Eye Ear I Hear Concert Report

This speech is Karl Paulnack’s welcoming address for incoming freshman students. He addresses that music isn’t apart of arts and entertainment rather music is an invisible force that helps us piece ourselves together. Paulnack believes that music is an essential part of life and goes to prove it by telling his experiences with it. He describes the first moment he truly understood music and the impact it has on people. Paulnack portrays the day after 9/11 after he struggles to find any meaning in being a pianist. After a long time of questioning himself he observes the city and notices something. He sees that in this time of grief and sadness people are singing. From this he learned that music is a form of expression, it allows people to express their feelings when they have no other words to describe them. Paulnack goes on to describe what he says was the most important concert of his life. He and a friend were playing a concert at a nursing home. During their performance, one man began to cry, it was at that time Paulnack knew the man was a veteran. After Paulnack and his friend finished the piece, they announced that the piece they were playing was Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was a work

During a musical performance many elements to be looked are not easily recognized by the average critic. A musical performance has multiple interactions taking place between the music, text, performers, audience, and space that all can contribute to a great performance. Overwhelming majority of the audience does not realize so much can be looked at during a single performance. At a performance by the University of Maryland Marching Band I was able to analyze the Musical Sound, Contexts of the Performance, and Interpretation of the Performance.

He does not create scores with orthodox musical methods and his music can be unpleasant or even irritating to some; yet by using a technological process, he reveals a naturally occurring acoustic phenomena and demonstrates it an unforgettable physical form. In the simplest way one could imagine (play-record-play-re-record-repeat), Lucier successfully guides the audience to pay attention to listening itself, to sound itself, to the space that we stand in, to the effect that the surrounding environment may have upon us. Other composers may deliver emotions or opinions through their works, but Lucier manages to erase all these subjective judgements, triggers a self-reflecting thinking process and initiate a borderless experience that all audience shared

I believe that as a composer himself, his appreciation for music must be boundless. And to see that “most people only listen to music in a primitive way”, he is propelled to explain the process of listening and how to appreciate musical works.

On November twenty-ninth, I attended APSU Student Recital at the George and Sharon Mabry Concert Hall. The performance consisted of only three pieces, yet both were met with enthusiastic applause and praise. When I attended the performance I hear and seen exactly what I expected which were student performing amongst their peers. This particular performance was different because I never experience a student recital. I was very pleased by the performance I thought it was very entertaining and interesting.

Every time I hear about famous composers, like Bach or Mozart, the names themselves put me to sleep quicker than any anesthesia ever could. So, it was no surprise that I absolutely dreaded the idea of seeing a piece written by any of these composers. I attended Mozart’s requiem at the Seattle symphony, I grunted at the idea of paying $38 for something I wasn’t even interested in. How dare they charge an absurd amount for something that was written before time itself? I took my seat and looked out at the sea of older retired couples and couldn’t believe this would be my fate someday. Ludovic Morlot was conducting for the evening, I have never heard the name in my life and only learned of it from the magazine I was handed before taking my seat. Morlot is French born musician, and currently the music director for the Seattle symphony.

On the 27th of April, I attended an open rehearsal for the New York Philharmonic at the David Geffen at Lincoln Center. Going to the David Geffen Hall for the first time, I came with high expectations on the size of the place. The venue wasn’t as big as I thought it would be, but it was big enough for the standard orchestra size. The setting of the place as I entered was quiet and serene, with the spotlight on the orchestra and conductor Alan Gilbert. In order to fully enjoy the performance no phones or speaking were allowed when they performance went on. The audience followed this rule with conviction, and made it easier for a “new comer” like me to try to understand the pieces that were being played. One thing that impressed me with my fellow audience members was that fact that they were able to identify the pieces

I had never heard anything like pianist Andrew (Andy) Lee’s piano recital, which was performed in the University of North Florida’s (UNF) Fine Arts Center Recital Hall. This performance made me think of the Antonin Artaud, and how Lee’s performance was strange and unsettling. Before I presented my concretion to the class, I read from The Theater and it’s Double. Reading Artaud helped me make a connection between Lee’s work which is titled, November. Artaud writes, “We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not exist, and brings in into being” (13). The reason I made this association because I felt as though Lee was daring in creating a piece that had

The first chord was soft and low. He released control, letting the rational, overzealous part of his brain shut down as his fingers moved on instinct across the ivory keys. It was a simple composition, nothing more than an exercise to him. He improvised note after note and chord after chord, until the piece he was playing no longer resembled that on the papers in front of him. His eyes drifted closed as he lost himself in the sweet melody. All else could be, and was, forgotten. He felt as if he were floating, no longer tethered to the limitations of the flesh, but free to move and live and breathe as he longed to do. Here, in music, his soul was laid bare. All the pain and the longing and the love bubbling up inside his heart were poured out onto the smooth keys of the piano, free to flow without restraint.

Every semester, Dickinson College has a Noonday Concert series, in which Dickinson students perform musical pieces they have been working on for our community. The Noonday Concert on October 29, 2015 featured only a few performances that were all beautifully done. However, the one performance that truly left me in awe was Shucheng Yang’s rendition of Chopin’s Étude Op. 10, No. 9. Not only was Yang’s piece the only one of that concert that was not accompanied by a vocalist, but his work allowed me to truly use the skills I have learned in my music classes to develop a deeper appreciation of music. Yang’s demeanor as a pianist, his talent, and his attention to detail allowed him to transform Chopin’s piece into a piece all his own. I have a deep appreciation for Chopin, but I had never been able to see his pieces performed live before I came to Dickinson. The classes I have taken at Dickinson helped give me the language to interpret music, analyze performances, and finally understand why I am so passionate about this form of art.

On April 29th, 2016 the Yale School of Music with the Yale Phillharmonia had conductor Peter Oundjian as their season closer, which featured Motzarts Symphony No. 41 in C Major, “Juipiter”, and Hoslt’s “The Planets” as their featured pieces. When I first walked into the concert hall, I noticed the depth of the sound when people were talking. The sound seemed to echo even though people were talking in hushed tones. The sound seemed to vibrate off the walls just from pure conversation so I was excited to see what the pieces would sound like initially when the concert first started. I also noted the decent size of the concert hall. I thought it was going to be tiny, while it wasn’t huge it was a very good size and could hold a lot of people.

“The Art of Practicing is about art, about creating something fresh and genuine. In this approach, practicing is not so different from performing” (Bruser 11). The author tells the story when years ago, she was practicing for a long time and suddenly she started to focus on listening to the sound that was coming out of the piano rather than imagining what sound she wanted to hear. For the first time, she truly heard what she was playing. Ms. Bruser says that she felt free and spontaneous, just like if she were performing on a stage. We can all practice this sensation every day during our practice sections.

I am a musician and composer. My work allows me as an artist to use music as an inherent and universal means of communication to invoke my audience in a period of time on an emotional level. I choose music because I feel an image can be interpreted in a plethora of ways while music generally elicits a unanimous emotion that convey a theme instead of being restricted to one central focus. Bheetoven’s, Moonlight Sonata was written for a Countess Giulietta Guicciard whose beauty he said, reflected that of the moon. The musical composition envokes a sense of elegance and imperfection. Like that of an image of nature in a glass of water one could conclude deduce that Bheeetoven’s composition invoked beauty in both its radiance and imperfections.

I am a creature of sound, and as a teen wherever I travelled I would be accompanied by my best friend , my ipod , I would rarely be without my headphones and have a constant access to the Radio . Walking down the street, I frequently almost walk into telephone polls because I’m too busy paying attention to the noises emanating from my headphones, visually oblivious to the world around me.

As a child, I sat with young, fascinated eyes, engaged with the amputee pianist upon center stage. With mellow lighting, the Stienway and Sons reflected the most beautiful hues of gold upon the inner lid, soft and fluid in form. Dressed in a fanciful tailcoat, the one-handed musician remained motionless and reflective at his instrument as though it were whispering angelic secrets to him. Enchanted by his image, the rumble of cellos felt deep within my chest may have very well been the cries from my own mouth. Bittersweet emotion evolved as the soloist hung in the timelessness of sonorous strings, waiting to come forth with his own voice.