Most ensembles perform classical compositions by musicians from the 18th and 19th centuries. But the New Music Collective, an ensemble of Ohio State music students and faculty, takes a different approach.
The 25-member group performs a wide spectrum of modern contemporary music from the 20th and 21st centuries. The New Music Collective is performing its second free concert 8 p.m. Nov. 20 in Weigel Auditorium in Weigel Hall.
“The main thrust behind this was last year,” said David Tomasacci, general manager of the New Music Collective. “Myself and another doctoral student [Robert Lunn] were frustrated at the lack of a group or forum for more recent and newer music compositions.”
The New Music Collective formed at the end of Spring Quarter, 2009. The group’s first performance was on May 22.
“The first show was just Lunn and I programming a concert by ourselves with music from the last 50 years,” said Tomasacci, a graduate student in music theory.
Thomas Wells, professor of composition and director of sound synthesis studios at OSU, played a set of piano pieces at the debut show.
Interested in the project, Wells became the New Music Collective faculty adviser and artistic director.
“He was excited by our desire to address this lack of forum for new music,” Tomasacci said. “And the following quarter, we made it a regular event.”
The event will include two world premiers by OSU composers Anthony Vine and David Root. Vine, a third-year in composition, composed a 15-minute piece for a chamber ensemble of 23 musicians, titled American Poetic.
“It’s a sound environment composed of moments of ecstasies, which moves away from its standing as one thing to become another,” Vine said. “But none of the material really becomes anything.”
Vine drew inspiration from the word “poetics.” He said it is the continuous state of becoming, an action that transforms and continues the world.
He described his composition as similar to watching a Polaroid photograph develop.
“The hues and colors of the picture fluctuate and, in the case of this piece, a clear image is never materialized,” he said.
“In such a fast-paced, crowded world, the bravest thing is to be still,” Vine said. “Structures and plots of musical devices are irrelevant to the immensity of the textures to be absorbed.”
While writing American Poetic this summer, Vine said he kept in mind a sound environment approach of having the ensemble literally surround the audience.
“There will be instrumentalists in the front, the back and along the sides of Weigel Auditorium, where there are walls that musicians will be on top of playing,” Vine said.
There will also be eight boom boxes with cassette tapes playing an electronic part to all the music, Vine said. Some parts of the cassette tape will include Hank Williams, Guillaume de Machaut, traffic over a bridge, the hum of electric circuitry, human voices, television signals, breathing, sirens and the ambient noise of a swimming pool.
At 7:35 p.m., before the main program, Paragraph 2, a section from Cornelius Cardew’s “The Great Learning,” will be performed by six percussionists and 50 singers. Wells said the audience is invited to participate and sing.
“The whole piece is about eight hours long, and it’s in seven paragraphs,” Wells said. “As we go from concert to concert, we will perform one of those.”
Wells knew Cardew before he passed in 1981 and described the piece as a 30-minute religious experience with drummers playing loops of rhythm while singers compete over the drums.
The event will also feature guest composer Per Bloland from Oberlin College, with a performance of his piece “Clouds of Oran” and Giacinto Scelsi’s piece “Okanagon,” a work for harp, contrabass and tam-tam.
