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HEARD focuses on contemporary music
By JESSICA KELTZ
Reporter Contributor
The Department of Music hopes that a new performance ensemble composed of department faculty members will expand the local audience for contemporary classical music and help recruit performance-oriented students to UB.
TONY ARNOLD, JACOB GREENBERG
HEARD will make its formal debut on Wednesday with a program of music planned around the theme of the Mexican Day of the Dead. "The Day of the Dead: Ruminations on Life, Death, Spirituality and Mexico" will be held at 8 p.m. in Lippes Concert Hall in Slee Hall, North Campus. The concert is part of the HEARD on Wednesdays series.
Stephen Manes, Ziegele Professor of Music and chair of the Department of Music, College of Arts and Sciences, says UB has not seen this much activity in contemporary music performance since the 1960s and '70s.
The department recently hired several performance-oriented, tenure-track faculty members—as opposed to composers—and one last search is still under way, says Manes, who teaches piano performance and has been a UB faculty member since 1968.
"Until this last hiring spree, for a number of years we were really, for the most part, without full-time performing faculty," he points out, explaining that a series of retirements, coupled with budget cuts, had left a hole in the department's roster. "We hope to create some excitement by having the new ensemble and having it recognized."
Manes says the university plans to create a Center for 21st Century Music as part of the UB 2020 strategic planning initiative, and he feels that HEARD will contribute to that goal.
"There are not very many schools around the country that have this unique focus," he says of the department's new emphasis on performance of contemporary music. "We really want to attract students who are interested in performing music written in the lifetime of the audience."
Flutist Cheryl Gobbetti Hoffman, adjunct assistant professor of music and a member of HEARD, says that while the group performed last month as part of the annual faculty fall gala, Wednesday's concert will be the first with only HEARD members performing.
"A lot of it is very mystical in nature," she says of the pieces the ensemble will play. "The composers we selected are each, in their own way, wrestling with questions of life and death, and how these things are all connected, and all part of each other.
"The sounds will be very intriguing and lush, and very provocative," she adds.
In addition to Manes and Gobbetti Hoffman, the ensemble features Jonathan Golove on cello, Jacob Greenberg on piano, soprano Antoinette "Tony" Arnold and baritone Alexander Hurd. In addition, various guest artists will perform with the group during the course of the academic year.
The group's name comes from a variety of associations, Gobbetti Hoffman says. She explains that group members talked about buffalo—which travel as a herd—and the name of singer Alexander Hurd, as well as definitions of "heard" when they were trying to come up with a name for the group.
Manes remembers that the idea of the name HEARD was at first "just tossed around facetiously."
"We sat around a table one day and people were throwing around various names," he says. With HEARD, "The idea sort of caught on," he adds.
Members of HEARD hope their audience will include students and other members of the university community, but also music enthusiasts drawn from the general public. Gobbetti Hoffman and Arnold, assistant professor of music, both think an unusually strong focus on vocals will help draw the audience into the pieces.
"We have a lot of text-based selections, which can give more of a connection between the performer and the audience—take it out of the abstract realm," Arnold says. "We're really about making connections—connections between music, cultural connections. It's about presenting contemporary music in context."
While much of the text of Wednesday's concert is in Spanish and languages other than English, the program will provide translations, as well as give some background about the music being performed. Gobbetti Hoffman notes that "Day of the Dead" is just a general theme and the program also includes the work of Finnish composer Harri Vuori, in addition to contemporary Mexican works.
Although HEARD generally focuses its attention on music written within the past 50 or so years, members plan to perform occasional classics as well. Wednesday's show will include two pieces from Mussorgsky's 1877 three-part cycle, "Songs and Dances of Death." All other pieces to be featured were written within the past 30 years.
"Hopefully, we appeal to all, rather than just being pigeonholed," Gobbetti Hoffman says. "Sometimes 'contemporary music'—that title can scare people off.
"I think it's no different than the fear that the title 'classical music' puts into people, too," she adds. "I hope we can invite people in and show them pathways into building a broader audience for the performing arts in general."
Other upcoming performances in the HEARD on Wednesdays series will include "HEARD in the Wild" on Feb. 22 and "Of Love and Money: A Taxing Program" on April 5.
For more information, visit http://www.slee.buffalo.edu/faculty.htm.