The SOU Percussion ensemble had a busy spring term planned with a trip to New York and much more. However, the travel plans had to be adjusted in accordance with the changes with SOU’s guidelines during COVID-19.
Taran McGuire, a senior this year, sees the new situation in a positive light. He states that SOU’s distance learning model is allowing for new creative solutions where all new ideas are welcome.
Oregon Center for the Arts students are finding new innovative ways to interact with their professors, fellow students, and community. OCA Music student Tatjana Luce recently completed 30 days of 30 seconds of music. When it came time to post the video Tatjana was innovative in editing the pieces together on her phone, adapting to utilize the technology she had on hand.
Associate Professor and Music Department Chair, Dr. Cynthia Hutton will retire this Spring 2020 after 26 years of teaching at SOU. Dr. Hutton’s teaching contributions to the Music program at SOU included teaching courses in music education, music theory, aural skills, conducting, and for 24 years she was the Director of Bands at SOU.
SOU Music Ensembles get Creative in their New, Virtual Reality
This article was originally published on news.sou.edu
With some schools canceling ensembles altogether, Paul T. French – Southern Oregon University’s Director of Choral Studies and Vocal Studies – had doubts about the spring ahead for his corner of the Music Program in the Oregon Center for the Arts at SOU. The idea of taking the choir virtual was especially daunting, with the experience rooted in collaborative rehearsals and harmonious performance.
“I didn’t even have a Google calendar,” French joked, “so we’re all kind of crawling forward and learning this together.”
SOU’s Chamber and Concert Choirs are joined for now and still rehearse twice weekly online. With upwards of 50 people on the screen, French and concert choir director Kendra Taylor watch as the singers mute themselves in their homes and perform individual parts to a piano accompaniment written by French’s wife, SOU instructor, and staff pianist Jodi French.
Once they’ve learned and perfected the parts, they’ll record and send them to Taylor, who will plug them into and arrange them on an online music platform called Soundtrap.
“It calls for a lot of accountability from individual students because they can’t lean on other people, so the bar is higher and their own contributions are that much more meaningful,” Paul French said. “I’m proud of the students because they’re compassionate when we screw up and want to do whatever it takes to move forward, and after our second rehearsal the chat bar was full of all these tremendously positive and excited comments.”
The recording will be released later this spring. They hope to add a video component and perform the piece live in the fall if all goes well.
Terry Longshore, SOU’s director of percussion studies, is taking a similar, virtual tack. Originally, he and SOU Raider Band director Bryan Jeffs had been invited to take 17 students to New York City in May for the inaugural “Long Play” music festival by the renowned contemporary music organization Bang on a Can.
In lieu of that trip, and considering the limitations some students have without access to their instruments, they’re working on an 18-minute piece in which 16 performers will pour dry rice over various materials – metal, wood, and leaves, to name a few. It will explore textural changes created by the rate at which the rice is falling. They will eventually turn their individual recordings into a video collage, and will later have the chance to interview the piece’s composer, Michael Pisaro of the CalArts School of Music.
Their other ideas include breaking into small groups that will create original soundtracks to short, silent films.
“They’re excited about the projects because they get to take advantage of what we have and try to make lemonade out of it while still learning something, having a unique creative experience, and putting something out in the world that we’re proud of,” Longshore said.
French concurred with the sentiment.
“Given how isolated we feel, we’re not together, but we can see each other and create something together,” he said. “We still need art and this is what we can do.”
Story by Josh McDermott, SOU staff writer
The Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University Music Program proudly presents the Southern Oregon University Wind Ensemble Spring Concert spring concert. The concert, titled Music from Latin America will be held on Thursday, June 8 at 7:30 PM in the SOU Music Recital Hall.
The Southern Oregon University Wind Ensemble under the direction of Dr. Cynthia Hutton will perform a festive final concert of the academic year, Music from Latin America. Pieces include “La Fiesta Mexicana” by Owen Reed, “Bachianas Brasileiras No.2” by Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa Lobos, “El Retiro” by Colombian composer, Alfredo Mejia Vallejo, “La Bamba De Vera Cruz” by Argentine composer, Terig Tucci, and “San Antonio Dances” by Frank Ticheli.
The program will feature Zachary Yu Yang, Saxophonist and Junior Music Major at Southern Oregon University. Mr. Yang, the 2017 SOU Wind Ensemble Concerto Competition recipient will perform the “Fantasia for Alto Saxophone” for concert band and solo saxophone by Claude T Smith. States Cynthia Hutton, Wind Ensemble Director and Associate Professor of Music, “the concert promises an evening of beautiful and spirited music, please tell your friends and join us. Ole!”
The Southern Oregon University Wind Ensemble is the sole wind band on the campus of Southern Oregon University. It is an ensemble of approximately 45 members and is opened to talented musicians from all disciplines; both music majors and non-music majors are accepted. The Wind Ensemble seeks to obtain the highest quality level of musicianship and performance. It is dedicated to the study of a diverse repertoire for winds and percussion from the masterworks to recent commissions of new compositions. The Wind Ensemble has performed for the Oregon State Music Educators Association Conference, the Lawrence R. Sutherland Intercollegiate Wind Band Festival, the College Band Director Regional Conference and the Western International Band Conference.
Tickets for this performance are $10 for regular admission, $5 for seniors, and free for students. All tickets are general admission. The OCA box office is located in the SOU Music Building, off South Mountain Avenue. The box office hours are noon to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, and two hours prior to performances. Tickets can be purchased with a credit card over the phone by calling (541) 552-6348 or online at oca.sou.edu/box-office. Please contact the box office for discounts offered to SOU alumni, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute participants, and SNAP/Oregon Trail cardholders.
The Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University (SOU) Music Program proudly presents two events with guest musicians, NoiseFold. Cory Metcalf and David Stout, who comprise NoiseFold will give an Artist Talk on Thursday, May 25 at 12:30 PM in the Meese Auditorium in the SOU Art Building. Then NoiseFold will join SOU’s own Left Edge Collective in concert on Friday, May 26 at 7:30 PM in the SOU Music Recital Hall.
Melding real-time animation and generative electronic sound within the legacy of cybernetics and mathematic visualization, NoiseFold (Cory Metcalf and David Stout) celebrates the evolution of visual music as a form of instrumental play with semi-autonomous systems. The artists re-imagine a painterly abstraction to suggest elemental narratives that evoke highly charged emotional states. From subtle life-like emanations to roiling upheavals of sound and light the resulting audio-visual events are at once familiar, mysterious and strange.
Left Edge Collective is a new music organization founded and directed by David Bithell and Terry Longshore at the Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University. Left Edge composes, performs, improvises, creates interdisciplinary projects, and hosts an annual festival of contemporary performance which focuses on presenting and premiering new works by members of Left Edge, works by nationally recognized guest artists, and collaborations between artistic disciplines.
For the performance on Friday, May 26 at 7:30 PM, Left Edge Collective welcomes guest artists NoiseFold – transdisciplinary artists working at the fuzzy boundary blurring nexus of visual art, music and interactive cinema. Left Edge Collective will premiere two new works by David Bithell: “Shepard”, for four vibraphones, explores a temporal equivalent to shepard tones – overlapping frequencies that seem to rise infinitely. In this work, the ensemble appears to speed up continually.
In “CavitationStudy.01”, to be performed, Bithell states, “Plants make sound – if we know how to listen. There is the rustling of leaves, the creaking of branches or trunks, the lone tree falling in a forest, all created by forces external to the plant. Internally, rhythms are created by the formation and bursting of microscopic gas bubbles in vessels. This process of cavitation occurs at frequencies and time scales well beyond the range of human hearing. In this performance, these events are made audible through a variety of methods of data sonification. The timing of recorded cavitation events serves as the structural backbone as well as the generator of local rhythms. The sound of cavitation events themselves are transposed into the audible frequency and used as part of the sonic environment. All of these elements are activated by sensors that read the resistance of conductive inks drawn on plant matter collected locally in the Rogue Valley.
Tickets for this performance are $10 for regular admission, $5 for seniors, and free for students. All tickets are general admission. The OCA box office is located in the SOU Music Building, off South Mountain Avenue. The box office hours are noon to 600 PM. Monday through Friday, and two hours prior to performances. Tickets can be purchased with a credit card over the phone by calling (541) 552-6348 or online at oca.sou.edu/box-office. Please contact the box office for discounts offered to SOU alumni, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute participants, and SNAP/Oregon Trail cardholders.
The Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University Music Program proudly presents the spring concert by SOU Percussion Ensembles, directed by Terry Longshore. The Lou Harrison Centennial Celebration concert, which will be performed on Thursday, May 18 at 7:30 PM in the SOU Music Recital Hall, is a tribute to Lou Harrison (1917-2003) on his 100th birthday. One of percussion music’s pioneers, Harrison composed some of our most compelling early works.
A student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, Lou Harrison was influenced by the music of Indonesia, Japan, and Korea and was very interested in tuning systems. He composed many works for Javanese gamelan, as well as for his own homemade and found instruments. He was also a prolific poet, artist, and music critic. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, along with John Cage, Harrison composed numerous important works for percussion ensemble, especially quartets. Unlike a string quartet in which every piece is for the same instruments, percussion quartets can vary widely from piece to piece and include dozens of instruments.
For the Lou Harrison Centennial Celebration, three of Harrison’s percussion quartets will be performed, all composed in 1941. All of the quartets combine instruments from around the world with found sounds from junkyards, antique shops, and kitchens. Harrison and Cage were true curators of sound, choosing instruments based on their sonic qualities, not their ethnic identities or price tags. I am particularly excited that Harrison’s poetry will be read by members of the ensemble between the musical works,” states Terry Longshore, SOU Percussion Ensembles Director and Professor of Music.
The concert will open with “Double Music”, co-composed with John Cage. It features water buffalo bells (here played on large Swiss cowbells), automobile brake drums, water gong, thunder sheet, elephant bells, cowbells, Chinese gongs, and temple bowl gongs. Following that will be “Simfony #13”, a work that utilizes one of Harrison’s favorite compositional devices, the canon. Families of instruments (brake drums, wood blocks, cowbells, drums, water buffalo bells, etc.) play melodies in various canonic and unison relationships throughout the work. The final quartet, “Fugue”, also combines some beautiful sounds – clock coil gongs, resonant brake drums (here played on cast iron Bundt cake pans), tuned pipes, musical saw, wash tub, etc. – in the form of a fugue, but substituting rhythmic relationships for the typical harmonic ones. “Fugue” was so difficult that it was not performed for 20 years after its composition. It will be performed by Left Edge Percussion.
Also featured will be “Threnody for Carlos Chavez” for gamelan and solo viola, featuring Kimberly Fitch. A beautifully haunting melody played on the viola is accompanied by the shimmering, resonant sounds of Sundanese gamelan degung, here performed by Left Edge Percussion. Harrison’s “May Rain” for soprano, prepared piano, and tam-tam gong will be performed by Jennifer Longshore and Terry Longshore. An invention of Cage’s, the prepared piano uses screws, bolts, rubber, etc. placed between the strings of the piano to emulate the sound of a percussion orchestra.
Tickets for this performance are $10 for regular admission, $5 for seniors, and free for students. All tickets are general admission. The OCA box office is located in the SOU Music Building, off South Mountain Avenue. The box office hours are noon to 600 PM. Monday through Friday, and two hours prior to performances. Tickets can be purchased with a credit card over the phone by calling (541) 552-6348 or online at oca.sou.edu/box-office. Please contact the box office for discounts offered to SOU alumni, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute participants, and SNAP/Oregon Trail cardholders.
The SOU Percussion Ensembles are comprised of undergraduate and graduate students, who perform alongside faculty members Dr. Terry Longshore and Bryan Jeffs. The ensembles are dedicated to the performance of contemporary percussion repertoire and providing the members with a variety of percussive experiences. The ensembles frequently collaborate with notable composers on premieres of new works, and repertoire ranges from contemporary music to world traditions to jazz- and rock-inspired compositions. The ensembles give several concerts every year at the Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University, as well as many performances throughout the Southern Oregon community and the Pacific Northwest, and were invited to perform at the 2013 and 2014 Percussive Arts Society International Conventions (PASIC). The ensembles have self-released two CDs, “La Alma del Árbol – The Soul of the Tree”, and “Electric Rebel Poetry”. In 2015, the SOU Percussion Ensembles recorded the CD, “30”, by Stanford University composer Mark Applebaum, released internationally on the Innova Recordings label. The SOU Percussion Ensembles endorse Vic Firth Sticks and Mallets.
The Oregon Fringe Festival is underway! The festival kicked off Wednesday to host a variety of local art, film, music, and theater student-driven acts. A mixture of innovatively produced happenings, installations, and curated works from artists at Southern Oregon University, the Oregon Fringe Festival breaks boundaries and takes art out of its traditional venues. The Festival’s student producers are particularly excited to present headlining performances this weekend by special guest artists Mark Applebaum and James Donlon.
Key Fringe events are listed below – for a full schedule of Fringe events, please see www.oregonfringefestival.org. All events are FREE and open to the public.
Mark Applebaum and James DelPrince: Concerto for Florist
Friday, May 5, 6:00 PM, SOU Music Recital Hall
Saturday, May 6, 3:00 PM, Lithia Park Butler Bandshell
Mark Applebaum’s Concerto for Florist is a daring composition that exemplifies his unconventionality. Featuring floral designer James DelPrince, the piece blends floral design, musical composition, and performance work. Mark Applebaum is an internationally renowned musician and composer whose solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia. www.markapplebaum.com.
James Donlon: Monsters
Friday, May 5, 10:30 PM, SOU Music Recital Hall
Saturday, May 6, 10:00 PM, SOU Music Recital Hall
James Donlon presents a devised theater piece, entitled Monsters, that changes in each manifestation. Donlon has partnered with students from the SOU Theater, Music, and Visual Arts Departments to bring this provocative work to the Oregon Fringe Festival. James Donlon has been a celebrated master teacher, international performer, and director since 1970. The New York Times describes his work as “an extraordinary blend of skill and lunacy!” jamesdonlon.com
Visual Arts Exhibitions
Opening Receptions – Coinciding with First Friday Trolley: Friday, May 5th, 5-8pm
Exhibition Dates: May 5 – 28, 2017
Stevenson Union Gallery
figure.ground, David Bithell, Solo Exhibition
Center for the Visual Arts Galleries
Dancing with Alchemy, Mara Reinhardt, Solo Exhibition
Imagined: 30 Years of Performance Mask, James Jesse Peck, Solo Exhibition
Works by Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, Solo Exhibition
[i s h], Samuel Lindley, Solo Exhibition
Revelation, Charlie Howarth, Solo Exhibition
The Oregon Center for the Arts (OCA) at Southern Oregon University presents the Tutunov Season Finale, a celebratory concert to conclude a successful year of outstanding performances in the Alexander Tutunov’s 2016-2017 Piano Series. The concert will be Friday May 12th at 7:30 PM at the SOU Music Recital Hall.
The Tutunov Season Finale will feature special guest Madeline Abel-Kerns, the internationally renowned soprano (see bio below), who will join Alexander Tutunov on stage for the Oregon Premiere performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling. Alexander Tutunov will also perform the Sonata in B-minor by Franz Liszt and Sergei Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7. He will also perform audience favorites, such as Liebestraum by Listzt and Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev.
Alexander Tutunov, the founder of the series, is Professor of Piano and Artist in Residence at Southern Oregon University. He is widely recognized as one of the most outstanding virtuosos of the former Soviet Union. First Prize winner of the Belarusian National Piano Competition and winner of the Russian National Piano Competition, Tutunov’s playing was described by Soviet Culture, Moscow, as “exhilarating and inspired, and which demonstrated a unique talent.”
All tickets are $20 general admission and free to students, and are being sold through the Oregon Center for the Arts Box Office. The box office is located in the SOU Music Building, off South Mountain Avenue, adjacent from the Theatre building, which is currently under construction. OCA Box office hours are noon to 6 PM Monday through Friday. Tickets can be purchased with a credit card over the phone by calling 541-552-6348 or in person at the box office.
About Madeline Abel-Kerns
Named the “mezzo-toned soprano” (Frankfurter Allgemeine) with a “warm and expansive voice” (Cool Cleveland), who “filled the house with thrilling sound” (San Francisco Chronicle), Madeline Abel-Kerns has garnered awards in every genre in which she sings.
In January 2016, she joined SOU as an instructor of voice for the Oregon Center for the Arts. Last May, she and Dr. Rhett Bender performed “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” a song cycle for soprano and saxophone composed by Lori Laitman, with text from children of the Terezin Concentration Camp. Tonight, Ms. Abel-Kerns is thrilled to perform Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Ugly Duckling” with Dr. Alexander Tutunov at the piano. It has been twenty years since these two artists have collaborated, and long overdue!
Opera and oratorio credits include soprano roles in Aida, Albert Herring, Beethoven’s 9th, Carmen, Cavalleria, Creation, Die Walküre, Der Rosenkavalier, Madama Butterfly, Messiah, Siegfried, Tosca, and the Mozart, Rutter, & Verdi Requiem with the Bahamas Music Society, Cologne Chamber Orchestra, Frankfurt Alte Oper, Heidelberg Opera, Hessische-Rundfunk Orchestra, National Chorale, NY Choral Society, Opera Orchestra of NY, Sacramento Opera, SF Choral Society and SF Opera, among others. Concert and theatre credits include opera, sacred music, musicals, cabaret, dinner theatre and original works in the Bahamas, Germany, and throughout the U.S. in Arizona, California, New York, Oregon, Ohio, Utah, Virginia and Washington.
She has taught voice, breath, acting, and physical conditioning at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Hebrew Union College, Holy Names College, James Madison University, Mary Baldwin College, Southern Oregon University and New York University, and has presented master classes and workshops around the country, in the Bahamas, and abroad.
Supplementing professional training in California, Germany, Oregon and New York, Ms. Abel-Kerns earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Vocal Performance, summa cum laude with Distinction, at Mary Baldwin University in 2013. She is a long-time union member in good standing of AEA, PWSA, and SAG-AFTRA.
The Oregon Center for the Arts (OCA) at Southern Oregon University presents Groove Machine, a concert by OCA’s in-residence ensembles the Cascade Clarinet Consort and the Siskiyou Saxophone Orchestra. The concert will be Tuesday May 30th at 7:30 PM at the SOU Music Recital Hall.
The Groove Machine concert will feature the music of American composer Marc Mellits. In addition to Black for two bass clarinets. Mellits’s Groove Canon, Mara’s Toys, December and Groove Machine from his work Revolution will be performed by the Siskiyou Saxophone Orchestra. Composer Marc Mellits is one of the leading American composers of his generation, and is often considered a miniaturist, composing works that are comprised of short, contrasting movements or sections. His music is eclectic, all-encompassing, colourful, and always has a sense of forward motion.
The Siskiyou Saxophone Orchestra (SSO) is renowned in the saxophone world for their commitment to expanding musical possibilities. Tours of the SSO have included Asia, Europe and Mexico. As the guests of the Longkou Jingsheng Musical Instrument Co., the SSO performed at the China Music Trade Show in Shanghai and at the northern seaside resort city of Yantai. The Cascade Clarinet Consort (CCC) and SSO have performed with guest artists Edmund Welles and Globe Saxophone Quartet as well as live on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Green Show, Britt Festival, Oregon Music Educators’ Conference and the KTVL-Medford Channel 10 Morning News. They were honored by being selected for a performance at the XVth World Saxophone Congress in Bangkok, Thailand and in 2012 a consortium of the SSO opened for Branford Marsalis at the XVIth World Saxophone Congress in St. Andrews, Scotland.
The local and internationally recognized Siskiyou Saxophone Orchestra attracts students from all over the world and is led by Yamaha Performing Artist and Professor at Southern Oregon University Rhett Bender. Go to saxophone.sou.edu for more information about saxophone and clarinet activities at Southern Oregon University. Professor Bender states that he is “particularly excited about this concert because it exploits the interlocking rhythms written by one of America’s most commissioned composers, Marc Mellits. His music for saxophone and clarinet is an engaging musical journey.”
All tickets are general admission and are being sold through the Oregon Center for the Arts Box Office. The box office is located in the SOU Music Building, off South Mountain Avenue, adjacent from the Theatre building, which is currently under construction. OCA Box office hours are noon to 6 PM Monday through Friday. Tickets can be purchased with a credit card over the phone by calling 541-552-6348 or online at oca.sou.edu/box-office.
UNIVERSITY
COMMUNITY
During the Academic Year
Box Office
M thru F, 3 to 6 pm
(and one hour before performances)
541.552.6348
Oregon Center for the Arts
1250 Siskiyou Blvd
Ashland, OR 97520
541.552.6101
oca@sou.edu