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Sweet Honey In The Rock® vocal ensemble
honors range of year-end holiday traditions
Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trio Mediaeval
perform Julia Wolfe’s new version of John Henry
Brazil’s cosmopolitan symphony orchestra
makes Penn State debut with famous percussionist
Jazzman Stefon Harris being true
to himself in The Anatomy of a Box
Central Pennsylvania hoofers passionate
about being part of the tap family tree
Julian Lage’s guitar music melds
jazz, blues, classical, and folk
Jeffrey Siegel seamlessly blends the music
of Beethoven with insightful commentary
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Sweet Honey In The Rock® vocal ensemble
honors range of year-end holiday traditions
By Jennifer Pencek
Songs of sleigh rides and St. Nick might turn on your holiday-cheer switch. But for the Grammy Award-winning a capella ensemble Sweet Honey In The Rock®, the holidays are just as sweet without the jingle bells and ho-ho-ho. The internationally renowned female vocal ensemble performs at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, December 2, in an Eisenhower Auditorium concert honoring the array of holiday traditions that mark the end of the year.
In place of the commercial tunes you would hear walking through the mall during holiday shopping, Sweet Honey In The Rock’s songs come from a variety of practices and beliefs.
“Well, it won’t be the usual,” says Sweet Honey In The Rock member Ysaye Maria Barnwell, speaking by phone from her home in Washington, D.C. “In part we will be doing music out of our repertoire that actually does still honor the holiday season. But we’ll also be doing songs that come out of the practice of Kwanza, Hebrew traditions or Jewish traditions, as well as Muslim traditions. We really want to respect as many religions as possible. We will also have songs that come out of Christian traditions. I think it will be a different kind of program and something people will really feel affirmed in when they leave.”
Barnwell isn’t concerned that some audience members may be disappointed they’re not going to hear mainstream holiday tunes.
“We don’t do a lot of the commercial, popular kinds of things. Those are not in our repertoire,” she says. “And it doesn’t make sense to go in that direction when that’s not who we are, and so we have to be as true to the traditions that we come out of and to the message that we would normally be bringing when we consider what kind of music we want to do during the season. … I guess that’s another reason why I look at it as the holy days instead of the holidays because I really feel there are times when we celebrate a number of different traditions.”
Founded by Bernice Johnson Reagon in 1973 at the D.C. Black Repertory Theater Company, Sweet Honey In The Rock has become an innovative presence in the music culture of Washington, D.C., and has gained popularity around the world through recordings and touring.
“We are unique because we are a cappella,” Barnwell says, “but I think the other thing that really is unique is that we are one of the rare groups that does such a broad spectrum or palette of music.”
The ensemble—Barnwell, Nitanju Bolade Casel, Aisha Kahlil, Carol Maillard, Louise Robinson, and Shirley Childress Saxton—gets its name from the Bible’s Psalm 81:16, which speaks of a promise to be fed by honey out of the rock. The metaphor aptly describes the group’s repertoire steeped in the sacred music of the African American church, the clarion calls of the civil rights movement, and songs of the struggle for justice everywhere. The ensemble fashions its music from the sounds of the blues, spirituals, gospel, rap, reggae, African chants, hip-hop, and jazz. Sweet Honey’s collective voice, sometimes accompanied by hand percussion instruments, produces soulful harmonies and intricate rhythms.
Its palette is certainly diverse, but what also makes Sweet Honey In The Rock a success is the ability of the members to tell a story and take audiences on a musical journey of creativity and expression, says Anthony T. Leach, associate professor of music and music education at Penn State and the 2009–2010 Penn State Laureate.
“It all begins with the performer,” says Leach, who is the founding musical director and conductor of Penn State’s Essence of Joy choir. “What I know is creativity knows no bounds. The vocal instrument we use also knows no bounds. Sweet Honey In The Rock is real, real good at changing vocal nuances in sharing a story. … They aren’t limited vocally. It’s their ability to understand the human voice, and figure out unique ways that will appeal to them as performers, and honor aspects of African American culture, and provide audiences with opportunities to be instructed and encouraged.”
Those sensibilities are central to Barnwell’s life journey. Her path has, at times, gone in winding directions but ultimately has brought her to a place in which she can teach, learn, and hone musical skills at the same time. Even though she began music at age 2 and studied violin for fifteen years with her father, she never intended to pursue music professionally.
After seeing The Miracle Worker on Broadway, Barnwell decided to go into speech pathology and work with the deaf. She became a speech pathologist, but now she is also a commissioned composer, arranger, author, master teacher, and choral clinician in African American cultural performance. In 1979, Reagon heard and saw Barnwell sing and sign at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C—where Barnwell had founded the Jubilee Singers in 1976—and invited her to audition for Sweet Honey In The Rock.
“Now I would say the music is about 90 percent of what I do,” Barnwell says. “I’m glad to have work and work that I’m passionate about and love.”
Leach can relate. Essence of Joy, featuring fifty students from various colleges at University Park, travels extensively around the world performing African and African American traditional and contemporary sacred and secular music. No matter the genre being performed, Leach says, music has the ability to take hold of a person and create an experience previously unimaginable and unexpected.
“That’s magic,” he says.
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders.
Sweet Honey In The Rock®
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, December 2
Eisenhower Auditorium
Adult $37
University Park Student $22
18 and Younger $26
The Village at Penn State Life Care Retirement Community sponsors the performance.
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Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trio Mediaeval
perform Julia Wolfe’s new version of John Henry
By John Mark Rafacz
On the Thursday before Thanksgiving, perhaps the most American of holidays, artists from two continents are gathering at Penn State to perform Steel Hammer, a twenty-first-century adaptation of a classic American folktale about a working man who faces the onslaught of the industrial age by trying to out dig a machine.
New York City’s Bang on a Can All-Stars—equal parts rock band and chamber group—and Oslo, Norway’s Trio Mediaeval vocal ensemble perform the evening-length Steel Hammer at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, November 19, in Eisenhower Auditorium.
“In a way it’s a new kind of ballad. That’s how I’ve been thinking of it—a sort of art ballad, for lack of a name to call it,” says Julia Wolfe, who composed Steel Hammer. “It’s based on the John Henry legend. There are lots of versions of John Henry. I think there are 200 or more versions of it.”
Wolfe, whose earliest musical epiphanies came from her love of American folk music, grew up in the southeastern Pennsylvania town of Montgomeryville. As a young woman she studied and played the mountain dulcimer—a key component of the Appalachian musical tradition that sparked the idea for Steel Hammer.
“I had the sound in mind first before the story. I just thought, I need this sound. I need to hear the dulcimers and the sort of folk performance practice. A lot of my pieces make folk references in them. A lot of the titles are taken from folk pieces,” says Wolfe, speaking by phone from her New York City home. “… I think over time I’ve gotten closer and closer to some of these sounds and sensibilities that I love. It began with the sounds and, [then] I went searching for the story. I kept coming back to this one because it’s so quintessentially American, which I think is fun.”
Wolfe was also drawn to the legend because it’s many variations and widespread appeal prove it transcends race and ideology.
“I like the political ramifications. John Henry belongs to everyone. He belongs to the socialists, and the mountain people, and whoever thinks he’s their person. He somehow speaks to them,” she observes.
“Aside from being inspired by the legend, it’s inspired by the performers,” she continues. “Bang on a Can All-Stars is a sort of rocking amplified group. But in this case I’m actually accessing a little bit of a different side of them because we’re using a lot of folk instruments, which is part of my musical history. So we’re using banjo, mountain dulcimer, and bones alongside electric guitar, and drum set, and things the All-Stars are probably usually known for, as well as the very classical instruments like cello and double bass and clarinet. So it’s a mix.”
Bang on a Can was formed two decades ago “as a collective of composers and musicians frustrated by the insularity of the new music scene and by the downtown-uptown divide that defined music in New York,” notes a Chicago Tribune writer.
“Sometimes it’s hard to describe Bang on a Can because it’s always evolving, but it began as a twelve-hour marathon, a twelve-hour concert, and that was in an art gallery in SoHo in New York City,” says Wolfe, who co-founded the organization. “I think we were three young composers basically looking for a home for the music we loved and for our own music, and we didn’t find it at the time in New York City. I think things were a little bit more formal uptown or very severe downtown. So we thought, well, let’s present it in a really open way where people can have fun and feel like it’s their concert, and they can have opinions about the music, and it’s not like you have to have a Ph.D. in music theory or something to understand the music.”
Bang on a Can now stages concerts throughout the year in New York City, across the United States, and abroad. The organization also has a record label, operates a summer institute in northwestern Massachusetts for composers and musicians in the early stages of their professional careers, and commissions works such as Steel Hammer.
While the Bang on a Can All-Stars lay down the musical bed for Steel Hammer, the sopranos of Trio Mediaeval tell the tale.
“They have these really beautiful, pure early music voices. But in recent history they’ve been singing a lot of Norwegian folk music,” Wolfe says. “So I thought, okay, they have this sensibility. It’s not American, it’s Norwegian, but their voices are so special I brought them in for the project. So that’s the sound world. These sort of very clear, pure voices and a lot of mix of amplified and folk instruments, side by side.”
The usual fare of the sopranos, who formed their trio in Oslo in 1997, is a varied and inviting repertoire of polyphonic medieval music from England and France, traditional Norwegian ballads, and contemporary songs composed for them.
“Singing,” a San Francisco Chronicle critic asserts, “doesn’t get more unnervingly beautiful” than that of Trio Mediaeval. “To hear the group’s note-perfect counterpoint—as pristine and inviting as clean, white linens—is to be astonished at what the human voice is capable of.”
Steel Hammer, which debuted November 13 at the University of Florida’s Phillips Center, was co-commissioned by Bang on a Can, Carnegie Hall, and Carolina Performing Arts. The Penn State performance comes just two days before the piece has its New York City premiere at Carnegie Hall.
Wolfe’s composition is divided into short sections.
“I kind of cover different parts of the ballad—from where he’s from to what he’s like. I’ve got these little names, like one’s called ‘Some Say.’ One’s called ‘The States.’ One is called ‘Characteristics.’ One is called ‘Polly Ann’ because he had a wife, but we don’t know if she was Polly Ann, Mary Ann, Lucy Ann, Liza Ann, Sally Ann. So I use all the names. It’s a silly one,” she says.
“And there’s ‘The Race,’ which is pretty much the one unchangeable thing in most of the versions. He does race the steam engine and wins, but he dies from that. And then I end with a sort of prayer, it’s called ‘Lord, Lord,’ because almost every version has ‘Lord, Lord’ somewhere in it.”
Weaving folk elements into new music has been quite a challenge, Wolfe says.
“You hear a lot of threads going through it that are very strongly connected to folk music, but I’m sure anyone who’s a true folkie would not think it was folk music. But it’s kind of much closer to it than anything I’ve written,” she insists. “… It’s tuneful and it’s rhythmic. It’s very clear in a sense. … It still has this sort of driving rhythms and maniacal moments that I tend to have, but I think it’s simpler and clearer in some ways, so the connection is probably harder to tie to what people might think of as contemporary music.”
While Wolfe has had an enduring affection for folk music, the seed of that love wasn’t planted until she left her childhood home.
“I played some guitar when I was growing up, but mostly I think the folk influence comes from my college years because I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for about eight years, and went to school there, and then stayed and worked at a theatre company,” she recalls. “It’s a very big folk town. They have one of the most famous folk coffee houses in the country called The Ark, and I did some performances there, and I started to play mountain dulcimer—sort of alongside studying new music. Not the most common pairing. But a very interesting town, a very open town. I’d say that the roots of my connection to folk music really were formed there. One of the instruments I’m using [in Steel Hammer is] the wooden bones, and the most famous bones player—at least that I know of—is from there. I think he is not living anymore. But he was there all the years I was there, this guy Percy Danforth. He was a maker of bones.”
The inclusion of Appalachian musical and oral traditions may reveal a mellower side of Wolfe, but the soft-spoken composer is best known for her rhythmically vigorous new music creations.
“I love the physicality of music making. It’s part of the reason I became a musician because of the physical nature of it,” she says. “I was in college, and I didn’t know I was going to study music until I got involved in the theatre, and it seemed very real to me as a young person at the time. I thought, I’m actually making something, and I’m making sound. There’s this acoustical and physical part of it that was very attractive to me, so that stayed with me. I like listening to a big range of kinds of music … . I can’t really say that I’m only drawn to energetic music. But Stravinsky and Bartók and Steve Reich—things that have a kind of propulsion in them—I’ve been very influenced by that. Yeah, it gets kind of noisy.”
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring Wolfe, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders.
Bang on a Can All-Stars
and Trio Mediaeval
Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer
7:30 p.m. Thursday, November 19
Eisenhower Auditorium
Adult $29
University Park Student $10
18 and Younger $19
WPSU-FM is the media sponsor.
This tour of Bang on a Can All-Stars and Trio Mediaeval in Julia Wolfe’s Steel Hammer is made possible by a grant from Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program. Steel Hammer was commissioned by Bang on a Can with generous support from Maria and Robert A. Skirnick and Carnegie Hall.
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The appropriately named Jeff Whitty pens a perfectly hilarious musical in the people-and-puppet comedy AVENUE Q
By John Mark Rafacz
If adversity breeds character, Jeff Whitty is brimming with it.
Whitty, who won a Tony Award for best book of a musical for his work on the comedy AVENUE Q, fought countless battles during the creation of the people-and-puppets show making its Penn State debut October 6 and 7 at Eisenhower Auditorium.
Whitty, who grew up in Coos Bay, Oregon, was not part of the project from the start. Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx wrote music and lyrics for what they hoped would become a stage show, but their producers decided the work needed a playwright to bring unity to their ideas.
Enter Whitty, a writer and former actor. From the beginning, the relationship among Whitty, Lopez, and Marx was anything but warm and fuzzy.
“Now we get along great. Back in the day, we were not friends,” Whitty recalls. “We didn’t know each other when we were working together, and we had very strong points of view about what the show should be. So it just took a lot of arguing and arguing and arguing to make the show work. We were very hard on one another because we had very strong points of view about what’s funny, so the only things that would actually make it into the show were things that Bobby, Jeff, and Jason Moore the director, and me all thought were funny. So it was pretty ruthless for awhile, I’ve gotta say.”
But the show, which went on to upset the heavily favored Wicked to win the Tony for best musical in 2004, probably wouldn’t have been so good without the conflict.
“It was better for that,” says Whitty, speaking by phone from New York City. “I think sometimes if you’re writing with friends or people you really like, that you’re not necessarily as honest as you should be. Musicals are, I think, the hardest thing to write.”
At the time Whitty joined the project, Lopez and Marx had written about half the songs that would find their way into AVENUE Q, but the fledgling show lacked a narrative to tie the concept together.
“When I came on board there was no story to speak of but these really hilarious, wonderful numbers,” he says. “So a lot of the challenge of the show—also because it was my first musical—was to figure out how to make those feel organic to a story. It took a lot of trial and error, but eventually we found a place for just about everything.”
After Whitty accepted the challenge to write the book, he realized he was largely ignorant about musical theatre.
“When I started writing AVENUE Q, the only musicals I really knew were the ones I did in college. I didn’t know anything about musical theatre when I started writing the show,” he admits. “Now I’m a big ole musical theatre queen, as they say, but when I started the project I literally had no idea what they were referencing when they would talk about, you know, Company the musical. I had no idea what that meant at the time.”
Now that he’s helped to create a musical, Whitty’s view of the genre has changed.
“I had that withering thing about ‘Oh musicals are lame. Musicals are lame.’ But [today] I actually think there are so many brilliant, really funny, really touching ones,” he says. “It’s just that when a musical fails, it’s just awful, you know, because they are so hard.”
AVENUE Q’s longevity on Broadway attests to the musical comedy being anything but awful. The show closed in New York City September 13 after a run of 2,534 performances, which makes it the twentieth-longest-running show in Broadway history. That puts it on the all-time list between The Producers and Hairspray.
“We had no idea it would ever even go to Broadway, much less run for six years,” he says.
Asked to describe AVENUE Q, Whitty hesitates before responding.
“Gosh, it is funny. Even after six years, I’m never quite sure how to put it into a nutshell,” he says. “The original impetus of the show was to do sort of an adult version of a children’s educational TV show. Instead of learning about spelling and numbers, you’re learning about racism, and sexuality, and cheating on people, and things like that. So that was the original impetus. But it’s also a full two-hour musical with a story. Sometimes I say it takes as long to explain AVENUE Q as it does to actually see it.”
The musical comedy, which includes mature language and content, is at its heart a coming-of-age story. The protagonist, Princeton, is a recent college graduate who moves to New York City to find his way in the world. Much of the plot turns on the quirky people he meets in his out-of-the-way neighborhood.
“In that way, it’s a very classic sort of musical structure kind of thing,” Whitty says. “It’s finding a family. You know, it happens in Rent. It happens all over the place.”
Penn State alumnus Rick Lyon designed the show’s puppets, and his company manufactured them. Lyon, who mastered his craft while working with Jim Henson, was an original AVENUE Q cast member who portrayed several characters, including Nicky, Trekkie Monster, and Bear.
“He’s a genius, Rick,” Whitty says. “Those puppets are indelible.”
The show initially targeted young adults, but Whitty says it was clear from early in the run that AVENUE Q spoke to adults of all ages.
“The funny thing is the original subtitle of it was AVENUE Q, Children’s Television for Twentysomethings. That was the original concept, and then the subtitle was dropped early on,” he says. “When we were doing it off-Broadway, it was such a trip to look out and see the little old theatre ladies from Long Island busting a gut—like during the sex scene. This little old lady came up to me afterwards and said, ‘I still feel like I’m looking for my purpose in life,’ which is one of the big themes of the show. In a weird way I think it resonates for a really, really broad spectrum of people, which is a really pleasant surprise for all of us.”
Winning a Tony for his first effort in professional musical theatre did not make his head swell, Whitty insists. When talking about the trophy, which resides—where else?—on his mantle, he almost sounds embarrassed by the recognition.
“The show itself is what really changed everything, and the Tony was just sort of this gravy on top of it all,” he says. “AVENUE Q kicked down a lot of doors and helped me pay off my student loans and things like that.”
Whitty studied acting as a graduate student at New York University. Afterward, he was a professional actor for about five years. But his bachelor’s degree, from the University of Oregon, is in English.
“I had, even then, sort of an awareness that I should probably get a background in something not theatre,” he says. “As an artist I think it’s good to be able to bring a lot to the table. Even back then I loved writing, and I loved literature, so I was able to sort of do plays with the theatre department but then put my academic focus on English.”
Whitty, who is gay, found refuge and support as a teenager in the theatre.
“I look at these kids today, and I just marvel at how much freer and open they are,” he says. “Back then there was nothing to read; there was no role model. There was nothing about how you could be happy and gay, at the time, and this was in the ’80s, too.”
“I hooked up with some great folks in Coos Bay, from the [University of Southern California] master’s program, and they sort of gave me a pretty strong theatre esthetic—even at age 15. [I] always, always loved theatre,” he says. “I frankly love being a writer just as much as I loved being an actor. In fact, in a way it’s more rewarding. It’s so fun for me to sit in the audience, and be anonymous, and just listen to people instead of being front and center. I enjoy that quite a bit.”
Whitty has written a screenplay for a possible film adaptation of AVENUE Q.
“It’s the tortoise of screenplays, as opposed to the hare. We’re all pretty confident it will be coming eventually,” he notes. “It’s a hard sell … . Because we show the puppeteers live on stage, people can’t understand how it would work to bring it to film or TV, where the puppeteer would not be visible. We’ve been saying the whole time, ‘Well, it’s actually right there. Look at the Muppet Movie. Look at all of these things.’ It’s really fun. It’s just been sort of funny getting out of the gate with it. We’ve hooked up with some terrific people, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed.”
These days, Whitty devotes much of his time to a musical he’s written based on Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin’s series of novels set in San Francisco.
“We just got out of a big workshop for that, which went really, really well,” he says. “We’re really excited about it.”
Details about the debut of Tales of the City have yet to be announced publicly, Whitty mentions, but, “If you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay area in the 2010–2011 season, you might be able to see it.”
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before each performance of AVENUE Q and is free for ticket holders. Audio description, which is especially helpful to patrons with sight loss, is available for the October 7 performance at no extra charge to ticket holders.
AVENUE Q
7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, October 6 and 7
Eisenhower Auditorium
Adult $55, $49
University Park Student $40, $34
18 and Younger $50, $44
Kish Bank sponsors the performance. FOX 8, ABC 23, and 95.3 3WZ are the media sponsors.
AT&T underwrites touring Broadway presentations at the Center for the Performing Arts.
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Brazil’s cosmopolitan symphony orchestra
makes Penn State debut with famous percussionist
By John Mark Rafacz
The Brazilian metropolis São Paulo—one of the largest population centers in the Americas and often likened to New York City—brims with cultural institutions and a diverse gathering of ethnic and racial groups. In the twenty-first century, Orquestra de São Paulo has become one of Brazil’s most celebrated classical music ensembles by reflecting the character of its cosmopolitan home.
The symphony orchestra makes its Penn State debut October 23 in an Eisenhower Auditorium concert conducted by American Kazem Abdullah and featuring Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.
Abdullah, who conducted Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in his January 2009 Metropolitan Opera debut, is a rising star in classical music.
“He is a very young conductor … . Our orchestra is very young, as well,” says Marcelo Lopes, the ensemble’s executive director. “The average age in the orchestra is about 35, 36 years old, so I think it’s going to be a very energetic concert.”
Glennie, the first person to sustain a full-time career as a classical percussion soloist, gives more than 100 performances a year with cream-of-the-crop conductors, orchestras, and artists. She performed at Eisenhower in 1995 with—ironically since São Paulo is Portuguese for Saint Paul—Minnesota’s Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
The program includes two works by Brazilian composers—Alberto Nepomuceno’s O Garatuja and Heitor Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4—plus James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni Emmanuel and Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin: Suite.
Glennie performs as soloist for the MacMillan concerto, which she first performed in 1992 and later recorded. MacMillan, born in 1959, is considered the preeminent Scottish composer of his generation.
“It’s a very special program,” says Lopes, speaking by phone from São Paulo. “… We are very excited to have Dame Evelyn Glennie to make this concert with the orchestra.”
The orchestra was state-sponsored when it began in 1955 but adopted its own board of directors in 2005. The major music media have praised the São Paulo’s efforts in becoming an orchestra of international merit.
“I think we have fourteen to fifteen different nationalities in the orchestra. And those musicians, they came from Eastern countries, they came from Latin American countries, they came from Germany, from Europe in general. And they get along very well here,” Lopes says. “… The cultural differences of the schools [and] differences of the backgrounds of the musicians have been a great asset for the development of a new sound, and I think this has made a great difference and has brought to the orchestra this consideration of being a new thing in the international scenery of symphony orchestras.”
“The public here is very open to different and new music. We can have in our season lots of contemporary music and commissioned pieces—and classical music in general, as well,” Lopes points out. “… We are very far from the centers like New York and Europe, but we are creating, I believe, a new center for the development of classical music in Latin America, and I’m very happy to be part of this process.”
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders.
Orquestra de São Paulo
Kazem Abdullah, conductor
Dame Evelyn Glennie, percussionist
7:30 p.m. Friday, October 23
Eisenhower Auditorium
Adult $53
University Park Student $20
18 and Younger $35
Dotty and Paul Rigby sponsor the performance. WPSU-FM is the media sponsor.
Foxdale Village, a Quaker-Directed Continuing Care Retirement Community underwrites classics presentations at the Center for the Performing Arts.
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Jazzman Stefon Harris being true
to himself in The Anatomy of a Box
By John Mark Rafacz
Stefon Harris defies the stereotype that men are not good listeners. Indeed, listening is so important to the vibraphonist and composer that one of his regular activities is trying to hear how many independent sounds he can identify in a given environment.
“The first way we interact with sound is through our ears. So for me the most important element to being a musician, especially as it pertains to being an improviser, is your ability to listen first and foremost,” Harris says. “Once you can hear what’s coming in, you can interpret it and figure out how to create something that would complement that which has already been said.”
The Music Accord, a national chamber music consortium of which the Center for the Performing Arts is a member, commissioned Harris to compose a work for him to perform with the woodwind quintet Imani Winds. The result is The Anatomy of a Box: a sonic painting in wood, metal, and wind, which Harris performs on vibraphone and marimba with Imani Winds September 30 at Schwab Auditorium.
The program also includes Imani Winds performing Quintette by French composer Jean Francaix plus two works by Imani musicians—Red Clay Mississippi Delta by flutist Valerie Coleman and Homage to Duke by French horn player Jeff Scott.
“The process of composing [The Anatomy of a Box] involved a log drum, which is just a small box with several slits in it that are pitched,” Harris says. “I essentially started the loop with just a few pitches and composed everything in the entire piece based on this loop of the log drum.”
This project marks the first time Harris has worked with Imani Winds, but the musicians have long been familiar to him.
“I’ve known them for quite some time,” he says. “In fact, I went to college with a few of them.”
Harris, who grew up in Albany, New York, earned an undergraduate diploma in classical music and a graduate degree in jazz performance at New York City’s Manhattan School of Music.
“[Imani oboist] Toyin [Spellman-Diaz] and I were in orchestra together,” he recalls.
For Harris, the process of collaborating with the woodwind ensemble has been as important as the musical work itself.
“We got together, and I talked to them about what I could bring to the table. They told me about what they had already done, what they may be interested in, and where we could meet in the middle. The topic of improvisation came up a lot. I decided to create a piece—and a system of improvisation—to help them get started with this. So the piece involves a lot of improvisation.”
Although The Anatomy of a Box incorporates improvisation, the majority of the music is written.
“I’d say 95 percent of it is written down. There are small sections where each musician will be highlighted for improvisation,” he says. “The parts are written for me, but I’m pretty spontaneous, so I’m not even sure that I’ll play my part the same way every time.”
Harris is most closely associated with jazz, but he also has a background in classical music. He does not, however, see the collaboration with Imani Winds as an overt blending of the two types of music.
“In general, I don’t think in terms of two different genres. I think in terms of authenticity, and really being who you are, and allowing whatever is inside of you to come out,” he insists. “I think from my life experience thus far, clearly Western music is a part of my development, so it comes out. But it comes out in a very organic manner.”
Harris views his collaboration with Imani Winds as an example of a new direction in small-ensemble music.
“I think it’s culturally relevant that in this period in American history, in terms of chamber music, there is this idea that these boundaries are coming down—that you can take someone like myself, who’s coming primarily from the jazz world, mix with Imani, coming primarily from the classical world, and find a middle ground,” he says. “I think what results in the end is true American chamber music.”
As a composer, Harris is more concerned about the journey than the destination.
“For me, music is not so much a process of creativity, it’s more of a process of discovery,” he points out. “So, it’s not that I sit down, and I predetermine that I’m going to do this, this, and this. It’s more that I sit down, I open my ears, and I take a look and see what’s already there. So, for example, with the log drum concept, it’s just a few notes. I took those few notes, and I found every harmonic possibility that would support those few notes … and discovered a harmonic palette from which to write on.”
As much as he enjoys the discovery of composing, Harris’ chief thrill comes from playing music.
“I absolutely love performing. It’s one of the reasons I get out of bed in the morning,” he says. “I’m completely fascinated with the science of music itself. And then to study study study, get the opportunity to get on stage in front of an audience and to share your passion, that’s what it’s ultimately all about.”
Harris is renowned for his enthusiasm and energy on stage.
“My basic definition of music is that it’s the science of organizing sound and silence into emotion. So ultimately music is all about emotion … ,” he says. “If I’m home alone, that’s a very limited scope of emotion. To be on stage, and to share that energy, and to pull the energy back from the audience, it’s an unbelievable experience—one of the greatest components of art.”
Harris started playing the vibraphone and the marimba when he was about 13.
“Even at that time, in middle school, I played basically all the band instruments. I played like twenty instruments at a time,” he remembers. “I taught myself to read music at a very young age, so when I went to school and started taking lessons, I was more advanced than a lot of the other kids. So to keep me busy, the teachers would just give me different instruments to try on my own.”
The major vibraphonists of jazz had an effect on his playing, Harris acknowledges, but they have not defined his style.
“I definitely feel that I’m playing my own music in my own way. In fact, I think that’s inevitable. But, certainly Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson, Lionel Hampton, these are all influences of mine,” he says.
“In the end, I actually don’t have a strong affinity for the vibraphone or marimba. I think that it’s just a pile of metal and wood. It ultimately comes down to the story that’s being told through the metal and wood. It’s not so much about the instrument. If I weren’t playing the vibraphone, I’d play something else.”
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring Harris and the members of Imani Winds, is offered in Schwab Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders.
Imani Winds
with special guest
Stefon Harris
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 30
Schwab Auditorium
Adult $36
University Park Student $15
18 and Younger $29
Gay D. Dunne, M.D., and James H. Dunne, M.D., sponsor the performance. WPSU-FM is the media sponsor.
Norma and Ralph Condee Chamber Music Endowment underwrites chamber music presentations at the Center for the Performing Arts.
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Central Pennsylvania hoofers passionate
about being part of the tap family tree
By Jennifer Pencek
Thank You Gregory, on stage October 2 at Eisenhower Auditorium, features nine acclaimed dancers and video montages paying tribute to the legends of tap dancing. But tap isn’t just about dancers who have garnered fame on stage and screen. Like blood flowing through veins, tap dancing is vital to people from many walks of life. From its rich history to the sheer joy people get from it, tap infuses its fans—including those in central Pennsylvania—with passion.
“Dance in general as an art form is incredibly addictive to people, it seems,” says Becky Mastin of Pine Grove Mills, a senior at Philadelphia’s Temple University studying psychology and religion. “But tap is a whole different kind of creating. It’s not just putting movements to music. It’s becoming the music, becoming the instrument of sound. Just as musicians can convey emotions based on the tone and tempo of the piece, so can tappers with their feet try to send a message to their audience. It’s an art form and a skill that takes time to perfect.”
Mastin first became interested in tap when her mother enrolled her in private lessons as a child. She was hooked.
“I love improvising because I am able to create something so completely new and unique from anything anyone has done before,” she says. “I like rehearsals and class because there is something so rewarding about finally getting that step you’ve been practicing for weeks. Aside from those things, it’s just a little getaway. It’s time when I can just focus on dancing and not on school or work. It’s almost like a little paradise.”
While in high school, Mastin performed with the Fraser Street Dancers through the Central Pennsylvania Dance Workshop in State College and Crunch! Productions at Potters Mill-based Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts. After completing high school, she joined the academy’s professional Jade Dance Project.
Despite her years of training and performing, Mastin says she still feels the excitement flow through her as she watches an exhilarating tap performance—especially a live show.
“There’s a feeling you get from the dancer when you watch them live on stage,” she says. “The performance seems more alive, and it’s almost like some of that passion from the stage comes right to you.”
Live tap performances came into the public consciousness mostly through vaudeville. Films brought tap to an even wider audience. But tap’s origins predate the silver screen. For Sarah Mason, co-owner and artistic director of Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, truly appreciating tap means understanding its traces to slavery.
“This started when slaves were here, and their drums were taken away, and they found rhythm with their feet,” she says. “It was a form of communication and expression, and I feel a cry for freedom.”
The slave origins of tap have morphed into a large community comprised of members from all walks of life and racial groups. Mason says the support tappers feel from one another is similar to another eclectic dance form—hip-hop.
“When you stand in a room of tap dancers or hip-hop dancers and gather in a circle for a battle or whatever, you hear them,” Mason says. “There’s a lot of vocalization and encouragement. It’s a totally different relationship. There’s not competition like in other dance forms. We all love each other and want to see it grow and continue.”
Mason started tap dancing at age 10. Just five years later, she danced with Savion Glover in concert and later founded Footprints Tap Ensemble in her home city of Chicago. She moved to Centre County in 2002 with her husband, Chuck, and opened the dance academy.
While she has studied ballet and musical theatre, it is tap that fuels her artistic fire and brings out her creativity. In a way, she is a mad tap scientist, not afraid to experiment with forms some would consider mismatched, like fusing classical music and tap, along with narrative tap where she incorporates a storyline.
“I’ve chosen things a little more narrow where there are not many of us doing it, but there is broad audience appeal,” she says. “It’s something different.”
But what has remained the same, she says, is the unifying factor in tap. Whereas tap used to publicly be considered a predominantly African American, male-dominated field, Mason says there has been a shift to include more women and members from all racial areas and skill sets.
“I personally have the utmost respect for those using their tap to unify,” she says. “The scene now is as beautiful and healthy as it’s ever been, and I hope it keeps going in that direction.”
So does Kaleena Rallis, another former student of Mason. Rallis, originally from Alexandria, Huntingdon County, now works in talent management in Los Angeles.
Rallis says it is important to explore as many branches of the tap family tree as possible. She is particularly interested in the giants of past tap generations, such as the late Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Buster Brown, and Gregory Hines—along with living legends Mable Lee, Skip Cunningham, and Arthur Duncan.
Even as a child, Rallis recalls being fascinated with the concept that tappers’ feet can be musical instruments. But after meeting Mason, Rallis says she really emerged herself into tap and became eager to learn more.
“[Mason] led me on a rhythmical journey and taught me how to truly express myself through my feet,” Rallis says. “Sarah opened me up to the tap dance community, and immediately I was inspired by its positive energy and the amazingly talented and good people who have come together to support this unique art form.”
Thank You Gregory
A Tribute to the Legends of Tap
7:30 p.m. Friday, October 2
Eisenhower Auditorium
Adult $36
University Park Student $15
18 and Younger $26
McNees Wallace & Nurick LLC sponsors the performance. MAJIC 99 is the media sponsor.
Penn State International Dance Ensemble Endowment underwrites dance presentations at the Center for the Performing Arts.< BACK TO TOP
Julian Lage’s guitar music melds
jazz, blues, classical, and folk
By John Mark Rafacz
Guitarist, composer, and arranger Julian Lage, who makes his Penn State debut October 13 at Schwab Auditorium, is often described as a former child prodigy. But Lage didn’t come out of the womb with a jones to play guitar. It was Lage’s father—inspired by a 1992 Eric Clapton recording—who piqued the youngster’s interest in the stringed instrument.
“I never thought of myself as a prodigy at all,” says Lage, speaking by phone from his native Sonoma County north of San Francisco. “The thing is that my father picked up the guitar when I was like 4. … It was around the time that Eric Clapton’s Unplugged had come out. I think a lot of people of my father’s generation—born in the ’50s—were really kind of rejuvenated [by that CD] as far as their interest in acoustic guitar. … It inspired my dad to get a guitar, which inspired me to get a guitar. I just wanted to do what he did, I guess. He showed me what he would learn at his guitar lessons until I was maybe advanced enough to go learn it myself.”
Lage’s childhood affinity for the guitar was the subject of the 1996 Oscar-nominated documentary Jules at Eight.
The blues bit Lage hard. “Yeah, I was a pretty diehard blues player,” he recalls.
“In a lot of ways it’s like a stepping-stone. It’s like, ‘You want to play guitar? Oh, well blues is a guitar friendly kind of music,’” he says. “It just kind of happened, so I sought out classical and jazz as a way to kind of break open some of the theoretical aspects of music that I had wondered about. That was kind of my progression. It goes full circle. I go back to the blues a lot, and [I’m] always in classical mode.”
Today, Lage’s music resides at the intersection of jazz, blues, classical, and folk. Only in his early 20s, the guitarist has performed with a who’s who of musicians, including Béla Fleck, Herbie Hancock, Gary Burton, Christian McBride, and Chris Thile.
Sounding Point, Lage’s first album as a leader, was released earlier this year to glowing notices. “Here’s a jazz newcomer more interested in elegance than in flash, more interested in instrumental storytelling than in virtuosity,” observes a Washington Post reviewer. “With a fully-formed voice that transcends yet incorporates his multifaceted stylistic interests, Lage’s impressive debut points to a giant in the making,” writes a critic for All About Jazz.
The CD features Lage in four settings. He performs with his band or selected members of it. He also plays solo guitar, as a duo with his longtime collaborator pianist Taylor Eigsti, and as a trio with mandolinist Thile, best known for his work with Nickel Creek, and banjoist Fleck, who returns to Penn State for a concert on March 3.
The guitarist, who lives in Boston, leads the Julian Lage Group in concert at the Center for the Performing Arts. The band, which formed in early 2008, includes saxophonist Ben Roseth, cellist Aristides Rivas, bassist Jorge Roeder, and percussionist Tupac Mantilla. “I’ve known most of the guys, more or less, for the last five years,” he points out.
“I was looking for a band that had many bands within it,” he says, “and allowed the guitar to kind of be a chameleon and float around a little bit—not have to be so defined as the soloist, the melody player, or whatever.”
Lage has always had eclectic taste in music. “I listened to a lot of music, and I never was extremely committed to any one style. Even though I went through a strong blues phase, a strong jazz phase, and I’m always immersed in classical, … I always felt like I could jump around quite a bit,” he says. “I think I’ve just been in pursuit of qualities more than a musical style. … Obviously jazz has this incredible improvisational energy, this kind of communication that’s just so amazing when it’s happening between great jazz musicians that you see. So that’s a quality. And then I said, ‘I love that quality, so where else is that?’ Well, it’s also in classical music in some of these string quartets. Let’s say Beethoven string quartets. Even though they’re not improvised, they still talk about something similar. Or maybe I like the percussive nature of bluegrass music, you know that kind of perpetual motion feeling. … So in the pursuit of all these characteristics, I’ve stumbled into a lot of really cool styles of music.”
Coming of age in northern California wine country was—maybe surprisingly to outsiders—fertile ground for music.
“It’s a great place to grow up because musically there’s a ton of influences over here,” he says. “You know, like when I used to play a lot with [mandolin master] David Grisman, that was a perfect example of someone who’s very diverse—and lived just down the street—who exposed me to a whole world. You could be with him one day and then with some amazing jazz musicians the next.”
Lage, at age 11, made his first recording as a duet with Grisman on “Old Souls,” the closing track of the disc Dawg Duos.
The music of Bernard Hermann (1911–1975), the film composer who wrote the scores for nine Hitchcock films (including Psycho, Vertigo, and North by Northwest), Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, and other movies, has also had a tremendous influence on Lage.
“Bernard Hermann is a master of Romanticism, and extreme suspense, and what could be thought of as maybe a tragic sound to his harmonies,” he says. “And that was so fitting with Hitchcock’s very dry, almost deadpan, sense of terror. You know, like the way Hitchcock movies would have these characters who were seemingly so normal and almost boring, like in Psycho, but there was something a little bit different about the character. That was Bernard Hermann’s job, to exploit that one little quirkiness, and he did that through, like I said, this romantic kind of lush orchestral sound. Which is just so cool to me … to have someone who’s devoted their musical career to making music about that thing you can’t put your finger on—why someone is a little creepy or why that chord rubs you the wrong way. I think that there’s just so much beauty in his writing.”
On songs such as “All Purpose Beginning,” featured on Sounding Point, Lage draws inspiration from Hermann’s compositional style.
“I still don’t think of myself as being really a composer. I’ve always been a student of it. I probably started that pursuit when I was 6 or 7, right from the beginning, because I just would try to write songs,” he remembers. “When I was maybe 12 or 13, I began writing tunes for bands and stuff. And then with Sounding Point and my new band, I wrote a lot of music for the band that was kind of in a more folkloric tradition. None of the music on the record was written out. It was all kind of conceptualized, played on the guitar, and then taught to each musician. But yeah, my interest in composition really kind of became more serious when I was maybe 12 or 13—so nine or ten years ago.”
Lage tries to share his love of music with students who come to Stanford University to learn about jazz.
“I teach in the summers at the Stanford Jazz Workshop, which is a three-week workshop for both adults and children,” he says. “The first two weeks are primarily for students under 18, and the last week is all ages. … This will be my sixth year. I started when I was 15.”
Many of Lage’s students are considerably older than he is.
“There’s no clear-cut rule about how information is supposed to be passed on. The one thing I know that I can offer, even if it’s a student who’s a bit older, is a love for the music,” he says. “I enjoy it, and I’m energized about it, and I think that’s always fun because that might spark someone who played years ago and now they’re getting back into it. You’re not really teaching what you think you’re teaching, it’s always something a little more subtle. But yeah, that’s a big part of my life, and I teach a lot [of private lessons mostly] in Boston, as well.”
“Peterborough,” one of the songs on Sounding Point, is named for the street Lage lives on near Fenway Park, but that doesn’t mean the Californian has become a Red Sox fan.
“I wish, I wish. I’ve actually never been to a game. I live there out of convenience,” he says. “I see the darker side of it, which is the packed streets, not being able to get anywhere when there’s a game, the noisy crowds. But I can look past it. I’m going to see a game this year.”
Lage has a significant presence on the innovative ArtistShare Web site.
“That’s a great paradigm, you know, the way they’ve set this up,” he says. “I have a lesson on there now basically discussing ‘Autumn Leaves’—my approach to it—with a feature of me and Jim Hall playing duo, which is an honor for me because he was one of my major influences. So it’s nice to be able to share that with people.”
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Schwab Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders.
Julian Lage Group
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 13
Schwab Auditorium
Adult $25
University Park Student $10
18 and Younger $18
Corvette America underwrites jazz presentations at the Center for the Performing Arts.
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Jeffrey Siegel seamlessly blends the music
of Beethoven with insightful commentary
By John Mark Rafacz
Hearing Juilliard-trained piano virtuoso Jeffrey Siegel, who has appeared as a soloist with many of the world’s great orchestras, perform works by Ludwig van Beethoven would be a joy in itself. But Siegel enhances the experience with his insights in an engaging concert-plus-commentary format called Keyboard Conversations®.
Siegel’s The Power and Passion of Beethoven program, which opens the Center for the Performing Arts 2009–2010 season September 23 at Schwab Auditorium, features Beethoven’s Moonlight and Les Adieux sonatas, Für Elise, and the German composer’s variations on the familiar God Save the King.
“Each work on the program will be performed in its entirety, just as one would expect to be the case at a formal solo piano recital,” says Siegel, speaking by phone from New York City. “What we like to think of as being the plus is that prior to the performance of each composition on the program, I speak to the audience a bit about the music in non-technical language and usually with some illustrations of the work that they are about to hear, out of context, so that when I sit down to play the piece straight through, just after talking about it, hopefully the audience will feel that they are on the inside track, that they’re getting more out of the listening experience than might otherwise be the case.”
Both classical music devotees and novices enjoy Siegel’s approach.
“I would be the first one to defend the principle that it’s not necessary to [provide commentary],” he says. “On the other hand, avid concertgoers have told me that it makes their listening experience more meaningful than an ear wash of sound. And, of course, the Keyboard Conversations reach out and make the listening experience for the non-concertgoer much more inviting and accessible.”
Siegel came up with the concert-plus-commentary concept by recalling from his youth Leonard Bernstein’s television appearances.
“Before conducting a symphony, for example, he would talk to the audience about the music in layman’s terms illustrating various points in the composition, out of context, and then when he turned around to conduct something—even that we thought we knew like the Beethoven Fifth Symphony—we were on the edge of our chair. It was much more active listening. So that was the guiding light as a model,” Siegel says.
“But in terms of the inspiration to do it,” the pianist continues, “I would meet many concertgoers at after-concert parties who would say to me, ‘Yes, I love music, and I go to concerts, and I have a good CD collection, but I wish my listening experience to great music could be more than just this pleasant ear wash of sound.’ I’ve also met many people who will tell me, rather sheepishly, ‘I know I’m missing something not to have Beethoven in my life, but I wish some musicians like you could make a more accessible introduction to classical music for somebody like me who’s not a concertgoer but wants to give it a try.’”
The performance of Moonlight Sonata is part of Moments of Change, a Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities multifaceted initiative focused in 2009–2010 on the years 1776 to 1801.
“What is so startling about the Moonlight Sonata is that people tend to take it for granted. … It’s very well known—and it should be—but really it’s a shocking, revolutionary masterpiece unusual even for Beethoven, and he knew it,” Siegel says. “He knew he was writing something very unusual here that, indeed, went against the grain of what was expected of a composer in the late eighteenth century and even beginning of the nineteenth century. … In many ways people had every right to have a certain expectation in those days of what a piano sonata was to be—the form, and the design, and the content—and this is a shocking break with precedent. … He’s not content, for example, to simply call this piano sonata number 14, which it is, but it’s Sonata quasi una fantasia—sonata more like a fantasy—that’s the title. And why? I talk about that in the course of the program.”
Like much of Beethoven’s music, the sonata has an autobiographical element. The onset of Beethoven’s deafness, Siegel maintains, factors into the work.
“He was beginning to have to face up to the horrible truth that indeed this hearing loss was real and what the consequences might be,” Siegel points out. “So, if one hears the first movement as brooding and contemplative, and one hears the finale, which should be light-hearted and gay, but is a rage in musical tone, one might indeed make some attachment, if you will, to Beethoven’s personal life.”
As is the case with so many other pieces of classical music, the sonata got its common name from someone other than the composer.
“The Moonlight got its nickname years after Beethoven’s death,” Siegel says. “The very influential German poet and critic named Ludwig Rellstab happened to remark that listening to the first movement of this sonata reminded him of moonlight over Lake Lucerne. And from that chance remark, ‘moonlight’ got attached to this piece, and it’s been stuck to it ever since.”
The Moonlight Sonata, which today ranks as one of the most beloved works in classical music, had a large following from the start.
“In Beethoven’s lifetime the Moonlight Sonata was very well known and very popular, and in later life Beethoven realized that this was one of his most frequently played works. He felt, of course, that the music he was writing later in his life was more significant, so he tended to speak less fondly about the Moonlight Sonata as he was looking back upon it,” Siegel observes. “But it was one of his major works, and it was considered so revolutionary that one of the later pianists [Ignaz] Moscheles was told by his teacher that he shouldn’t play the piece, that it stirs their emotions too strongly. It’s too revolutionary.”
Beethoven wrote thirty-two piano sonatas, but only one received its nickname from Beethoven himself. It’s the Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 81a, and it’s also on the Penn State program.
“This one is the sonata that will be on the second half of our program, the Les Adieux— or the farewell—sonata. This is the only piece of music for the piano of Beethoven that has a very definite program. It has a very definite source of information [and] of inspiration,” Siegel says. “A very important person in Beethoven’s life had to leave Vienna in May of 1809. Who was this person? Why was Beethoven so deeply affected? And the sonata in many ways is the programmatic response musically to this. The first movement is entitled The Farewell, the second movement The Absence—Beethoven wrote the second movement while the person was away—and the third movement is the absolutely jubilant Return. And to really get what this piece is about, it really helps enormously to know who this person was, what was the relationship to Beethoven, why was Beethoven so deeply affected, what caused the person to leave town, and how big of a musical life is this in tone.”
To avoid spoiling Siegel’s commentary for those attending the concert, the identity of Beethoven’s inspiration will remain a mystery in this article.
The September 23 program includes two other works.
“We have Für Elise, which is one of those piano pieces that’s known to every piano student and every parent of a piano student,” Siegel mentions. “Did Beethoven write this hackneyed piece of music as a teaching piece for piano students? Why didn’t he publish the work, because it was not published during his lifetime? And who was Elise? And I get into that in the course of the concert. People who know this piece, and most people do, will find it shocking to find out what’s really behind it, and once you know, you hear it differently and you play it differently.”
Many people, even those who aren’t devotees of classical music, recognize Für Elise because it’s part of the popular soundtrack of A Charlie Brown Christmas.
“Also on the program is a melody that everybody knows—God Save the King, or Queen, as the case may be—the British national anthem. Beethoven wrote a short set of variations on this tune,” Siegel says. “We know it as My Country, ’Tis of Thee. In Britain, of course, it has the God Save the Queen appropriate title—God Save the King it was when Beethoven wrote the piece in 1803. What inspired him to write it, and what does a composer do to a tune that seems so complete in itself? How much musical juice could be extracted from a tune that indeed seems complete in itself? Beethoven takes us through seven different variations, all with a different mood, all based on this tune, and one marvels, especially since everyone knows the tune, what the composer is able to do with it.”
Center for the Performing Arts Director George Trudeau, who presented Siegel at his previous directorship in Utica, New York, has high praise for the pianist.
“Through his informative insights, wit, and fine interpretations, Siegel breaks down the barriers—both imagined and real—between artist and audience, composer and listener,” Trudeau insists. “Siegel incorporates both the classics of the repertoire and little-known piano treasures, weaving together programs that are interesting, informative, and stimulating and that always leave us wanting more.”
“Someone who once heard a Keyboard Conversation actually said ‘It’s like a gentle inoculation into the joys of listening to classical music,’” Siegel says, “which I took as a great compliment.”
Due to the built-in commentary of Keyboard Conversations, Artistic Viewpoints will not be offered before this presentation. The performance is made possible through a partnership between the Center for the Performing Arts and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Jeffrey Siegel
Keyboard Conversations®
The Power and Passion of Beethoven
7:30 p.m. Wednesday, September 23
Schwab Auditorium
Für Elise
Variations on God Save the King
Sonata quasi una fantasia in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, Moonlight
Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 81a, Les Adieux
Adult $36
University Park Student $15
18 and Younger $26
Bill and Honey Jaffe and Bud and Carol Rowell sponsor the performance.
Foxdale Village, a Quaker-Directed Continuing Care Retirement Community, underwrites classics presentations at the Center for the Performing Arts.