine the American dream. In this piece, the Korean instrument ‘Gayageum’ represents the American land. East Asian Composers usually expressed their own culture and timbres through western instruments. However, for this piece, the western culture was expressed with an eastern instrument, and the immigrants (all ethnic group) with western instruments. This piece includes the sorrowful departure from the immigrants’ homeland, to achieve the American dream every other people aspire. It also includes their harsh journey across the sea, and the arrival to a land of hope.”

Picture of the Day – June 28, 2012

Today’s picture comes from the Electro-acoustic Concert on March 8, 2012. The concert opened with Ryan Ford performing Kirsten Volness’s work for bass and electronics entitled Hints and Hauntings. The composer describes the piece in her program notes:

“Hints and Hauntings is a pastiche paying homage to a long list of influences and experiences that have shaped my musical life. I sought to use sounds I once found far more prevalent in my daily existence, whose absence and possible future obsolescence I’ve noticed. (You’ll find I spent a lot of time as a child listening to records and reading the dictionary.) Formative sonic experiences find their way into the piece as well, like playing in a drumline and discovering electronic music, from early analog sounds to my teenage years dancing in clubs.”

To learn more about Kirsten and her music, visit her website at www.kirstenvolness.com/.

Picture of the Day – June 27, 2012

We’ll be uploading pictures from the 2012 Festival over the next couple of weeks, so check here for the Picture of the Day.

Our first picture features Owen Weaver as he performs Lisa Coons’s Percussion Sculpture No. 1.

The composer writes the following about her piece:

“Percussion Sculpture No. 1 was my first completed percussion sculpture. It was originally meant to be a realization of my frustration with our disposable nation. I imagined it to be an object of twisted scrap metal that moaned and screamed. The problem came when I started to make the sculpture…

I’m afraid that all of my anger and politics disappeared while spending the summer walking through the junkyard, hitting anything I could find to test the resonance and pitch, and dragging it back to the barn to weld. I ended up enjoying process more than ever before, while my dad patiently (and bravely) helped me re-learn the equipment of his shop. The whole experience became about the beautiful sounds we heard in the metal and the process of building something that sang. I have to thank my little sister for all the times I asked for her to listen, my dad for many, many hours spent helping me put this thing (and the several before it) together, and my mom for all of her aesthetic input and her first-aid knowledge (it healed nicely).”

More pictures (and video) from 2012 coming soon!

For more about Lisa Coons, visit www.lisarcoons.com/.