October 2012

Mon | 1 | MTA Composer Forum presents: Mark Harvey. Jazz Composing in the Key of Flexology. 5pm, MIT Lewis Music Library, 14 E-109, MIT Hayden Library Building. A reception will follow.

Mark Harvey will discuss his philosophy of flexology that allows for individual, collective, and conductor’s improvisation within complex structural frameworks.  He will also talk about music from his new CD Evocations that includes works on political and cultural themes.

Mark Harvey is a Lecturer in Music at MIT teaching jazz history, arranging, and composition.  He is a trumpeter, composer, conductor, and the founder/music director of the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra now celebrating its 40th season.  With the AJO, Harvey has released eleven CDs to international critical acclaim on the Leo, Nine Winds, and Aardmuse labels and may be heard on 20 other recordings including those with George Russell (Blue Note), Baird Hersey’s Year of the Ear (Arista/Novus), and soundtracks for the Treasures from American Film Archives series.  He has received MIT commissions from the Festival Jazz Ensemble, Wind Ensemble, and the Council for the Arts for the MIT+150 Convocation.  Other commissions include those from the Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Commissioning Project, the Organization of American Kodaly Educators, and the 15th Annual John Coltrane Memorial Concert. He has performed with jazz luminaries such as Geri Allen, Jaki Byard, Gil Evans, Jimmy Giuffre, Vinny Golia, Sheila Jordan, Howard McGhee, Sam Rivers, and Claudio Roditi.

 

Sun | 7 | MITHAS and Association for India’s Development Present: Birju Maharaj and company. 7pm, Kresge Auditorium. For tickets and information, contact mithastimes@gmail.com or (617) 258-7971.  He is the leading exponent of the Lucknow Kalka-Bindadin gharana of Kathak dance in India and a descendant of the legendary Maharaj family of Kathak dancers.

 

Th | 11 | Folk Music Lecture Demonstration. Alison McMoreland and Geordie McIntyre, Scottish ballad singers. 7:30pm, Killian Hall.  Free.

“Two of Scotland’s most passionate singers whose wealth of knowledge and experience of traditional song is legendary”
Living Tradition (2005).

 

Fri | 12 | Family Weekend Concert.  MIT Wind Ensemble; MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, Frederick Harris, Jr., Music Director. Four Countries and Five Decades of Jazz. This program features the Wind Ensemble in music from Russia, England, Australia, and America including Prokofiev, March, op. 99; Vaughn Williams, Rhosymedre; Gorb, Yiddish Dances; Grainger, Children’s March; Bernstein, Overture to Candide. The MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, celebrating its golden anniversary, will perform pieces from each decade of its history including works by Ellington, Mingus, La Porta, Sharifi, and others. 8pm, Kresge Auditorium.  Admission is free.

 

Sun | 14 | MITHAS Presents: Kala Ramnath and Vijayalakshmi, N/S violin jugalbandi.  4pm, Stata Center. For tickets and information, contact mithastimes@gmail.com or (617) 258-7971.  http://web.mit.edu/mithas/www/concerts.html  She has revolutionized the technique of playing the violin by taking this instrument so close to vocal music that today her violin is called The Singing Violin.

 

Mon | 15 | MTA Composer Forum presents: George Ruckert in The Making of a Raga.  5pm, MIT Lewis Music Library, 14 E-109, MIT Hayden Library Building. A reception will follow.

Sarodist George Ruckert, with virtuoso tablist Hindole Majumdar, will present a lec-dem on the making of a raga, which traces the newly composed raga Usha Kanra from its origins as a traditional ballad melody, “The Wife at Usher’s Well,” to its flowering as a many-faceted basis for raga performance.  5pm, Lewis Music Library, 14E-109.  Free.

 

 

Wed | 17 | MTA Composer Forum presents: Roger Reynolds. Resource and Outcome, an illustrated presentation involving a performance (Gabriella Diaz, violinist), prepared texts, and informal remarks on creative fuel and how it influences one’s work. Subject works: Kokoro (solo violin); not forgotten (string quartet); Work in Progress (multimedia orchestral work) on the writings of George Washington. 5pm, MIT Lewis Music Library, 14 E-109, (MIT Hayden Library Building). A reception will follow.

Roger Reynolds’ compositions incorporate elements of theater, digital signal processing, dance, video, and real-time computer processing, in signature multidimensionality. The central thread running through his career links language with musical space, and first emerged in the notorious music theater work, The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961-62). In addition to his composing, Reynolds’ writing, lecturing, organization of musical events and teaching have prompted numerous residencies at international festivals: Darmstadt, Music Today (Tokyo), the Helsinki Biennale, the New York Philharmonic’s Horizons ’84, the Agora (Paris), Proms, and Edinburgh festivals among them. In 1971, Reynolds founded the Center for Music Experiment at UCSD where he has taught for four decades. In 2011, he inaugurated an Arts activism program at the UC’s Washington Center. Whispers Out of Time for string orchestra earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Reynolds’ writing – beginning with the influential book Mind Models (1975), and continuing, most recently, with Form and Method: Composing Music (2002) – has appeared widely in international journals. The Los Angeles Times’ Mark Swed labeled him an “all-around sonic visionary.”  Reynolds’ music is published exclusively by C.F. Peters; the Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work in 1998: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/rreynolds/rreynolds-home.html

 

Fri | 19 | MIT Symphony Orchestra.  Adam K. Boyles, Music Director.  Swafford, From the Shadow of the Mountain; Bernstein, Suite from On the Waterfront; Dvorak, Symphony no. 9 in E minor. 8pm, Kresge Auditorium.  Admission:  Free in advance; $5 at the door. Advance Tickets at http://mitmta.eventbrite.com/

 

 

Sun | 21 MITHAS Presents: TV Sankaranarayan, Carnatic vocal.  4pm, Wong Auditorium.  For tickets and information, contact mithastimes@gmail.com or (617) 258-7971.  http://web.mit.edu/mithas/www/concerts.html

Sankaranarayanan an eminent and popular Carnatic vocalist (South Indian classical singer), known for his vibrant music.

 

Fri | 26 | Forum: A talk by Emma Dillon, a scholar of 14th c French music on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania.  The talk is sponsored by Ancient and Medieval Studies at MIT.  5:15pm, Rm. 14E-304.  Free.

A specialist in medieval music, sound and manuscripts, Emma Dillon’s research focuses on French musical culture from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Her work ranges widely in terms of repertories, sources, and methodological approach, and broadly speaking falls at the intersection of musicology, sound studies, medieval studies, and the history of material texts. She has published and presented on issues of transmission and reception of music in the material form of the book, on tensions between audible and inaudible meaning in the Old French motet, on the relationship between musical and non-musical sound, and on the sense of sound as depicted in prayer books. Author of Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330 (forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2012).  She is currently working on a series of essays and papers exploring the evidence for musical feeling and the emotional effects of sound in the later Middle Ages, and an edited volume on etymologies of medieval song.

 

Sat | 27 | Don Byron with the New Gospel Quintet and guests: Don Byron, clarinet, tenor saxophone; Carla Cook, vocals; Xavier Davis, piano; Jerome Harris, bass; Pheeroan akLaff, drums; and students from the Boston Arts Academy. 7:30pm, Kresge Auditorium.  Admission: $20; MIT students: Free; Other students: $10; MIT faculty and staff: $10. Tickets available at http://donbyron-at-mit.eventbrite.com

The Don Byron New Gospel Quintet, featured on Byron’s latest album Love, Peace, and Soul, is the newest of his musical adventures.  A groundbreaking clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, and arranger with jazz as his base, Byron, who interprets music by a widely diverse range of styles has now turned towards Gospel icons Thomas A. Dorsey, “the father of black gospel music” and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a one-of-a-kind singer, songwriter and star gospel recording artist.

 

Sun | 28 |MITHAS Presents Alarmel Valli, Bharatnatyam.  4pm, Kresge Auditorium.  For tickets and information, contact mithastimes@gmail.com or (617) 258-7971.  http://web.mit.edu/mithas/www/concerts.html

Alarmel Valli is the foremost exponent of the Pandanallur style Indian classical dance form of Bharatnatyam

 

Sun | 28 | Jean Rife, Harpsichord Recital. Frescobaldi and Further, a concert inaugurating MIT Music and Theater Art’s new Italian harpsichord by Owen Daly. Works of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) and his students Michelangelo Rossi (1601-1656) and Johann Jakob Froberger (1616-1667):  Toccatas, Partitas, and Capriccios.  4pm, Killian Hall.  Free.

Lecturer in Music at MIT Jean Rife is a harpsichordist and horn player who coaches ensembles in the MIT Chamber Music Society.  In 2004, she revived an interest in playing keyboard instruments.  Since then she has studied harpsichord with Peter Sykes, and has performed several full-length solo recitals.  In addition to performing with students and with the MIT Symphony Orchestra, she has played with professional musicians such as violist Marcus Thompson and oboist Peggy Pearson.

Ms. Rife has presented horn solo and ensemble performances in Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, South America and throughout the United States. She has recorded on Telarc, Telefunken, Titanic, Harmonia Mundi, Arabesque, the BBC Radio, WGBH, and Radio Suisse Romande. Her Yoga for Musicians workshops take her to festivals and universities all over the country.  She is assistant chair of chamber music at New England Conservatory and serves on the early music and mind/body faculty at the Longy School of Music.

 

Sun | 28 | Screening of a silent film with live music:
F.W. Murnau’s FAUST
with Ellen Harris, soprano,
and Martin Marks, piano.
7pm, Killian Hall.  Free.

 

 

 

Mon | 29 |MTA Composer Forum presents: Peter Whincop,
MIT Lecturer in Music, teaching Electronic Music Composition.  Whincop will provide an exposition of a few of his works involving text, or voice in a more abstract context, based on simple perceptual and algebraic precepts. 5pm,  MIT Lewis Music Library, 14E-109,  Hayden Library Building. A reception will follow.

 

Mon | 29 | Folk Music Lecture Demonstration. Jim Bollman, early banjos.  7:30pm, Killian Hall.  Free.

Bollman’s banjo collection ranges from 1840 through 1910, spanning the instrument’s pre-Civil War origins to its late-Victorian high-water mark as America’s most popular instrument.

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