The upcoming season of the Tutunov Piano Series promises a spectacular start – a grand prelude of prelude music featuring a performance by internationally acclaimed pianist Andrey Ponochevny.
Learn more about the up-and-coming Dr. Alexander Gonzalez, such as his methods to create an environment of learning and creativity.
With football season just around the corner, pep bands everywhere are getting their chops ready for the big fall games. The annual SOU Raider Band Camp will hit the ground running with a one-week camp Sept. 16-21 under the direction of Bryan Jeffs and is seeking brass instrumentalists.
Southern Oregon University will observe the 50th anniversary of the SOU Music Recital Hall’s Worth Harvey Pipe Organ – and the history behind it – with a celebration and concert at 2 pm. on Friday, August 23. The massive and much-celebrated pipe organ itself will be at center stage.
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.
OCA
UNIVERSITY
COMMUNITY
The OCA Box Office Hours:
Tuesday – Friday
Noon – 6pm
And one hour prior to all performances
Email: boxoffice@sou.edu
Phone: 541.552.6348
Oregon Center for the Arts
1250 Siskiyou Blvd
Ashland, OR 97520
541.552.6101
oca@sou.edu