On Sunday, March 3, 2013, Encounter: with the music of our time presented the world premiers of Ph.D. dissertations by Tim Hambourger, Paul Swarzel, and Dan Ruccia. The packed house was treated to a wonderful evening of works performed by the New York-based Wet Ink Ensemble, who are in residence at Duke for the 2012-13 season; world renowned mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek from the early music vocal group Anonymous 4; members of the North Carolina Symphony; and other local musicians; conducted by Verena Mösenbichler-Bryant. You can read a fantastic preview of the concert from the Recess section of the Duke Chronicle here.
Excerpts from the performance are below.
Tim Hambourger's Last Wave Reached featured settings of poetry by former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. Hambourger writes of the work: "I love Kay Ryan's poems for their compact intricacy, for their quirky sense of rhythm and pacing, for the way her language rings with sparingly-sprinkled rhymes and hidden assonnances and alliterations. With Ryan a few simple understated sentences somehow crystallize perfectly into a single vivid image, like stray thoughts that just need a small nucleus to condense into a meaningful whole." This video features the third movement, "The Things of the World."
Paul Swartzel's Barbeque Man Unleashed: The Greatest Professional Wrestling Work of All Time, a piano concerto with Action Figure Photography by Gray Swartzel, tells the story of how Barbeque Man, Jr., gets his revenge on the evil Baron Banks Gentry. Swartzel composed the soundtrack using MIDI samples, creating an everchanging virtual orchestra of his own devising.
Dan Ruccia's Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons, sets excerpts from Christian Bök's Griffin Prize winning collection Eunoia. He writes that "the composition imbues vowels with esoteric, supernatural powers...which grace speech with the differentiation needed to produce meaning. They also bestow upon each movement its own unique character and temperament." This video is of the third movement, "Movement O: Frog, Pond, Plop (for Rogério Duprat)."
This performance was made possible through a Visiting Artists Grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts, and the generous support of the Music Department, the Program in Literature, and [dnme].
Department of Music