Breaking Barriers :: Making Art… This Might Get Messy
Art + Music
Classics Series Concert
FRI 25 JAN 2019 at 11AM
SAT 26 JAN 2019 at 8PM
Kentucky Center
BREAKING BARRIERS :: MAKING ART
ART + MUSIC Promises to be one of the highlights of the 2019 Louisville Art Season
Do you know the story behind the Russian masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition? The composer, Modest Mussorgsky, was inspired to write the music after seeing an exhibition of drawings and paintings created by his friend Viktor Hartmann.
Light – Sound – Taste
This concert “flips” the concept as our Music Director Teddy Abrams reached out to artists affiliated with the Kentucky College of Art + Design (KyCAD) and invited them to created new works of art based on a selection of musical classics. The Louisville Orchestra, with Teddy Abrams conducting, will perform the listed works as written. The artists will either create their time-based and site-specific artworks during the concert or present their work that was created in advance of the performances.
Eight artists have stepped forward to engage in this collaboration and the plans underway are shaping into an exceptional pair of concerts for Louisville audiences. Here’s a brief description of what to anticipate.
■ G.F. HANDEL: “Alla Hornpipe” from Water Music (4 minutes)
Mariam Eqbal, a Pakistani-American artist whose art has been seen around the world, will amplify conductor Teddy Abrams’ motions with moving projections that abstract the timing and form of the music into gestures and visual elements.
■ ROBERT SCHUMANN: Symphony No. 3 (“Rhenish”), Mvt. 4 (6 minutes)
Josh Azzarella, an explorer at the intersection of personal experience and history, will use depth mapping cameras to record and image the magnetic space between musicians, then process and amplify this data through a triangle oscillator giving “voice” to this unseen element of the concert experience.
■ IGOR STRAVINSKY: “Infernal Dance” from The Firebird (5 minutes)
Jace Stovall, a Louisville-based illustrator, is pioneering work that focuses on asexuality, identity, and intimacy. Illustrating a re-telling of the classic Russian tale, Jace presents an animation to reimage the relationships in The Firebird.
■ MAURICE RAVEL: “The Fairy Garden” from Mother Goose (4 minutes)
Ron Schildknecht, a Louisville-based award-winning independent filmmaker, reveals a Sleeping Beauty story of refugee children whose families live in migrant centers in Sweden. Tragically, many of these children have fallen into an unresponsive physical state diagnosed as “resignation syndrome” and emerge from their deep sleeping illness only when they understand that their families are safe in a new permanent residence.
■ BELA BARTÓK: Music for Strings. Percussion & Celesta, Mvt. 4 (6 minutes)
Ricardo Mondragon, a Chicago-based artist and composer, seeks to transform sound into light in an ingenious transfer of the orchestra’s performance through a custom algorithm. Watch for a 3-dimensional effect produced with the orchestra being washed in a color matrix projected onto a semi-transparent scrim. The artist controls the algorithm and effect in real-time.
■ CHARLES IVES: “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” from Three Places in New England (4 minutes)
Charles Rivera, a sound artist, composer, and musician, creates an “homage” to the composer by taking his creation of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” a sonic collage of disparate musical elements, and overlaying a new set of musical and sound elements over the original composition. Approved by the estate of Charles Ives, this is an extraordinary mingling of sound to create myriad fractal relationships.
■ MODEST MUSSORGSKY: Night on Bald Mountain (12 minutes :: Saturday performance only)
Taria Camerino, self-identified as a Gustatory Synesthete – able to experience taste through sound, has been a chef, confectioner, and an herbalist for her entire career. A battle with cancer brought a surprising new element to her creativity as sound and taste are now a shared sensation – an extraordinary experience she hopes to share with our audience by creating a tasting element for everyone to synchronize with listening to this performance.
■ MODEST MUSSORGSKY: Pictures at an Exhibition (35 minutes)
Anthony Schrag sports an international reputation as an artist, researcher and educator who seeks to build participation in the arts. Expanding the place of participatory artworks within the public realm drives Schrag to include people from around the world to share our performance through their own experience of this work whether through this live performance or listening to recordings or performing in any other version. There will be no visual element at the concert – just your awareness that hundreds of other people, young and old, are sharing your experience in some coordinated way through the curatorial efforts of the artist.
Top L – R: Charles Rivera, Ricardo Mondragon, Moira Scott Payne (KyCAD president), Teddy Abrams, Anthony Schrag, Ron Schildknecht Front L – R: Jace Stovall, Mariam Equbal, Lori Larusso (curator and project manager), Hannah Goodwin (assisting Ron Schildknecht), Josh Azzarella (PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Witzke)
The Kentucky College of Art + Design (KyCAD)
KyCAD is the only four-year independent college of art and design in the Commonwealth. With approval from the Kentucky Council on Post-Secondary Education to award a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art, KyCAD is now designing its future and creating exciting new goals to be a college that sees the city of Louisville as its campus. KyCAD welcomed its first class of students in January 2019 and is currently accepting applications for Fall 2019. For enrollment information or to make a donation to help further the education of KyCAD students, visit www.KyCAD.org
