Tag: Professor Wlodarski

First Year Seminar Student’s Videos Displayed to Full House

We wrote a post encouraging people to attend the Third Coast Percussion performance of John Cage’s work a few weeks ago and we hope some of you got to see the amazing spectacle that night.  The performance was great, but our eyes were especially focused on the four student produced videos that accompanied each piece.

Professor Amy Wlodarski tasked the students of her First Year Seminar to create short, documentary style videos that would help the audience understand the context around the following performances.  Each had a specific topic it focused on and the groups took different paths in how they styled the segments.  We have seen a lot of student produced videos but we were especially impressed with these.  Professor Wlodarski gave them an important project and the students understood that their audience wasn’t only their professor, but a real audience of over 200 people watching it live.  They took the assignment seriously and created entertaining and engaging videos that blended perfectly into the evening performance.

You don’t have to take our word for it, you can watch them yourself.

Music 102 end of semester performance of ‘John Cage’s Circus On (1979)’

We had the pleasure of working with Professor Amy Wlodarski again this semester and her class will be showcasing their work during an electronic performance open to the public. Sounds like a hoot and we hope a lot of people show up to enjoy the show!

On Thursday, April 28th, Music 102 will present their annual performances of John Cage’s composition, Circus On: A Means for Translating a Book into a Performance Without Actors, a Performance which is both Literary and Musical or One or the Other (1979). The students, in compositional teams of major and non-majors, have each selected a book to translate into a chance-determined musical soundscape (complete with original poetry) according to Cage’s meticulous score.

The four compositions will last ten minutes each and will be preceded by a short preface. They are electronic compositions, so please do not expect live performances. In some cases, the outcomes are dramatic and lively. In others, the outcomes are subdued and sparse. Laughter, outrage, dismissal, and fun are all appropriate responses. As Cage once famously said, “I would rather people laugh at my pieces than cry.”

The students have worked hard for three weeks to execute these compositions, including studying Cage’s writings and authoring a manifesto explaining all of their creative and aesthetic decisions. As such, the compositions are not random but highly-controlled sound spaces in which space is translated into time and events in the book into creative sonic forms according to objective or chance-determined criteria.

The performances will be held in Weiss 235 and will begin promptly at 1:30pm. Should you join us later, please slip in the back door of the classroom.

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