New Music Festival adopts new format

It’s a new school year and the School of Music & Theatre has rolled out a new approach to the New Music Festival. Organizers Dr. Doug McConnell and Dr. Barbara Specht have moved away from the single-weekend format with numerous guests and performers, and instead, they are working major new music concerts into the thread of the entire performance year.

The first major new music concert is coming up on at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 25, when the Formosa Quartet will be on campus for a concert in Ohl Concert Hall.

”We still want new music to have a presence, but this is just a different model,” Doug said. “We really think this is going to be a super format,” Barb added.

The Formosa Quartet will perform works from a list of composers that will be new to our audiences, but that is part of the excitement, Doug said. Bringing their Taiwanese heritage to Heidelberg will be quartet members Jasmine Lin, Wayne Lee, Chen-Yen Chen and Deborah Pae.

For their Heidelberg concert, the Formosa Quartet will explore the connections between East and West, as well as between the lowbrow and highbrow. The first half of the concert includes works by living contemporary composers. Dana Wilson’s Hungarian Folk Songs is a direct adaptation of Hungarian music in its original forms; Shih-Hui Chen’s Fantasia on the Theme of Plum Blossom is influenced by Nanguan, a musical style originating in China’s Fujian province and now flourishing in Taiwan. The composer Lei Liang lends a new work inspired by the Amis, a tribe of Taiwanese aborigines.

The one exception to works by living composers will be the String Quartet No. 4 by the late Bela Bartók. “This is a landmark work in 20th century music that paved the path for today’s contemporary composers, but you rarely get a chance to hear it live in our part of the world. Listening to it on a CD is one thing; watching four players dig in with their instruments to play this very raw, earthy and percussive music is another, more exciting option,” Doug explained.

Prior to the concert, the quartet will host an informal session at 4 p.m. for students interested in learning more about building a music career.

The Formosa Quartet’s From Hungary to Taiwan is a great way to kick off the season. But it’s just the start!

Also scheduled this year as part of the new format will be a concert by pianist Alexander Malikov of Friday, Nov. 11. Malikov will be on campus as this year’s Montague Artist. In April, the School of Music and Theatre will welcome national and international composer and performer Dr. Mark Applebaum, a member of the music faculty at Stanford University. He’ll be a composer-in-residence, giving students access to him in the classroom as well as the concert hall.

Stay tuned for more details as the November and April artist visits get closer, and in the meantime, mark your calendars and plan to come to the first concert by rising stars The Formosa Quartet.