Concert Report
The New, Experimental, and Improvised Music Concert was held at the Laidlaw Recital Hall in Mobile, Alabama on November 1 from 7:30-9:00. The concert featured a mix of newly composed pieces, as well as experimental and improvised ones. There were eight pieces in total, performed by both students and professionals. The following report discusses the performers and their pieces, in sequential order.
John Goforth performed the first piece; he is a senior majoring in music and is the Presser Scholar of Music. He presented a new composition.
Goforth's piece is titled "Adam vs. The Monster." It was performed on trumpet; the piece is soft and slow-tempo and incorporates a percussive ensemble.
Jerry Alan Bush performed the second piece. He teaches piano performance and literature and is a professor at Piano Faculty at USA.
Bush's piece was composed by John Goforth. It is titled "Heron's Bay," and the piece displays many shifts in tempo and culminates in a forceful ending.
Rachel Moody, Brianna Smith, and Meghan Squier all performed additional pieces that were composed by John Goforth, written for trumpet and the computer.
The pieces performed by Moody, Smith, and Squier vary in style, but each explores the intersections between instrumentation...
Wright is a junior music major and he performed a new work, titled "Three Dances for Piano." The style of the piece is new, as the pieces were composed shortly before the program.
Wright's "Three Dances for Piano" is notable because each of the dances manages to refer to a different style of music. The style therefore shifts almost continuously, leaving the listener on edge. The piece begins with a choppy, staccato rhythm that gives way to a smoother feel as the piece progresses. The piece begins in the Romantic period, while the second shifts to a more contemporary, 20th century style. Finally, the piece ends by utilizing a Post-Minimalist style. Wright invokes many different composers for the piece, including Chopin and Lizst, Shostakovich and Stravinsky, and John Adams and Phillip Glass.
David Durant presented two new works for brass in the fifth installment for the program. The first is performed by Cam Alidor and is called "A Storm's a Comin." Alidor is a senior music major and a bass trombonist, and Durant composed the piece specifically with Alidor in mind.
The piece is a programmatic solo for bass trombone, and it tells the story of a fierce storm that builds off the coast of an unidentified…
