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Stravinsky and the Dance:

November 2009

Friday, December 4 10.00-12.00, Studio A, Dance Building

As a prelude to the Department of Dance’s restaging of Paul Taylor’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) at the Power Center (Feb 4-7, 2010), a panel of three dance-music presenters will examine Igor Stravinsky’s contribution to 20th-century performance. The first speaker, Professor Stephen Rush, will consider The Radicalism of Stravinsky’s Music. Professor Christian Matjias will then focus on The Evolution of ‘Le Sacre’ from Enfant to Etude. In the final presentation, Professor Angela Kane, dance department chair and Taylor scholar, will discuss Paul Taylor’s re-envisioning of ‘Le Sacre’ as a modern-day American morality tale.

Look for the complete story of the restaging of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) on our dance students by Ruth Andrien, former Paul Taylor Dance Company member who originated the role of The Girl, in the Fall 2009 Michigan Muse, due out just before Thanksgiving. This colloquium and the forthcoming performances of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal) have been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Music for Mobile Phones

November 2009

Georg Essl, new faculty member with a joint appointment at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance—Performing Arts Technology (PAT)—and Computer Science is making inroads into a brand new field: creating music with mobile phones.

Georg, who grew up in Austria, first got the bug when his physicist father bought a computer—a Commodore Vic-20—for the family in the mid-1980s. “I was just fascinated,” he says. By the time he was at Princeton working on his Ph.D., his focus was on computer music; four years ago it shifted to mobile phones. “It became obvious to me that these are good platforms to make noise with because they are great at playing and recording audio,” Essl says. “So I got on this trajectory of taking existing mobile phone technology and trying to see what you can do with them.” The phone can be played like a magic eye, turning light patterns in a room into sound, strummed like a stringed instrument, or—if the user blows into the microphone at the bottom—played like a wind instrument. Sounds can be altered by tilting the phone in different directions.

“Today’s cell phones provide more processing power in the palm of our hand than was every imagined at the dawn of electronic music,” says Mary Simoni, head of PAT. “Equipped with a microphone, speaker, and processing software, these devices have the essential characteristics of a musical instrument. The transformative work of Georg Essl could unlock unconventional modes of music-making as each person programs his or her cell phone to be a customizable musical instrument.”

Students in his class, Building a Mobile Phone Orchestra, will perform on December 9 at 8:00 in Britton Recital Hall. Because the speaker in the phone is too small for public performances, players wear a small canister-size speaker on each wrist. Don’t expect Mozart. But do come ready to hear the first small steps in a new field with still as yet unrecognized potential.

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