The Hamilton College Orchestra will present a concert titled "BRAINSTORM! A Sense of Time" on Sunday, March 7, at 3 p.m. at Wellin Hall in the Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts. "BRAINSTORM!" is a concert format that the orchestra introduced to Hamilton last year, in which the orchestra explores a topic with connections to multiple disciplines, interspersing discussion with musical examples of each piece to be performed in order to illustrate how the issues raised are reflected in the music.
Touching on the fields of cognitive psychology, philosophy, physics, and astronomy, conductor Heather Buchman and the orchestra will explore how composers create and shape the perception of time. Included on the program are Bedrich Smetana's Die Moldau, Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question and John Adams' The Chairman Dances. The Ives piece will feature first-year trumpet player Brent Franklin.
Buchman, assistant professor of music, is also the conductor of the Hamilton College Brass Ensemble. She also directs the chamber music program and teaches courses in 20th century music. Buchman has recently conducted the Syracuse Society for New Music, and directed Monarch Brass, an ensemble of top professional women brass players, at the 2003 International Women's Brass Conference in Illinois. Buchman recently completed professional studies in conducting at the Juilliard School. She holds an M.M. in orchestral conducting from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Kenneth Kiesler, and a B. Mus. degree and a Performer's Certificate in trombone from the Eastman School of Music. She served as principal trombonist of the San Diego Symphony from 1988 to 1996. As a soloist she won prizes in the ARD International Music Competition in Munich, Germany, and the New York Philharmonic Young Artists Concerto Competition, and has commissioned and premiered several works for trombone.
Romantic Czech composer Bedrich Smetana (1824 - 1884) wrote Die Moldau as an orchestral work for the six-piece cycle titled My Native Country. The piece musically describes the course of the Moldau River from its source to the Delta and into the Elbe.
Charles Ives' most famous work, The Unanswered Question, is a miniature he called a "cosmic drama." The piece is a collage in three roughly coordinated, distinct layers. In the background a quiet and hauntingly beautiful chorale of strings represents, said Ives, "the silence of the Druids." Over that silence a solo trumpet proclaims, again and again, an enigmatic phrase representing "the perennial question of existence." In response to each question, a quartet of winds Ives called the "fighting answerers" runs around in search of a reply, becoming more and more frustrated until they reach a scream of rage. Then the trumpet proclaims the question once more, to be answered by silence.
The Chairman Dances is called a "foxtrot for orchestra" by composer John Adams. It was written in 1985 as a commission by the National Endowment for the Arts for the Milwaukee Symphony and first performed January 31, 1986 by the Milwaukee Symphony. This short work has become one of the most popular contemporary American pieces for orchestra.
This performance with the Hamilton College Orchestra is free of charge and open to the public. All seating is general admission. There will be a reception immediately following the performance. For more information call the Performing Arts box office at 859-4331 and leave a message.
