UMS Student Blog

Feb 9 "Blues at the Crossroads" at Hill Auditorium

2011-03-03T18:48:00.004-05:00

The expression "Blues at the CrossRoads" obviously has two separate meanings. This clever title for the event referred simultaneously, I suppose, to both the past and the present of the blues. On the one hand, given that the event was a tribute to the great delta bluesman Robert Johnson, the "crossroads" of the title was a reference to the celebrated mythology that has grown up around Johnson: that he is reputed to have met the devil at the crossroads and struck a bargain with him, dying early in exchange of acquiring the ability to play the guitar so prodigally in such a short period of time. (Here is Ann Arbor's own John Sinclair performing his poem "The Crossroads" about this legend -- although John Sinclair wasn't part of the HIll Auditorium event, blues and Ann Arbor cannot be mentioned in the same breath without thinking immediately of John Sinclair!) But "crossroads" also have another meaning; they represent possibility and choice, the ability to veer off into a new direction. A concert that gives itself over to celebrating "blues at the crossroads", then, signals through its very title that it is interested not so much in preserving the music as if it were frozen in time, as it is in being open to new directions and possibilities even as it pays homage to the past.

This dual celebration of old tradition and new possibility was well expressed in the roster of the event's musicians. On the one hand, there were the canonical bluesmen, grand old men of the tradition, its legends: the 95-year-old David "Honeyboy" Edwards and the 79-year-old Hubert Sumlin. On the other hand, there were also Todd Mohr (of Big Head Todd and the Monsters), the guitarist Steve "Lightnin' " Malcolm and the drummer Cedric Burnside, the grandson of the great Mississippi bluesman R.L. Burnside. While several blues standards associated with Robert Johnson -- such as (of course) Crossroads Blues, were interpreted by the evening's performers, and such blues standards as Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago" were sung, there was also ample room, especially by the likes of Todd Mohr and his bandmates Squires, Nevin and Lawton, for a more contemporary, experimental, rock-music-inspired blues sound as well. (Interestingly, the review of the event by annarbor.com is scathingly critical of this aspect of the concert, opining that the insertion of a more contemporary sound into the event represented a lack of authenticity. I disagree -- I think it is much more interesting to "mix it up" as the event did, to have the old and the new sound share the stage and rub shoulders, so to speak.)

Laurie Anderson's _Delusion_

2011-02-08T23:03:00.009-05:00

When Laurie Anderson talked to a large and expectant audience at the Michigan Theater on Thursday January 13, before her performance at the Power Center the following weekend, it must have clear to everyone present how original she was in her thinking --- and how the promise of that originality of thought is translated into her out-of-the-box performances. Two of the things that she said in course of her talk at the Michigan Theater especially struck me.

The first concerned scale: she said that while digital art (like the multimedia performances she has become famous for) is increasingly more convenient to create using computers, what this kind of work lacks is a sense of scale. Mentioning that she started her artistic career as a sculptor, she said that that early training had ingrained in her a respect for scale, because sculptors work directly with physical material in three dimensions. What she is trying to do with her multimedia performances now, she said, was to attempt to introduce a sense of scale. Perhaps one way of thinking about this is that she is trying to mingle reality with virtuality.

The second comment made by Anderson at her Michigan Theater talk that struck me had to do with her statement that she was tired of the production of more and more conventional artifacts in the name of art. This, one suspects, has probably made her turn to multimedia performances, for performances are not artifacts: rather than commodities, they exist ethereally, only in performance. Her impatience with conventional artifacts found yet more expression in her talk when she decried how used we have gotten to staring at rectangular screens all day: the computer screen, the television screen, and even the screen on which a film is projected, are all variations of the same boring rectangle, after all. That she is trying to get beyond this is apparent in Delusion, in which there are at least three oddly shaped "screens" onto which images are projected: a crumpled-looking screen, another which is non-rectangular, and even, oddly enough, a curiously undefinable object that looks somewhat like a love seat, on which, in fact, Anderson appeared to sit during parts of the performance.

If parts of Delusion, with its often surrealistic imagery, stream-of-consciousness narrative, and Anderson's adoption, from time to time, of the baritone voice of her male alter ego, Fenway Bergamot, might have seemed bewildering and disjointed to the audience at times, it perhaps helps to think of the performance, as Jenn McKee writes in annarbor.com, as "a collection of some of Anderson’s most vivid dreams." Some comments by Anderson about the show, which were published in the Metro Times a few days before the Ann Arbor performance, are also quite insightful in trying to grasp what she was trying to do in the show, and why.

TED Talks Music!

2011-01-12T11:40:00.003-05:00

If you've never heard of the TED talks, go to Google and check them out. You can find a short, intellectual discussion on nearly any topic imaginable, and I promise you will leave feeling enriched or at the very least entertained.

Some fellow bloggers just posted this list of 20 Incredible TED talks for Both Music Students and Lovers alike*.

Click on the link you can listen to talks by musical superstars (Eric Whitacre and Bobby McFerrin both have their own piece), well-respected musical therapists, and multicultural artists.

Enjoy!

Sarah Bichsel
UMS Student Committee President

*Special thanks to Florine Church and company for the link*

Handel’s Messiah

2010-12-29T03:07:00.010-05:00

Something really special about this year's performance of this long-standing Ann Arbor tradition, Handel's Messiah by the UMS choral union, was that the principals of the event all shared a strong connection with Michigan. Three of the four soloists (Caitlin Lynch, Nicholas Phan, and Jesse Blumberg) were actually UM alums., while the fourth, Meredith Arwady, was also a Michigan native -- a resident of Kalamazoo. Two UM music professors were also prominently featured: Edward Parmentiari on the harpsichord, and Jerry Blackstone, conductor and music director.

Handel's Messiah has a tripartite structure. Concerned as it is with the story of the "messiah", that is, Christ, Its three sections correspond to "the prophecy", "the passion" and "the resurrection", with the most intense part of the piece consisting of the "Hallelujah" section just before Part II. Traditionally the audience joins in the chorus during the singing of this "Hallelujah" section, and that was the case, too, in this performance. In fact, the University Musical Society actually made the music available to audience members to sing to. The text (oratorio) of Handel's Messiah is actually drawn from various verses of the Bible. The "Hallelujah" sections, for example, are taken from Revelation 19: 6, Revelation 11: 15 and Revelation 19: 16. (By the way, the British Library has made the original score to Messiah, in Handel's own handwriting, available on the Web.)

The stage of the Hill Auditorium was beautifully decorated, with a mass of white poinsettias near the front of the stage and a large wreath hanging from the cavernous ceiling. The red color of the harpsichord was a nice touch.

In performing a work like Handel's Messiah, the elements of the dramatic in the work have to be carefully balanced against the element that expresses piety. This performance, overall, managed to do that well.

"Sankai Juku" last Sunday, Oct 24

2010-10-29T14:42:00.004-04:00

I had attended Sankai Juku's last performance in Ann Arbor back in 1999, and, ever since then, I had been enthralled by the dance form of butoh, of which Sankai Juku is a proponent. Last Wednesday, I went to attend the film screening at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, in which two films about butoh, both of them dating from the 1960s or 1970s, were screened. (You can see excerpts from one of the two films, Dance of Darkness, online). So, I walked into the Power Center on Sunday with some familiarity with butoh asw well as some expectations about what the performance was going to be like.

My expectations were both confirmed and belied in interesting ways. The performance that I had seen in 1999 had been much less lyrical and much more minimalist -- and, in that sense, with much more in common with butoh's early years of 1960s-1970s. That performance, with its slow writhing gestures and guttural cries that seemed to approximate cries of pain, had put me in mind of what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life". Christina Mcfee writes about this notion in a powerful passage:

'Bare LIfe' -- A Lyrical and Even Ecstatic Dimension

What is "bare life"?

This question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being.

Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. It is the part of life that is absolutely exposed.

But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to freedom of bare life for new and unexpected possibilities (in human relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, to the world in which we live).

Butoh as a dance form is, I think, expressive of this "sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being". Clad in minimal, raglike dresses and with a layer of white chalk-like paint covering their entire bodies, butoh performers tend to look anonymous on stage, with all indications of individuality stripped away: life at its most elemental. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza remarked (in 1677, in his book Ethics) that "we (still) do not know what the human body is capable of, nor the limits of what it can do." Thinking of butoh makes me think of that remark, because the practitioners of butoh, with their slow, mindful movements, and their emphasis on the physicality of the body and the mystery of its existence, seem to be exploring the outer limits of the possibilities of the movement of the human body.

Sankai Juku's performance both reinforced this ethos of butoh and simultaneously went against its grain. Titled "Hibiki: Resonance from Far Away" -- you can view UMS's program booklet about the event here -- this dance performance was uncharacteristically "pretty" (in a conventional sense) than one tends to expect in a butoh performance. (Jann Parry, writing in The Guardian newspaper of the U.K., has called 'Hibiki' "designer Butoh for new-age audiences," accusing it of having "little in common with the Japanese 'dance of darkness' that developed after the Second World War," and stating that "Sankai Juku have become the style queens of the Butoh performance circuit." So,well... is this diatribe justified? Have Sankai Juku really sold out, or sold their soul, in order to become a crowd-pleaser, betraying the uncompromising attitude of butoh as originally formed in the countercultural cauldron of 1960s Japan?

I think that the answer is both yes and no. The Guardian's reviewer does make a good point in pointing out that 'Hibiki' is too prettified, too mainstream. (But then, had Sankai Juku not acquired some degree of mainstream status, would the UMS even have brought it to Ann Arbor? Or afforded to? Organizations like the UMS do have to depend on ticket sales, and hence on audience tastes.) That aside, I do not think that the bareness and minimalism of butoh as it originally arose was necessarily missing from the 'Hibiki' performance. It was still there, with other layers and other influences having been overlaid on it and enmeshed with it. This was very apparent, I thought, in particular in a sequence within the performance in which the four or five performers would crouch very close to the ground, in almost a fetal position, and then abruptly rise up, draw themselves to their full height, and raise both hands upwards as if reaching for the sky, only to lie down again and crouch. Arguably, both the bareness that is elemental to butoh and the almost balletic, conventionally beautiful, lyricism of more conventional dance forms were present in that gesture. The two complemented each other, and together they managed to suggest, I thought, the complexity of man's being in the world: caught between animality and godlikeness, always pulled groundward by gravity but also always aspiring towards the sky in leaping exaltation. Man is, the performance seemed to say, a liminal creature caught forever between a nether world of despairing animality and an outer world of exquisite sublimity that always remains just beyond our grasp.

So too with the vase-like objects up near the proscenium's upper reaches, dripping a blood-red liquid in slow, spaced-out drops at a time, collected in a huge circular bowl around which the performers stood. From one point of view, it could be thought painfully kitschy, and perhaps it was. But it spite of coming in arguably New Age accouterments, it also reminded me of the fierce beauty of a famous passage from Aeschylus' Agamemnon:

And even in our sleep
pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us

(Agamemnon, 179-183)

Perhaps this is all part of what Sankai Juku meant by the phrase "resonance from far away" in the title of the performance: not just elementality but resonance, with all human experience -- which perforce must include not only the strange and the unconventionally beautiful, but also the conventionally beautiful; for that, too, is part of human experience.

Danilo Pérez and Baaba Maal (on different days)

2010-04-11T02:04:00.003-04:00

I'm going to combine my comments on the concert by Danilo Pérez and his ensemble, from Thursday, and the performance by Baaba Maal and his troupe, from Saturday, into this one and the same blog post.

While, during the first century of its existence, the University Musical Society almost exclusively hosted concerts of classically oriented Western music, in the last two decades it has been sponsoring more and more events with an increasing international flavor. In part, this is probably in recognition of the fact that UMS's audience, much like the demographics of the country as a whole, has grown more cosmopolitan and diverse, and continues to become more so. The concerts by the Panama-born Danilo Pérez whose group plays jazz with an international orientation and the Senegalese musician Baaba Maal, who plays West African music of an Afro- pop orientation that builds on traditional African music but is also inflected with Congolese, Afro-Latin and blues influences, illustrated this cosmopolitan trend that the UMS has been following.

First, the Danilo Pérez concert. Unfortunately, I had left my hearing aids at home (I remembered them only when I got on the bus for the concert and by then it was too late to go back and get them) and so I was somewhat handicapped as I was not hearing very well. Fortunately, the Hill Auditorium acoustics are very good, and the performers were all miked (a controversial issue, if you check out the posts at umslobby.org -- but which worked well for my situation).

I had been very curious to see Rudresh Mahanthappa, the saxophonist with Danilo Pérez, as he has been making big waves recently, especially in his ensemble work with Vijay Iyer. (Iyer and Mahanthappa will be playing together next Fall under UMS's auspices). Being as I am from India myself, I was especially curious to hear Mahanthappa play, as I had read that he brings Indian classical music, especially Carnatic music, influences to his playing. Actually, during one piece during Thursday's performance, Mahanthappa's saxophone seemed to provide the organizing principle and it definitely seemed inspired by a Indian classical musical sensibility.

I had been a little less enthusiastic about how the concert had been billed by UMS as "Twenty-first century Dizzy". That made the concert seem derivative: while Dizzy Gillespie was a great musician, jazz is ever-changing and forward-looking; so, to confine a musical description to the constraints of a "big name" from the past seemed somewhat like a marketing gimmick and also unfair to the musicians. Danilo Pérez is a superb musician in his own right, and to associate Dizzy's name with the concert in the way it was marketed seemed to me a trifle odd. In any case, Danilo Pérez played very well, and so did the other musicians, who all have very varied backgrounds.

I would suggest to UMS, though, that the Power Center (or even the Michigan Theater) might have been a better venue for jazz concerts of this kind than the Hill Auditorium. First of all, all too many seats remained empty at the capacious Hill for this concert, making the musical energy seemingly dissipate somewhat, whereas, in a venue like the Power Center or the Michigan Theater, the same size of audience packed into the smaller space of those venues would likely have contributed to a much more contagious and electric musical energy of the kind that feeds off a full crowd.

Finally, I have to report a problem that really drives me up the wall: too many people seemed to be checking their ipods or phones during the concert. Although the UMS is meticulous about asking people to turn off their cellphone ringers, maybe it should also ask people to desist from checking emails or otherwise using their phones or ipods during concerts, as the backlit blue screens of these devices happen to be very distracting to the people sitting in the row behind the people using them. Are people's attention spans so short these days that they cannot even last a concert's span without feeling compelled to check their email?

Next, let's talk about the Baaaba Maal concert of last Saturday. After Nomo, the African-music-inspired world music fusion band originating from Ann Arbor opened for them with a solid performance, Baaaba Maal and his entourage of Senegalese musicians, each wearing a flowing African robe of a different color, took the stage. The ever-smiling Baaba Mal, with his serene and melifluous voice, singing and speaking inspiring music and words calling for African unity and advancement, was a regal presence, and the audience participation was overwhelming. It seemed that a large body of the West African disapora in the South-Eastern Michigan area had turned up for the concert, many of them dressed in traditional costume, and kept climbing up on to the stage to dance energetically at every opportunity that presented itself. During the concert, Baaba Mal sang mostly in an African language that, I believe, was probably the Pulaar language. (The one song that I recognized was his song "Television" from his recent album. In course of the concert he introduced Mansour Seck, his bandmate, a blind Senegalese musician who has been a friend and influence on him since his earliest days as a musician, and who provided the backing vocals at this concert. The very tall Momadou Sarr, playing percussion both western and traditional, and Massambla Diop playing the talking drum, were also bundles of coiled musical energy.

On Chekov and Translating: Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersberg’s Uncle Vanya

2010-03-31T15:23:00.005-04:00

Uncle Vanya is a play that drives literary critics crazy: there is no main character, there is little plot and many of the monologues make little sense. The play centers on the aged Professor Serebriakov (who isn’t the main character) and his relatives, who spend their time on the Professor’s country estate having rather complicated relations with each other and going through a “midlife crisis.” A realistically bittersweet portrayal of regrets about opportunities missed and lives wasted, it is also a play about the search to create a new life, one that will exist a hundred or two hundred years from now, when people will know how to be happy. And the fact that nothing happens except reminiscences, conversations, and attempts to find too late the happiness that slipped through one’s fingers – that is Chekov’s way of making his point. As the play goes on, the audience too feels the dull reality of the characters, and understands the madness of their desires. It is poignant – and yet heartbreaking – to watch the madness of people who have missed their chances or who (like Sonya, suffering from unrequited love) see their chances slip through their fingers and their dreams break.

The audience, however, seemed to find the Maly Drama Theatre’s performance of this “tragicomic masterpiece,” as it has been called, funnier that it was intended to be. A tragicomedy is something between a comedy (which means not that it’s supposed to be funny, but that everything will end “happily”) and a tragedy (where everything does not end “happily,” such as in the story of Oedipus). In short, it is a play whose ending is neither “happy” nor tragic, and that is not intended to be funny. There is nothing inherently amusing about Uncle Vanya trying to make up for the opportunity he missed years ago by courting Elena, for example, or in Sonya’s sometimes unreasoned actions due to love. Yet the audience laughed.

Perhaps the audience’s misinterpretation of the play was due in part to the overtitles; Russian being my first language, I was lucky enough to be able to understand the play in the original, however, I occasionally followed the translation - enough to realize both its inexactness and the difficulty of translating this play. A viewer will obviously not have time to ponder the nuances of a particular word or phrase as the play is going on, yet I found the overtitles inexact to the extent that they were misleading. Phrases were left out, the song sung by Doctor Astrov was completely different than the text in the overtitles…and the significance of some key phrases was lost. The Professor’s phrase about the necessity of “doing the deed,” for example, was not a sexual reference, but an ironic statement by somebody who has spent his life reading and writing to the hardworking people around him that they have been doing nothing and that they must start doing work; Elena’s response to Uncle Vanya’s vows of love, translated as “Your love…it makes me numb,” suggests in the original that Elena could be becoming blunt, numb, or stupid, and the emphasis seems to be on the idea that his vows of love make her unresponsive, blunt, withdrawn – she simply does not care, and his vows do not move her. These nuances are difficult to convey in a written translation, and even more so in overtitles, but I found myself disappointed that a greater attempt was not made to capture the essence of Chekov’s meaning.

In the end, however, the words were no more powerful than the lack of them. The agony, anguish and despair of the characters (so brilliantly portrayed by this troupe of actors) and the tense moments of silence (possibly the director Lev Dodin’s addition) were as full of feeling as the powerful speeches, and required no translation to convey the pain of people who are searching for a way to make the world happy one day, even though their dreams of happiness were thwarted and their hopes melted into mist.

By: Ana Klimchyskaya
UMSSC Member

Uncle Vanya

2010-03-29T14:02:00.007-04:00

A performance of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya by the Maly Theater of St. Petersburg

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

As I was walking into the Power Center, I saw my housemate Ilya, a UM graduate student who is originally from Estonia and speaks Russian fluently, buying a ticket at the box office. Ilya wised me on to the fact that the Maly Theater of St. Petersburg is considered to be the premier interpreter of Chekhov in the world. I had an idea that they were famous, but I didn't know that they were that famous.

So, it was with expectations raised sky-high that I walked into the auditorium. (Incidentally, when I had picked up my tickets from the Mendelssohn Theater box office, the nice people at the desk had handed me a leaflet that said that, at the request of the Maly Theater, the production was supposed to begin exactly at the listed time and that everyone should be in their seats accordingly. I had been so intimidated by this injunction that I made sure to take my seat before the hour of 8:00 pm struck -- but the play, strangely, did seem to start at Michigan time after all. In any case...)

The first thing to notice about this production was that the production was much longer than I expected. Uncle Vanya is a very short play -- on the printed page, that is. I expected it to be over very quickly, but the Maly Theater had found out, it seemed, a way to wring duration out of Chekhov's habitual brevity of style.

In psychobabble-speak, one could describe Uncle Vanya, perhaps, as a play about mid-life crises. At the age of forty-seven, Vanya wakes up to the reality that he has been a failure and that none of the dreams he had as a youth have come to fruition. The melancholy note of the play derives from Vanya's realization that he had dedicated his life to selflessly serving a man (the self-important and narcissistic professor Serebryakov) who feels nothing but callous disregard for him. Vanya is a tragicomic figure -- we both laugh at him and feel pity and terror at his fate, knowing in our hearts that Vanya's destiny is, after all, a common human condition that could well befall ourselves, too, in one way or the other.

It is this sense of tragicomedy that is very difficult to pull off successfully, and in doing which the Maly Theater succeeded quite well. The tragicomedy demands quicksilver transitions of mood, as the play seems constantly to turn on a dime between sly humor and high tragedy. Avoiding the twin pitfalls of the banality of cheap laughter and the mushiness of shallow sentimentalism, the Maly Theater production guided the audience with a firm hand through these mood swings almost like a matador leads the bull this way and that with nothing but minute movements of the cape, so that the audience kept snickering and guffawing at one moment and falling into a stunned and awe-struck silence at the end. And at the amazing conclusion of the play -- Sonya's heroic attempt to wrest dignity and meaning out of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that flesh is heir to, her impassioned, piercing and repeated cry of "Mi otdokhnyom" ("We will rest"), I had tears flowing down my cheeks.

Vladimir Nabokov (whom I always find very insightful on the topic of Russian literature) had this to say about his fellow country-man Chekhov, which describes chartacters like Astrov and Vanya in the play to a "t":

"[...]It is not quite exact to say that Chekhov dealt in charming and ineffectual people. It is a little more true to say that his men and women are charming because they are ineffectual.

"But what really attracted the Russian reader was that in Chekhov's heroes he recognized the type of the Russian intellectual, the Russian idealist, a queer and pathetic creature that is little known abroad [...] Chekhov's intellectual was a man who combined the deepest human decency of which man is capable with an almost ridiculous inability to put his ideals and principles into action; a man devoted to moral beauty, the welfare of his people, the welfare of the universe, but unable in his private life to do anything useful; frittering away his provincial existence in a haze of utopian dreams; knowing exactly what is good, what is worthwhile living for, but at the same time sinking lower and lower in the mud of a humdrum existence, unhappy in love, hopelessly inefficient in everything—a good man who cannot make good. This is the character that passes—in the guise of a doctor, a student, a village teacher, many other professional people—all through Chekhov's stories ..."

I find Nabokov's emphasis in this passage on the Russian-ness of Chekhov interesting, in the light of how the Maly Theater succeeded in transcending the language barrier (the surtitles helped, of course, but they are never the whole thing) in communicating the essence of the play to a largely non-Russian-speaking audience.

"Beat the Donkey" with Cyro Baptista

2010-03-14T23:43:00.011-04:00

A performance by Beat the Donkey (Cyro Baptista and other musicians)

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

A few years ago I had the opportunity to listen to David Barsamian interview University of Colorado ethnomusicology professor John Galm about Brazilian popular music. In that interview, Professor Galm said something that I was reminded of by Cyro Baptista and Beat the Donkey's performance this past Saturday. Galm remarked in the interview that Brazilian popular music, in particular the music of the carnival, rests on a tremendous inventiveness. Since musical instruments can be expensive and often beyond the reach of common people, the masses in Brazil often simply improvise, Galm said, making music out of whatever is at hand. This has given rise, Galm said, to a quite wide variety of quite unorthodox and wildly inventive instruments, some of them even improvised from domestic utensils or appliances such as pots and pans, shelves or wooden crates. It is a matter of making a virtue out of necessity, so to speak.

In its performance, Beat the Donkey led by Cyro Baptista seemed to have taken this Brazilian tradition into a flight of whimsy that seemed to make the show part vaudeville, part a world music pageant, and part a fanciful caper. Over there in the [art]seen blog, Krithika has already done an excellent job of describing the concert, and so I won't give you a blow-by-blow account. Rather, I will be somewhat impressionistic and simply share my general thoughts about the concert.

Cyro Baptista reminded me somewhat of the great Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Tom Zé, well-known for creating music with the sounds of blenders, floor polishers, radios, typewriters and vacuum cleaners during the 1970s. Zé (and to a lesser extent, Zé's fellow artists in the Brazilian "Tropicalia" movement, too) were harkening back to the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade's influential "Cannibalist Manifesto" of 1928, a key text of Brazilian modernism, in which Andrade had compared the postcolonial re-appropriation, in places such as Brazil, of European/North American cultural symbols, to "cannibalism". The idea is that we postcolonials cannibalize (literally consume) western cultural artifacts, and in doing so we create something new out of them, very different from their originally intended use. The appearance, at one point in Beat the Donkey's performance, of a giant Coca-Cola crate (used as a percussion instrument) is a gesture, i think, towards this "cultural re-appropriation."

After the performance, I had a very lively and interesting discussion with a friend over coffee at Panera's. She said -- and I think she is correct -- that a concert like this can all too easily become kitschy, an exercise in mere showmanship and crowd-pleasing -- and in pandering, with its profligate and over-stumulative excess -- to us, the perpetually attention-deficient denizens of the cyberculture era, who are likely to lap up such pageantry and consume with goggle-eyed ecstasy, the globetrotting bricolage of world-music samples seemingly thrown together in a randomly jumbled, decontextualized, fashion. But I think that Cyro Baptista is well aware of this, and, with more than a hint of self-parody, he is putting on this performance in what is actually an ironic way. Very postmodern, in fact. He is, I think, while not denying the cacophony and kitschiness of modern existence, challenging its meaninglessness and actually humanizing it by performing it with fellow musicians with such joy and intensity.

In fact, something that Cyro Baptista says in one of his interviews is very revealing, I think, of how he envisages this kind of performance as, in a small way, an act of resistance:

Interviewer: Music brings together people in harmony…

Cyro Baptista: Yes. When I started to get together ‘Beat the Donkey’ I had this idea and I call this percussionist and I say, ‘I want to have music and dancers all together and do this….’ And he says, ‘Man. Why do we need ten people to do that? Me and you, we can do this with machines…’ In a time like we are passing now we need to do things together …… to see if we can transform the energy…. I wake up now and I see this stupid man who wants to have a stupid war and I think ‘What the f*ck…Why?’ This guy is wasting his time…I barely have time to do things during the day like composing, doing this and that, taking care of the kids, and how does this guy have time during the day to make a war? Does he not have anything else to do?

Bela Fleck and umsLOBBY

2010-02-24T13:06:00.007-05:00

Last Wednesday was quite a night to remember, as Bela Fleck brought the sound of Africa to Ann Arbor with his Africa Project, in which he traced the roots of the banjo. He brought different groups from Africa, each representing a form of music or playing musical instruments that influenced the creation of the banjo.

I was working and thus stepped into Hill after the concert had begun. Upon entering, I heard the virtuosic sound of Anania Ngoliga playing the ilimba, which is a type of thumb piano. I didn't realize until he was walking off stage, that he was blind! A friend of mine later referred to as "the Ray Charles of thumb piano," a great description!

Anania Ngoliga with his ilimba

After Ngoliga's performance, we switched gears as Bassekou Kouyate, one of the masters of ngoni, stepped on stage. Kouyate and his band, many of whom are family members, played all 4 types of the ngoni, which is a stringed banjo or guitar like instrument. At the Arts and Eats event prior to the performance, the guest speaker compared the ngoni to the saxophone family, with an alto, tenor and bass.

The several different sizes of ngoni

Kouyate played "the soprano" version, as he led the group like a rock star, with his leg rested the amp, strumming virtuosic melodies even Zeppelin would be jealous of. The atmosphere of Hill during the performance was much more like that of a rock concert than of a classic world music concert, with high energy and lots of laughs.

Bassekou Kouyate with Bela Fleck

The rest of the concert consisted of a blending of the many different styles of music we heard that night. An impressive and once in a lifetime kind of show.

But the performance wasn't the only thing UMS had going on that night. It was also the kickoff event to our new website, umsLOBBY.org, which takes the best parts of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Blogs and brings them together to create a social media hub all about the art and culture of UMS. And the whole idea is simply to get people to talk. In addition to the online portion of umsLOBBY, we will have events like the one at Bela Fleck, where we simply want to get people to talk about what they are experiencing.

If you were at the concert, you may have seen the walking highlighters, decked out in green and orange, all of whom were all members of UMS staff team. As one of those highlighters, I wandered the crowds chatting with people about what brought them to the concert, their expectations and their experience. When talking to one group of students, they told me they only came because their friend had tickets and couldn't use them, so they were free and had no idea what to expect. Another group of students overheard them say that, so jumped into our conversation and told them all about Bela Fleck and the Africa Project. A much more knowledgeable bunch than I, I simply listened and learned. That experience was the epitome of umsLOBBY, turning this performance into a social experience as well as a cultural one and into one heck of a Wednesday night.

Luciana Souza with Romero Lubambo and Cyro Baptista

2010-02-15T00:12:00.005-05:00

A performance by Luciana Souza with Romero Lubambo and Cyro Baptista

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

In 2002, the New York Times described Luciana Souza as "omnicultural". In her interview with Terry Teachout, Souza said, "People say, 'Oh, you're so eclectic,' and I usually say that I really don't look at styles anymore... I recognize, well, it's classical music or contemporary this or jazz that, or Brazilian, but I'm not worried about that... Let people decide for themselves what I am, and if they don't like it, they can get their refund on the way out.'' Teaming up with guitarist Romero Lubambo (who was already in Ann Arbor last Fall, performing with Gal Costa) and percussionist Cyro Baptista, Souza gave exactly this kind of easygoing and eclectic performance.

While some, such as the critic John Kelman, have characterized her singing style as "new bossa nova", Souza also regaled the audience with a few old and classic bossa nova standards. The ones that I think I recognized (although I am not completely sure) were Dindi and Águas de Março ("Waters of March"). Mostly, however, she engaged in a delectable and playful musical conversation with Lubambo and Baptista.

A description of the evening will not be complete without a few special words about Baptista, whom Relix Magazine has described as possessed of an "unbridled imagination, intense musical knowledge, skill and lust for sheer joy". Playing instruments that belong to the traditional drum set, as well as what looked to be traditional Brazilian percussion instruments (including gourds), and in addition playing bizarre-looking instruments that seemed to have stepped out of the imaginarium of a febrile musical genius, Baptista engaged in some intense percussion, smiling and thrusting his salt-and-pepper beard to and fro, looking somewhat like a mad scientist let loose in a music-maker's workshop.

2010-02-07T02:19:00.016-05:00

The Bad Plus

A jazz performance by The Bad Plus

written by a member of the University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee

Before attending the actual concert this past Friday, I went to the UMS educational event, "Music of The Bad Plus", which was held on Tuesday, February 2 at the UMMA Commons. In this educational event, UM jazz professor Andrew Bishop gave a presentation on The Bad Plus' music. He explained that what the group performs is an interesting synthesis of three distinct genres, whose distinctions they like to blur: jazz (of course), and popular music, and (more unexpectedly) European art music. Several UM Music School students were on hand to punctuate Prof. Bishop and his collaborators' talk with live musical demonstrations.

The Bad Plus actually presented two separate concerts on Friday February 5, both at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater in the Michigan League. I attended the second of the two concerts. From friends who had attended the first concert, I heard that they had played arrangements of pop songs (something which they are famous for) in that concert, while in the later (9:30 pm) concert, which I attended, they played mostly their own compositions.

In his book The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond, the critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt writes that piano trios tend to come in two different flavors. Some piano trios are what Berendt calls "conversational" trios: the musical model in such a piano trio is that of a musical dialogue between the pianist, percussionist and bass player, with each taking turns to solo and respond to the other two. The other model of the piano trio is what Berendt calls the "power" trio, in which the three musicians are more invested in playing music simultaneously, creating a convergence of sound, rather than in taking turns solo-ing. The Bad Plus proved to be solidly in the "power trio" tradition, with its three musicians -- Ethan Iverson on piano, Reid Anderson on bass and Dave King on drums -- playing mostly together and feeding off each other's musical energy. It was a measure of how enthused the audience was by the musical fireworks, that it stood on its feet applauding rapturously with such intensity that The Bad Plus returned on stage to give not just one but multiple encores.

Finally, I have a suggestion for UMS. I think that the decision to have this performance at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater was an excellent one. The Mendelssohn Theater is ideally suited for intimate and edgy performances of this nature -- just as it was for the UMS performance by another edgy, avant-garde band, eighth blackbird, a couple of years ago. (I had written about that performance, too.) However, I think that the location of the University Museum of Art Commons for the educational events associated with the performance is not a good choice. This is the second UMS educational event at the UMMA Commons that I went to -- the other one was in connection with the Bill T. Jones performance -- and I had the same thoughts on both occasions. Firstly, the UMMA Commons space is too small. On both the two UMS educational/pre-performance events that I attended there, there were more people than the space could accommodate. If you must have the educational events there, perhaps you could at least get rid of the tables among the audience in the room, which just take up space and perform no useful function during the pre-performance event. Without the tables, you could accommodate more people in the room. Also, the chairs in the UMMA Commons make too much noise every time someone drags them -- it is very distracting. It would be nice to have the educational/pre-performance events at a less noisy space.

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

2010-02-01T14:48:00.000-05:00

After 50 years of singing, Ladysmith Black Mambazo has lost none of what made them so famous to begin with. While I'm don't feel particularly enlightened about South African culture, I did enjoy myself immensely. These men have rich voices and create beautiful harmonies that carry you right into the music.

For the duration of the concert I felt as if I was part of the rhythm and part of their family. Their dancing did not feel choreographed, but like a physical manifestation of their sheer pleasure of being. Their songs were inviting and joyful, and whether the song was about hope or homelessness, the theme of togetherness remained a constant. I left the concert revitalized and content with the world.

By: Molly Baumkel
UMS Student Advisory Committee Member

The Humble Conductor

2010-01-29T13:14:00.009-05:00

An all 20th Century program: Ravel based on Couperin, a modern Flute Concerto, and a opera in concert... by Bartok? Quite a hard sell and yet there were people asking me about getting Rush Tickets up until an hour before the show! As much as I would like to think that it was my amazing marketing talent, unfortunately I know that is not the case. Whether it was because of or in spite of the program for this past Wednesday's performance, most people came out to see Pierre Boulez conduct in Hill Auditorium once again.

Boulez's subtle conducting, although not incredibly entertaining as my friend whose Rush Tickets landed him in the front row made sure to let me know, carried an energy and passion that led these incredible musicians to several standing ovations. During the long and well-deserved applause, I was struck by how humble Boulez was; always motioning for his soloists to take the front of the stage, leaving himself slightly in back. The conductor of my non-music major, unprofessional choir will take 10 bows for himself before motioning to us. But not Boulez. In the diva/divo centered world of music, it was refreshing to see such a great musician, who didn't need that limelight.

By: Rachel Lum
UMS Student Marketing Intern

Arts and Eats: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

2010-01-25T14:14:00.001-05:00

The UMS Paparazzi were out once again last Friday night at the Arts and Eats event in the UM Alumni Center.

As students entered, they were greeted by the lovely face of UMS Student Advisory Committee Members, Sarah Bichsel (left) and Lena Cintron (right).

After picking from a wide variety of pizzas, students headed to the drink station to quench their thirst.

Then students enjoyed their meals, chatting about the exciting show they were about to see.

Students got to enjoy a talk by Janet Wong, the Assistant Artistic Director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Janet discussed the artistic process and how the company worked together to develop "Fondly Do We Hope... Fervently Do We Pray." She mentioned a type of improvisation the company used, which involved moving together in an ovular pattern, hence the use of ovals on the stage! She gave an incredibly interesting perspective!

After Janet's talk, students hung out at the Alumni center and enjoyed each other's company while waiting for the show.

Some brought homework...

... some did each other's hair...

... and some even brought art of their own to do!

Overall, it was a great night! If you want to come join the fun, then check out the UMS website for more information about tickets, which go on sale about two weeks before the Arts and Eats performance. We still have Arts and Eats events for:

The folk musician, Bela Fleck's Africa Project, in which he explores the roots of the Banjo on Wednesday, February 17 at 6:30 in the Hill Mezzanine Lobby

The incredible Takacs Quartet, who will be performing two Beethoven quartets along with a new work, on Monday, March 15 at 6:30 in the UM Alumni Center

A program of Prokofiev and Brahms by the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra with pianist Lang Lang and conductor Christoph Eshenbach on Wednesday, April 7th at 6:30 in the UM Alumni Center

And our final Arts and Eats of the season will be for Danilo Perez and Friends: 21st Century Dizzy, a show inspired by Perez's mentor and the great jazz trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie, on Thursday, April 8th at 6:30 in the UM Alumni Center

See you all there!

By: Rachel Lum
UMS Intern

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company does Lincoln

2010-01-24T09:53:00.010-05:00

Fondly Do We Hope…Fervently Do We Pray

A performance by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

by University Musical Society Student Advisory Committee member

I went to see Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's performance at the Power Center on Saturday (Jan 23). Before that, on Friday (Jan 22), I had attended the "Arts of Citizenship" breakfast at the UM Museum of Art, on the topic of "Lincoln in American Culture's Collective Memory", in which several UM faculty members discussed the performance. Robin Wilson, Associate Professor of Dance, who is both a choreographer and a dance historian, said something at the Arts of Citizenship" breakfast that I was struck by. Wilson said that the human body is a container of memory. In our bodies -- our muscles -- we retain memories in a non-verbal, non-visual way -- viscerally and not visually, so to speak. For this reason, dance is very powerful, Prof. Wilson remarked in her talk, when what is being represented has to do with memory. Given that this performance by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company was a "meditation about Lincoln", it had to do, very much, with memory -- national, collective memory in the United States, since Lincoln played such an important role in US history and in the country's changing perception of itself. For this reason, Prof. Wilson felt, dance in particular was a very appropriate medium to celebrate and commemorate Lincoln.

In today's New York Times, newspaper, Eve Ensler remarks in an interview that dance can have a transformative effect on bodily trauma: "When you’ve been raped, the trauma lodges itself in your being". she says. "Dance is a surefire way to release it." Ensler states that, for that reason, she uses dance in the center that she runs for women who have been victims of the civil war in Congo. That, too, made me think of how apposite it is, then, that dance should represent Lincoln and the Civil War, given the national trauma that the Civil War and, subsequently, the assassination of Lincoln, represent for the USA.

The performance consisted of dancing figures (often foregrounded in the two corners of the Power Center stage) and a couple of musicians sitting right in front of the stage and facing the audience. A huge white curtain just behind the front of the stage was used to project images. The performance was nonlinear and non-narrative -- there was no attempt to narrate the life story of Lincoln from beginning to end. Instead, dance, music, and occasional voice-overs were left to speak for themselves.

Water Music

2010-01-14T18:20:00.005-05:00

Last Friday, I was on a very sleepy and snowy flight from Detroit to New York’s Laguardia airport. As early as it was (the flight left at 6am, meaning a 3:30 wake up in order to make it to the airport on time through the several inches of snow that had fallen the night before), I was still pulsing with excitement at the coming weekend where I would be volunteering at the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals with six other University of Michigan students. To pass the time, I buried myself in an article in The New Yorker called “Water Music” that discussed the October opening of the new Revson fountain in Lincoln Center plaza as part of the venue’s 1.3 billion dollar redevelopment project. The description of four hundred and seventy-five gallons of water in the air forming “a mighty column of water that slowly rises to a height of twelve feet” was enchanting, but somehow I didn’t make the connection that I was traveling to the city that housed this majestic structure.

About thirty-six hours and one iPod later (it had been a casualty of my sleepiness on the flight and is probably being enjoyed by someone else who happened to enjoy seat 8B on my American Airlines plane that day), I found myself standing in front of the very fountain about which I had been reading as I awaited the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Turandot. The fountain was stunning; illuminated by the fully lit opera house behind it and serving as the centerpiece of the hustle and bustle of hundreds of patrons scurrying into the warmth of the performance that awaited them. I stood outside for a few minutes, downing a tall latte from Starbucks that would ensure my full attention during Puccini’s masterpiece, and took in the energy that surrounded me. Standing in Lincoln Center at performance time is a humbling experience for anyone, much less a student of the performing arts; the energy in the plaza is a reflection of both the current love of the performing arts and the history of exceptional performances in what is perhaps the very heart of classical music in America.

My first experience at the Metropolitan Opera was seven years ago, when my family and I drove up from our Maryland home to see a production of Verdi’s Il trovatore. I hadn’t been to the Met since then, so I had a vague picture of its interior (although I knew to be excited for the personal subtitle screen on the seat in front of me no matter where I was sitting). My seat was fantastic, especially considering my ticket had only been purchased a few hours before at a student price, and gave me a spectacular view of both the stage as well as the layers of the opera house stretching high above me like some kind of giant birthday cake. After being joined by the lovely Rachel Lum, I sat brimming with anticipation as the lights dimmed and the curtain slowly rose, signaling the onset of what would be an exhilarating three hours.

There are only so many words I can use to describe the evening. The set was beautifully grand, the voices so rich that they actually served as my dessert for the evening, and the story charmingly timeless. What makes an evening at the Metropolitan Opera so special is not just the astounding voices so often heard on stage (although that certainly is a large part of any opera performance), but the collaborative effort of the entire production. When the curtain first rose on Saturday night, my eyes came close to filling with tears before a note had even been sung. The beauty of the entire experience – the set, the costumes, the design of the hall and stage, the lush sound of the orchestra from the pit – would not have been possible unless each element had been perfectly executed and placed to complement the others. Bland costumes would distract from the sounds emanating from the voices of the performers, and no production stands a chance of achieving its full potential when presented in a tired looking opera house.

The power of collaborative efforts that I realized at the opera exists outside of an individual production; it is what makes Lincoln Center a strong institution across its twelve arts organizations, and is exactly the purpose of conferences such as APAP that bring together arts communities from all over the world. In an ever-changing society where the status of the arts remains uncertain, it is imperative that people continue to come together and share as they did last weekend in New York. Perhaps the most striking thing I learned from my APAP experience is that collaborative efforts to improve the arts need to exist outside the boundaries of the field. I was lucky enough to be scheduled to work at a session called “At the ‘Tipping Point’: Artists and Climate Change,” that discussed how the arts can be used to raise awareness about the climate crisis (for more details on the session, see Maureen Stych’s entry below). I entered the session skeptical – how on earth can the concepts of art and climate change possibly be linked? The details are best explained in Maureen’s post, but the most important message that the session contributed is that we need another Copernican revolution. Copernicus thought the earth was the center of the universe, only to discover nine planets revolved around something much bigger, the sun. Citizens of the world need to follow his example and realize that different disciplines are not as central as they think; rather, they work together to maintain a sustainable existence. It is the same collaboration that made my evening at the Met so special that can enrich the arts as a whole, not only through discussion across the field but every branch of knowledge and study.

By: Patrick Carter

Intern, Office of Development and External Relations at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance

The "Other" Artist

2010-01-11T22:22:00.000-05:00

Lots of people live in New York City, it seems. I always knew it, I guess. Lots of people on the subway like bumper bowling at every station. Skyscrapers and Yankee fans. But, the APAP trip convinced me of its enormity. The people in this city create the largest audience for the arts in the world. This means a lot of things for the arts in New York. It means that the institutions can charge exorbitant ticket prices and still sell seats. It means that Bruce Springsteen can sell out a week at Madison Square Garden. But, it also means that there is a huge population of weirdos that consistently consume the avant-garde, the experimental, the "out". I use the term "weirdos" neither positively or negatively. It's just who they are- who we are?

Well, a quick list of some of the shows I saw this weekend may clear up the weird definition. Wednesday evening was The Asphalt Orchestra (http://asphaltorchestra.com/). They are a marching band- well, they look and act like a marching band. At the brand new Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, in a room with vines covering the walls, The Asphalt Orchestra did not play Hail To The Victors or any other fight songs. Instead, they marched the audience around the room and played transcriptions of Frank Zappa, Tyondai Braxton, and many others. They were talented, fun, interactive but, most definitely, weird. Thursday night was The Devil You Know (http://www.undertheradarfestival.com/index.php?p=27). A beautiful piece of puppet theater, the play was based on the 1937 short story, "The Devil and Daniel Webster". A show about a man selling his soul to the devil and Daniel Webster winning it back, it was dark, creepy, extremely engaging, and weird. Friday night was Trajal Harrell's "Twenty Looks or Paris Is Burning At the Judson Church (S)" at the New Museum (http://www.newmuseum.org/events/418). A solo dance piece, Harrell attempts to tell the story of what would have happened had the early postmodern dance artists allowed the African Americans dancing in the ballrooms uptown to participate in the dance scene downtown. An interesting question, Harrell explores the idea through the lens of a one man fashion show. Intimately and subtly, Harrell changed clothes and expressions- in his onstage dressing room- 30 times over the 60 minute show. Weird. The list continues throughout the weekend with dance showcases, theater performances, world music acts, and jazz club sets. And, at every show I went to, the house was full and the crowd seemed to be loving it.

I cannot always connect with the extremely "out" performances- someday maybe I will be deep enough- however, this weekend I found a deep appreciation for the importance of performance space and audience for the "other" artist. Is he welcome in Ann Arbor? Where's his home? Who cares?

By: Bennett Stein
UMS Intern

A Note About: The APAP Conferend

2010-01-09T16:46:00.001-05:00

“Climate Change: The Musical.”

Not exactly a Tony-Award winning concept, is it? Even I, someone who isn’t directly involved in the performing arts in any way, can identify such a concept as a an undeniable flop. But, as a Generation Y-er, I’m intrinsically concerned with the state of our environment, and exploring way to curb mankind’s damaging impact on our plant. Certainly there must be a way to utilize the arts—our micro-bubble of beauty in this destructive macrocosm—to not only reach the public, but get them to care about the environment, change their ways, and cultivate a better world.

I know. It’s far-fetched. Or so I thought.

About twenty minutes ago, I left a 3ish-hour long presentation called “At the ‘Tipping Point’: Artists and Climate Change” here at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) conference.

What just happened to me in those three hours was monumentally impactful in a way I never imagined.

I was skeptical when I volunteered work the event. In my experience, most attempts to blend the arts (whether music, dance, visual, written, theatre, etc.) with “save the environment” message always fell short in my book. It was either too cheesy, too dull, too strange, too new-age-y, too political (yes, that’s looking at you, Al Gore), or, honestly, just felt half-baked: the execution of the project didn’t do the message justice; the implementation either made the work feel immature or overwhelmed me with so many statistics and scare tactics that I felt diluted by too much science mumbo-jumbo that I just didn’t understand.

Fortunately, I discovered I wasn’t alone in this realization.

The presentation addressed this problem directly: how can we use the Arts to engage audiences while also educating them about the importance of global warming? There must be some middle ground; there must be a way for the Arts, as influential a field as it is, to strike deep into the very core of humans. It must be a part (if not the leader) of a radical movement to alter our lifetstyles, ways of thinking, and priorities.

But how?

We can’t turn everyone into Greenie Extremists and expect people to trade their cars in for bikes or build a compost pile in their backyard. Even if we could, finding a way to globalize those ideals through any medium would be darned-near impossible.

Graham Devlin, the keynote speaker of the presentation and a chair member at Tipping Point, emphasized the importance of getting artists themselves to care about the issue. Even just being at this conference for the last two days, I understand what he’s talking about: amid an overwhelming, bustling world of BlackBerries and social networking, why would—or SHOULD—an artist living in the heart of a metropolitan area care about the ice caps melting? The effects of global warming, despite all the PSAs, local protests, and political agendas, are hardly something these people are exposed to on a daily basis. They’re more concerned about getting a gig (or, in the case of presenters, finding a propritious gig) than they are about saving the world. I can’t blame them, really: part of my reason for attending this conference is to get myself into this networking world, and preventing the polar ice caps from melting is the last thing on my mind.

So, Devlin proposes, if we get the artists to care, we can get thier audiences to care. You don’t need hoaxy, trite ideas like “Climate Change: The Musical” in order to reach large groups of people. (Of course, don’t get me wrong: what I learned about the work done at the COP15 Coppenhagen Conference not only struck me as being of great importance, but also on a large-scale level that impacted people from all walks of life. Politicians, activists, chefs, artists, Average Joe: everyone could see, hear, touch, and experience the crisis we face as a planet).

But there are ideas fostered in a smaller realm that can be just as, if not more, impactful. Composer Robert Juan Rodriguez worked with Susie Ibarra to make a film (“Song of the Bird King”) about the impact of climate change on the indigenous people of the Phillipenes. They visited the tribe, heard their stories, recorded their music, and felt their pain. This tribe, losing their precious Lake Sabu to big-business filth, directly feel the changes of our planet; their everyday life is crumbling due to changes in the environment, and yet they have virtually nothing to do with its downfall whatsoever. Rodriguez and Ibarra, emotionally drawn to these people and their disastrous calamity, created a beautiful film (and soundtrack) that wasn’t corny or too in-your-face, change-your-ways-before-you-kill-us-all, but was incredibly heart-wrenching. Sure, a lot of it was due to the tragedy of the Filipinos, but it was also a result of the masterful work of the artists; they brought this world to us, and by doing so, they force us to register how what we do in our lives effects people a few, a hundred, or even thousands of miles away.

For me, though, this entire presentation was owned by the work of Natalie Jeremijenko and the Environmental Health Clinic. Her work was just…wow. It floored me. She absolutely, positively floored me.

Never in my life did I believe the nitty-gritty facts and statistics of science could blend so cohesively into a world of asethetics in such a beautiful, stream-lined, innovative manner. Her work is stunning. Gorgeous.

Sitting there, watching her presentation, I didn’t just feel motivated to change the world, I wanted in on this projected. I wanted to be doing this work. I wanted to be coming up with these brilliant public demonstrations like the No Parks and Tadpole Walkers. If they seem absurd, then their absurdity is what captivates an audience and lies at the heart of Jeremijenko’s success. I wasn’t alone in my awe; everyone was captivated by her work with eXperimental design.

After her work, I felt a calling from myself to do something along these lines. True, Jeremijenko works in a visual realm, and APAP is centralized around performing arts, but who says the visual arts can’t be a performance? That’s exactly what Jeremijenko brings to the table with her work, and that’s exactly why I find myself overwhelmingly drawn to her work and the possibilities it opens up not only for climate change, the visual arts, arts presenters, and performing arts, but also for what it does to me. It inspires me. Even though, I admit, I get inspired a lot and by a lot of things (read: pretty much everything), Jeremijenko presented a world to me that I could live and work in, and make my own.

The work she presented in a visual world (which is where I feel truly at home) can easily be transposed to music, theatre, and dance. Arts presenters can find similar ways to hook their audiences and get them to interact creatively with the performance. It’s brilliant. Everything is transferable, especially in a field as creative and fluid as the arts. That’s what I loved about sitting in on this seminar: imagine all the things we could do! I keep imagining a performing center blended with some visual arts gallery or studio. Or something Pollock-esque, where visual arts can be performed for an audience to get across a social message, or spark interest in a problem. The possibilities overwhelm me at times, but more than anything, they excite me.

And, really, that’s what APAP brings to me. Even though it’s great for social networking, at its core, it’s about sharing ideas and sparking excitement in others about what you do, and collaborating to build the best experience for everyone involved. Artist, presenter, and audience can all gain from a show, or even the pre-show and post-show. The field of arts presenting is larger than I ever imagined, and much more dynamic than my previous conceptions. That is what truly excites me.

By: Maureen Stych

UMS Intern

Social Media and the Arts

2010-01-09T13:01:00.017-05:00

When you work for UMS, you know Ken Fischer, because he is the nice, approachable who hugs you in the elevator on the way to class. When you are any one else in the arts presenting business, you know Ken Fischer, because he is Ken Fischer. None of us realized what simply knowing him meant for our experience here at the APAP conference.

It all started last night with a trip to the 42nd floor of the Hilton, where we met Ken in the Major Unitversity Presenters or MUP suite. He gave us a mission and a wad of cash and spent an hour getting the suite prepped for that night, when his friends, aka all the big shots of arts presenting, come up to the suite for an evening of reconnections, discussions and networking.

When we returned from our night on the town, the suite was just starting to get busy. One of the first people we met was Mike Ross from the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois, who is, you know, only the Chairman of the APAP Board of Directors. No biggie, right?

Although the night continued in the same manner, meeting anyone and everyone, my personal highlight of the evening was getting the chance to meet and talk with Romana Jaroff, the Senior VP and Director of Sales at IMG Artists. Romana wanted to take the opportunity to discuss social media with us "kids" (I turned 20 that day, thus quotations are necessary). Her biggest question was, "Why? Why do I, as someone with 2 kids, a full time job, and an insane schedule, want to spend my free time tweeting and getting on facebook?" She didn't understand our obsession with social media and why she needed to take the time to get on board, which the great debate of the evening.

It started as a simple discussion of what is the purpose of facebook, which got the simple answer, to keep in touch with friends. Of course that is true, but many of us do not use facebook to "keep in touch" but more so to avoid real human contact with our "friends." Our talk quickly took a turn towards the psychology of our generation. Romana made that point that no one picks up the phone and calls anymore, rather we text or facebook each other, avoiding a conversation which has the potential to be awkward. What is the impact of the importance we place on impersonal communication in how we will conduct business? Especially in an industry like the performing arts, which is so centered on networking and personal relationships, as exemplified by Ken Fischer himself. In spite of our discussing, arguing and disagreeing throughout the night, the conversation ended much like it began, questioning the relationship between social media and the arts.

I personally don't know what the future holds for social media. I don't know how artists will evolve and adapt to changing media. I don't know how it will affect how I get a job when I graduate. I don't know how tweet seats will effect the performance experience. But I do know this: I just friend requested Ken Fischer on facebook.

By: Rachel Lum
UMS Intern

APAP 2010

2010-01-08T12:29:00.002-05:00

Today, after surviving a treacherous 4:00am drive through the unplowed streets of Ann Arbor, seven students from the University of Michigen flew to to New York City for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) Conference. The APAP conference brings together many of it's members for several days of workshops, showcases, and intense networking. APAP's members are the people who coordinate any and all types of the performing arts; they are the agents who books your favorite band to play in your hometown, they are the people who run the staduim which brings you the NCAA championship, and they are the presenter who brings nearly 70 fabulous shows to Ann Arbor every year. And this year UMS is adding several of it's staff members to this mix of everyone in the arts presenting world, including Ken Fischer, Michael Kondziolka, Liz Stover, Claire Rice, and Mary Roeder.

These next few crazy days our seven University of Michigan students, many from UMS, will be recording their experiences here on our student blog, as we soak in this incredible opportuninty, which UMS and APAP are giving us.

By: Rachel Lum
UMS Intern

Welcome Back!

2010-01-06T15:16:00.004-05:00

Welcome back to campus everyone and happy new year! I hope you all enjoyed your break as much as I did and are getting ready for our Winter Season, filled with amazing artists!

You're probably asking yourself where you've heard some of the big names of our Winter Season before, well here is a little refresher! You might recognize Bill T. Jones, from the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, from his appearance on The Colbert Report, which he was on in December. Ladysmith Black Mambazo might sound familiar because it was referenced in Mean Girls: "But you love Ladysmith Black Mambazo!" And you might have seen Lang Lang, who will be appearing here with the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra, on Oprah!

If your interested in tickets, remember that starting this Sunday, January 10th we will be having our 1/2 Price Ticket Sale! Go to www.ums.org for more details and to purchase tickets. Or if you simply prefer people to computers and you want to know more about our Winter Season or student ticket options, come visit the UMS Student Advisory Committee on the Diag on January 11th from noon to 4pm! Hope to see you there!

By: Rachel Lum
UMS Intern

Jean-Yves Thibaudet

2009-12-16T17:09:00.004-05:00

As the lights dimmed in Hill Auditorium, all became silent, except for the rustling of a few coats and programs, as Jean-Yves Thibaudet took to the stage. A classical pianist recognized for the artistry and charisma he brings to the keys, his performance Saturday night exceeded his reputation. As is typical at UMS performances, I was impressed with the variety of people in the audience. From devout Thibaudet followers to Brahms fans to others who heard him play on the Pride and Prejudice and Atonement soundtracks, the artist offered a little something for everyone. Playing a mix of light and dark pieces, with not one, but two encores, Thibaudet‘s recital served as the perfect study break as UM students head into finals week.

Thibaudet opened with Pavane pour une infant défunte, by Maurice Ravel. The light sections of the piece were uplifting, and it was just the right length to set the mood. Ravel’s Miroirs followed, in which each movement has its own personality. The first, “Noctuelles,” (“Night Moths”) was fun and spritely, whereas “Oiseaux tristes” (“Sad birds”) was gloomy and fantastical. Throughout the arpeggios of “Une barque sur l’océan,” (“A Boat on the Ocean”) Thibaudet’s fingers flew up and down the keyboard. Although no movement offers a definite conclusion until the end, the audience could not help but applaud after “Alborada del gracioso,” (“Dawn Song of the Jester”) with its turn from a mechanical and focused sound to a flourishing dance rhythm. The last movement, “La vallée des cloches,” (“The Valley of the Bells”) presents a sound-sculpture that is not quite peaceful, but intriguing.

During intermission, someone came out to check the tuning on the piano. Perhaps he was prepping the D-flat for Brahms’s Sonata No. 3 in f minor, Op. 5. Angela Hewitt will play this same piece in February at UMS. I wonder what she will bring to the score, and look forward to comparing the two performers.

Photo: LSA Freshmen Lauren Ruben and Diana Juncaj await Thibaudet’s performance at Hill Auditorium.

A quick glance at the program told me that the Brahms movements would shift from “dramatic and powerful” to “gentle and lyrical” and back again. Prepared to get lost in the music, I sat back and let my imagination take over. By the third movement, I felt like I was at a carnival. The whirlwind of sounds circled around me, and I could almost see the “color of music” my conductors have tried to describe to me all these years.

Before I knew it, the song had ended, and Thibaudet was up for his third bow of the night. He was not quite through, and delighted the audience with an encore piece: Intermezzo in A, Op. 118 No. 2, also by Brahms. To me, a new ease seemed to have come over the pianist as he played this piece: Perhaps from the confirmation that the audience adored him? Or was he just having fun now that the official program was complete? I cannot imagine an artist who would not love performing in Hill Auditorium, and Thibaudet certainly seemed to enjoy himself.

Although Thibaudet bowed and left the stage once more, our audience refused to let him go. He graciously returned to present the moving melodies of Nocturne in E Flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2, as a tribute to his mother, who said, “A day without Chopin is not a good day.”

Take that one to heart. Happy listening!

By: Catherine R. Herzog

UMS Student Advisory Committee Member

Handel’s Messiah

2009-12-14T15:47:00.003-05:00

Hill Auditorium was filled with timeless music and tradition last weekend. The Messiah, composed in 1741 by George Frideric Handel, was performed by the UMS Choral Union, the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, featured soloists and instrumentalists, and conducted by the famous Jerry Blackstone. The UMS Choral Union has performed the Messiah every year since 1879. Hill Auditorium was decorated for the occasion, the organ was adorned with a beautiful wreath, and red poinsettias surrounded the stage.
At the arts and eats event before the concert, students listened to a lecture discussing “what to listen for” in the concert. Professor Jeffery Bloom explained some of the different methods composers used to express emotions through their music. For example, he mentioned that large jumps in pitch often represent joy, such as in the Hallelujah chorus.

Before the concert there was a palpable buzz at Hill as the packed auditorium prepared to hear the music. The Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra began with the sinfonia, playing with great emotion and energy. That same amount of energy was maintained throughout the concert. All of the soloists did a fabulous job. Ava Pine’s strong, yet pure soprano and emotive facial expression captured audience attention. Her rendition of the air, “I know that my redeemer liveth,” in part three of the work was especially memorable. The alto/mezzo part, typically performed by a female singer, was sung in this performance by Anthony Roth Costanzo, a male countertenor. He gave a truly flawless, stand-out performance, stunning and delighting the audience. There were audible gasps in the audience when he first began to sing. Robert Bracey and Kyle Ketelsen, the tenor and bass soloists, respectively, were also very impressive.

The UMS Choral Union did a wonderful job providing the heart and soul of this work. One of UMS’s own staff members, Stephanie Normann, was one of the union’s alto singers. The union’s balance and careful use of dynamics, expertly managed by Jerry Blackstone, made each and every one of their pieces feel like an epic moment to the audience. My favorite came towards the end of the work, “…since by man came death.”The way the piece’s words moved fluidly through the choir made me feel as if I was surrounded by the sound: a wonderful feeling.

All in all, it was a great night filled with fabulous music and holiday cheer.

By: Dana Harlan

UMS Intern

UMS on the Diag

2009-12-11T16:36:00.003-05:00

Beat the Cold, Feel the Beat!

January 11th 2009 from Noon to 4pm UMS Student Advisory Committee will be out on the Diag with some of your favorite student performing groups! Check out the upcoming UMS performances! Talk to us about the best way to get tickets! Have some of the free hot food and drink from our sponsoring partners! Watch your favorites, like The Friars and Amazin' Blue, perform on the steps of the Hatcher!

See you there!!!

Click here to RVSP on Facebook!

UMS Rush Bucks!

2009-12-02T13:59:00.003-05:00

Click here to check out the new UMS commercial for Rush Bucks! Or copy and paste this url into your browser http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxMT5f1Io3Q

Rush Bucks is a great UMS ticket program, in which students get the 10 dollar rush-ticket price to any performance with the added bonus of getting your tickets up to TWO WEEKS in advance and ordering ONLINE!

The program is simple, buy a 6 or 10 ticket pack at anytime from the Michigan League Ticket Office. Then, when you find a UMS performance that you want to attend, go online to www.ums.org up to two weeks in advance and order your tickets. They will be waiting for you at will call the night of the performance!

Each ticket is only 10 dollars, so you get the benefit of a low price, without having to plan months in advance! The 6 ticket, 60 dollar pack and the 10 ticket, 10 dollar pack can be used at any time during the UMS season (from September to April), but you must use all of those tickets during the season in which they are purchased.

Special Thanks to: Minhdzuy Khorami, Sean FitzGerald, Catherine Mac, and Chelsea Rebecca

Arts and Eats!

2009-11-23T16:21:00.007-05:00

Oh what a night! We had another incredible Arts and Eats event on November 20th 2009 at the UM Alumni Center and with nearly 100 students in attendance, a great time was had by all! The following are just a sampling of some of the photos Lu Huang took of the event. The rest can be found on the UMS facebook page!

Ishay Amir gave a short informational speech about Yasmin Levy and her unique style of music.

Ishay Amir with an Arts and Eat-er and UMS staffers, Liz Stover and Stephanie Normann.

UMSSC Member, Sayan Bhattacharyya, volunteered and helped serve drinks to some thirsty Arts and Eat-ers!

A group of student's enjoying Arts and Eats!

Want to get in on the fun for Handel's Messiah on December 5th? Join us at the UM Alumni Center from 6:30pm to 7:30pm for pizza, drink, a brief talk by conductor and former UM School of Music, Theatre, and Dance faculty member, Joseph Bloom, and time to mingle with other students! Tickets and dinner only cost 15 dollars and can be purchased online at the UMS Student Page or at the Michigan League ticket office. Limit of two tickets per student and the offer expires on Wednesday, December 2nd at noon.

By: Rachel Lum
UMS Intern

Photos: All rights reserved: Lu Huang 2009
For more information, contact huanglu@umich.edu
Images licensed to UMS for all official uses.

Berliner Philharmoniker: A Dream Come True

2009-11-20T14:27:00.002-05:00

This is a big moment in my life! Can’t believe I was sitting in the grand auditorium waiting for the world’s best orchestra to show up. The interaction between Berliner Phiharmoniker and UMS dates back to as early as 1955, however its most recent appearance was already 8 years ago. Back then I was just a school kid playing lousy accordion, never dreamed of watching a prestigious orchestra performing live. Now I’m here in Ann Arbor, going to witness Berliner Philharmoniker playing right in front of my eyes. Amazing!

Honestly, I didn’t listen to Brahms that much. I agreed that his symphonies are rigorously structured and thoughtful in its own ways, but they’re somehow not as exciting compared to his contemporaries and some predecessors – there’s no buzz. However, tonight’s performance completely changed my mind. It commenced with Brahms’ Symphony #3. I like the slow movement a lot. The theme of Andante is very gentle and lyrical, recalling other romantic composers’ style like Schumann’s, while being performed by BPO the progression kinda gave a feeling of magnificence and grandness, creating the illusion that I was listening to one of Beethoven’s movements. The poco allegretto began with a well-known theme, introduced by cellos and followed up by violins. It seemed to depict that the composer is deep in meditation, and is recalling his old memories. The melody seemed to be accompanied by a feeling of sorrow and tragedy, an emotion not expressed in the previous movement. It’s eased a bit by bright and gentle melodies, but comes back soon and dominates the mood of this movement. The ending of the 3rd movement is graceful and poetic, yet the tragic feelings are prolonged.

I got a strong feeling that Brahms is a man with romanticism rooted in his personality, as in numerous paragraphs in his works I sensed grace and lyricism underlying the music which really catch people’s emotions. And yet he had rigorous ways to develop themes, and inherited classical symphony form and structure. He was a synthesis of romantic nature and the spirit of the classical, in which way he shares many characteristics with his predecessor Beethoven.

The sound was just wonderful, combined with the acoustics of the concert hall. The solo parts of flute, oboe and horn were extraordinary throughout the performance. In fact, the players of woodwinds and brass were asked to stand up and receive a hall of applause. I was sitting on the balcony, and it still sounds so great. I can’t imagine how fantastic the sound would be down the floor. Many thanks to UMS for everything they’ve done to make all these happen. It feels so good when your dream come true!

By Allen Wang,
UMS Student Committee Member

Danke schön, Berliner Philharmoniker!

2009-11-18T15:01:00.008-05:00

It seems like so many of this year's concerts at UMS have been "the best concert I've ever seen" - Alisa Weilerstein & Inon Barnaton, Stile Antico, Belcea Quartet, St. Lawrence Quartet...so in that sense, the Berliner Philharmoniker was just another day at the office.

But in another, more important sense, it was completely different from almost any other orchestral concert I've ever attended. Everyone onstage, from the concertmaster to the percussionist whose only task was to play the triangle in the 3rd movement of Brahms 4, gave 110% throughout the entire concert. These are musicians at the peak of their abilities, doing what they love. I couldn't imagine anything more beautiful than the cello opening of the 3rd movement of Brahms 3...until the oboe started playing. Instrument after instrument came in, each with their own uniquely beautiful sounds. It was such a colorful performance - all the differences of the orchestra came through, with each player playing the most he or she could offer on the instrument. At the end of the 3rd symphony, I felt as if I had emerged from a completely different world.

Danke schön, Berliner Philharmoniker!

By: Paula Muldoon
UMS Marketing Intern

Yasmin Levy and Gal Costa: Some thoughts

2009-11-15T10:54:00.011-05:00

Over there at Arts at Michigan's "[art]seen" blog, Krithika Srinivasan posted a preview of Yasmin Levy's concert, in which she made the observation that "Traditional Ladino music is similar to Portuguese fado and Spanish flamenco".

Coming as Yasmin Levy's performance did on the heels of the Gal Costa concert last week, Krithika's comment set me thinking.

Gal Costa had, among other things, sung the beautiful bossa nova song by Tom Jobim, "A Felicidade", which begins: "Tristeza nao tem fim, felicidade sim" ("Sadness has no end, happiness does").

This somewhat melancholy take on the world and on existence is, actually, quite characteristic of bossa nova.

Even when singing of happy things, the bossa nova musician's underlying palette seems always to be constituted of melancholy, autumnal colors.

As Krithika indirectly suggests, the Ladino music that Levy sang did have distinct similarities to the fado genre of Portugal (e.g. check out the songs of the great Amália Rodrigues), which also has this sense of melancholy. The morna genre of Cabo Verde (Cape Vert), a former Portuguese colony where the language is a Portuguese-based creole (e.g. check out the songs of Cesária Évora), also shows this sensibility.

We can think of another classic _bossa nova_ song that Gal Costa also sang (in both Portuguese and English) that evening: "Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema"), also by Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. Notice how the underlying sentiment is one of melancholy:

Olha que coisa mais linda,
Mais cheia de graça,
É ela a menina que vem e que passa,
num doce balanço a caminho do mar.
Moça do corpo dourado do sol de Ipanema,
O seu balançado é mais que um poema,
É a coisa mais linda que eu já vi passar.

Ah, por que estou tão sozinho?
Ah, por que tudo é tão triste?
Ah, a beleza que existe,
A beleza que não é só minha,
Que também passa sozinha.

Ah, se ela soubesse
Que, quando ela passa,
O mundo inteirinho se enche de graça
E fica mais lindo por causa do amor,
Por causa do amor, por causa do amor...

Tall and tanned and young and lovely,
the girl from Ipanema goes walking
and when she passes
each man she passes
says "Aaah!"

When she moves it's like a samba
that swings so cool and sways so gently
that when she passes
each man she passes
says "Aaah!"

[ Oh -- but he watches so sadly,
How -- can he tell her he loves her,
He -- would just give his heart gladly,

But each day when she walks to the sea
She looks straight ahead, not at he,

Tall and tanned and young and lovely
the girl from Ipanema goes walking,
and when she passes
he smiles,
but she doesn't see.]

(Here's a YouTube video of "Garota de Ipanema" sung by Joaõ Gilberto and Caetano Veloso, by the way. And here's the English version, sung by Astrud Gilberto.)

It occurred to me during the concert that flamenco and the ladino tradition are also examples of the "melancholy as an underlying state" -- this is especially true of the song "Adio Kerida" [Farewell my Beloved] that Yasmin Levy sang at the concert.

This sense of melancholy seems to be historically there in the entire
Iberian peninsula (both Spain and Portugal), and in many musical genres of the hispanophone and lusophone worlds: in flamenco, in ladino music, in fado, in morna, and even, as we saw, in the bossa nova.

What could have been the reason for this? Exile and the sense of loss (as in the case of the gypsies who were/are such an important part of flamenco, and the diasporic sephardic jews who were associated with ladino music), certainly played a role.

But I think that the strong influence of the Catholic church (with its teaching
that wordly glory is always transient and passing) in Spain and Portugal probably also had something to do with this general cultural ethos.

This also reminds me of the somewhat related phenomenon of the valorization of death in Iberian and Latin American culture. Interesting in that regard is the
following story that I came across some time ago.

Incidentally, Ruth Behar, a professor at UM, made a documentary film some time ago with the title "Adio Kerida", borrowing from the same traditional ladino song with this title that Yasmin Levy sang at the concert. You can read about that film here.

By: Sayan Bhattacharyya
UMSSC Member

Gal Costa and Romero Lubambo in Ann Arbor, Nov 7

2009-11-06T23:09:00.007-05:00

Gal Costa and Romero Lubambo will be performing at 7 pm at the Hill Auditorium on Saturday Nov 7 at 8 pm. She's already made it into town -- I went today to hear her being interviewed today at UM's Clements Library, by a couple of UM professors.

At the interview, Gal Costa talked about her almost 40-years-long collaboration with the musicians Maria Bethania, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. (I have written elsewhere about Gilberto Gil's concert in Ann Arbor last year.) The four of them constituted the Tropicalia movement in the 1960s and 197os Brazil. When a right-wing military dictatorship took power in Brazil, the Tropicalia movement was persecuted by the military junta. Not because the four of them were overtly political, but because, with their openness and experimentalism, the four artists musically represented a spirit of a challenge to authority, which made them automatically suspect.

Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso had to leave the country and go into exile in London. Gal Costa, however, was able to stay in Brazil, where she continued to sing songs that Gil and Veloso were writing in Brazil. I learned, however, at the interview that one of Gal Costa's albums, nevertheless, was banned by the dictatorship. This was her album "India", which is shown below:

One of my favorite songs sung by Gal Costa is "London, London", written by Caetano Veloso (from the period when he was in exile in London). You can see here a video of Gal Costa singing this song.

By: Sayan Bhattacharyya
UMS Student Committee Member

Pizza with Yasmin Levy

2009-11-04T15:50:00.005-05:00

Ladino singer and world wide superstar, Yasmin Levy, is coming November 14th at 8pm to Hill Auditorium! The Ladino style spurs from the Judeo-Spanish tradition, which Levy then mixes with the more current Andalucian Flamenco, giving her music an increidlby unique sound.

Get a preview on the UMS youtube page!

The Yasmin Levy performance is also an Arts and Eats Event, meaning you can get great seats and a meal for only 15 dollars! Enjoy pizza and pop, a talk about the performance by an expert and there will be a photographer at the event snapping photos to be posted here on the blog and on the UMS facebook page! See you there!

Stile Antico

2009-11-04T15:26:00.005-05:00

Stile Antico was amazing! They held my attention throughout the entire performance - a rare and impressive feat for an early music (or any) group. Their sound was absolutely beautiful, incredibly blended and with flawless ensemble. More importantly, they clearly had a passion for the music they were singing. One of the best concerts I've been to - can't wait to hear them again!

By: Paula Muldoon
UMS Intern

Laughs about Love's Labour's Lost

2009-10-30T16:33:00.010-04:00

When my mother heard I was going to be interning at UMS, she was so excited for me. When she heard I could get us great tickets, she was even more excited. This weekend, she finally got to take advantage of my new job, as we sat front row center at the UMS presentation Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre of London: Love’s Labour’s Lost last week at the Power Center.

Going into Saturday night, I knew little about the play itself, I really only knew of the prestige of the players and therefore expected a great show. Fortunately, I was not let down. The acting truly was superb, with in my eyes a standout performance from Michelle Terry (right), who played the Princess of France, and Fergal McElherron, who played Costard. Both exemplified an expert use of physicality either facially, bodily or both, with McElherron’s creating a Three Stooges style comedy and Terry making the audience feel the joys or sorrows of her character. I especially enjoyed the chaotic scene which erupts into an onstage food fight, in which Terry concluded the scene as a machine gun with nonstop pummeling of other characters, being constantly reloaded by the town idiot. There wasn’t a single audience members who’s abs weren’t aching.

One of my favorite aspects of the performance, was the audience interaction. Shortly before the show, characters began wandering in as if looking for their seats like any other audience member and I had a lovely discussion with Sir Nathaniel (left) and Holofernes about ruffled collars. At intermission, the ladies shared their picnic lunch of bread, cheese and grapes with us. During the performance itself, the town wench was having sex in the aisles and the musicians were hanging out in the balcony, trumpeting for the entrance of the court. My favorite had to be when one of the Lords, in his attempt to hide from another Lord, headed off stage and proceeded to sit on an audience member, periodically shushing his complaints.

This production of Love’s Labour’s Lost was in a word, unforgettable. I am always amazed at the professionalism of shows on campus, but the intensely precise acting and perfectly timed comedy made this one of the best productions I’ve ever seen.

By: Rachel Lum
UMS Intern

UMS Student Committee is Back!

2009-10-23T15:01:00.003-04:00

After a short hiatus, the University Musical Society Student Committee is back and looking forward to another incredible year! One of the many UMSSC projects is the upkeep of the Student Blog, where students can voice their opinions about UMS performances! Feel free to leave comments and start discussion about any of the incredible UMS performances throughout the year.

If you want to be a blog contributor or for more information about the COMPLIMENTARY TICKET you will receive to the performance about which you blog, please email umsscboard@umich.edu.

For more opportunities within the UMS Student Committee - anything from meeting artists to getting complimentary tickets for volunteering to hanging out over free pizza at our monthly meetings - email umsscboard@umich.edu!

Rachel Lum
UMSSC President

Wrapping up another exciting season

2008-04-22T14:01:00.005-04:00

With the end of classes and finals comes the end of another great year for the UMS Student Committee. We accomplished a lot this year! Some of the highlights? We were present at Festifall, Northfest, Winterfest, and Goodness Day; we hosted a guest speaker who talked to us about gamelan prior to the Çudamani performance; some of our members attended the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York City in January; we went backstage at Hill Auditorium before the SFJAZZ Collective performance (note the picture to your right); and we hosted an on-site ticket sale for the Brad Mehldau Trio and Lila Downs.

We wrapped up the season with our last meeting of the year, which was held on April 8 in the Burton Memorial Tower Conference Room. Ken Fischer, president of UMS, even stopped by to say hello and thank us for our hard work this season. We have a lot of exciting ideas for next fall, some of which we need to begin planning right away! We'd like to make the UMS student brochure even more student-friendly, and we'd also like to hold a pre-season information session or reception to let students know about upcoming UMS performances from the moment they step onto campus in August. Next season will certainly be an exciting one for the committee, as we'll be taking on more responsibilities than ever before!

If you're interested in becoming a member of the student committee for next season, stay tuned to this blog for more information. Being on the committee is a great way to meet new people, make valuable connections with UMS staff members, and get your foot in the door at one of the nation's top arts presenting organizations.

The performance schedule for next season has already been announced, so be sure to visit the UMS website to check out all the amazing events UMS will be presenting!

Have a great summer!

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony at Hill Auditorium

2008-03-24T12:40:00.003-04:00

The San Francisco Symphony’s performance last week was really a show for everyone. The SFO opened the evening with Sibelius’ final symphony, and concluded with Beethoven’s 3^rd Symphony, otherwise titled “Eroica”. The performance was simply magnificent, as expected from one of the world’s most highly acclaimed orchestras. The contrasting nature of these two pieces was underlined by Associate Conductor James Gaffigan, at his appearance during Arts & Eats. In response to an insightful question, Mr. Gaffigan decided that an apt title for the evening performance be “revolutionary symphonies”. Mr Gaffigan explained how both Sibelius and Beethoven forward thinking composers during their respective times; both individuals were pioneering the traditional style and form of the traditional classical symphony. Although each composer lived during a different age in time, both explore contrasting themes of heroism and despair, and take the listener on a dramatic musical and emotional journey. Under conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’ baton, the symphony made for certain that no audience member was excluded from the musical experience. Tilson made a special effort to break the ice at the concert’s beginning. Unlike the traditional classical concert, Tilson was very candid with the audience, and introduced the orchestra with a brief discourse on the evening repertoire, making sure that no audience member felt out of place. Even associate conductor James Gaffigan emphasized at his Arts & Eats discussion that classical music is for everyone to enjoy, regardless of one’s musical background.

The concert’s audience included people of all types, from seasoned classical enthusiasts to individuals I met who had never before attended a classical concert. I was surprised to see just as many non-students as students at the Arts & Eats event before the concert, although it was wonderful to see so many individuals excited about classical music. The Arts & Eats event was packed with people, anticipating the performance; thanks to good planning, there was plenty of pizza and drinks for everyone. The SFO was showered with applause and needless to say, received a standing ovation. As an encore piece, the SFO performed the Third Entr’acte from Schubert's Rosamunde, and to everyone’s delight, the “Victors” with members of the university’s own marching band.

Yours truly,

Yash
UMS Student Committee member

Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony ‘Rock Out’- A new place for the orchestral spotlight

2008-02-25T12:15:00.016-05:00

Hi everyone, this is Yash, UMSSC member.

The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra will be performing at Hill Auditorium on March 14th, 2008. Be sure to join UMS for this surely magnificent performance.

For almost a century, the SFS has been celebrated for promoting valued classical traditions while continuing to transcend the confines of mainstream orchestral repertoire. Through assimilating non-classical musical forms and genres into their musical agenda, the SFS has welcomed a whole new realm of music enthusiasts and has brought a new level of excitement to the symphonic orchestra.

In 1999, the Elektra label featured the SFS with the iconic American rock band ‘Metallica’ in a remarkable fusion of heavy metal and classical music. Under the baton of co-producer Michael Kamen, this amazing union of old and new draws from the strengths of both sides and showcases each of these musical genres in a stunning new light. The SFS manages to intertwine classical elements into Metallica's beautifully crafted music, and brings the level of musicianship and expressionism to a totally different level.

Click here and take a listen yourself. Here is a YouTube video of the SFS and Metallica in their gripping performance of “Nothing Else Matters”.

Be sure to join UMS and the San Francisco Symphony on March 14th, 2008. The evening’s repertoire will include two orchestral favorites: Sibelius’s 7th Symphony and Beethoven’s "Eroica" Symphony with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

I would definitely recommend purchasing tickets for the Arts & Eats event. Before SFS's performance, UMS will provide a FREE pizza dinner as well feature a guest speaker to enlighten us all on the coming performance. Arts & Eats tickets are discounted but limited so be sure to get them soon.

Hope to see you there!

-Yash Somnay
UMS Student Committee Member

Sneak Preview of UMS

2008-02-12T15:14:00.000-05:00

Hey guys, its Andy from the UMS Student Committee. Check out these YouTube videos of performances UMS is bringing to Ann Arbor in the next couple of months:

SFJazz will be in town Thursday, March 13, at Hill Auditorium with "A Tribute to Wayne Shorter"

Urban Bush Women and Compagnie Jant-Bi will be performing Friday and Saturday, March 28-29, in the Power Center.

Lang Lang will be here Wednesday, April 2, also at Hill Auditorium. "...there is nothing to do but gape in awestruck amazement," says the San Francisco Chronicle.

Brad Mehldau Trio will be in the Michigan Theater on Friday, April 4. If you are a fan of jazz, you have to see these guys perform.

These are just a small sample of the performances left on the current season. For times, prices, and more info on these and the other performances, check out www.ums.org

I'll be at most of these shows and a few others. Hope I see some you at an upcoming show,
Andy
UMSSC Vice President

A Quick Update!

2008-01-18T14:54:00.001-05:00

As you are hopefully aware, UMS and the U-M office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives are co-presenting a Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day concert featuring Mos Def in a tribute to Detroit's most influential and respected producer, J Dilla, who died in February, 2006 at age 32 from complications from lupus. The Michigan Daily has a great article about this upcoming performance and its significance that can be found here. To purchase tickets for this performance, please visit www.ums.org or call the ticket office at 734-764-2538.

You may have received a Facebook message encouraging your participation in Facebook/Case Foundation's Giving Challenge. Facebook partnered with the Case Foundation to issue grants to non-profits through the online networking site. UMS participated in the challenge to receive the most unique (individual) donations in a 24-hour period, with the goal of receiving the $1,000 award. From 3 pm on Wednesday, January 16 through 3 pm on Thursday, January 17, UMS recruited 62 members to our Facebook cause, 34 of whom made donations. The total raised during the 24-hour period was $665. While UMS didn't win the $1,000 Challenge (we lost to Fight AIDS Now by 53 donations), this initiative helped raise awareness of UMS. You can still view, join, invite members to, or donate to the UMS Cause on Facebook here. More information on the Facebook Causes Giving Challenge program can be found here.

On a final note, please come visit UMS at Winterfest on the second floor of the Michigan Union on January 24 from 4-8 pm. Come by to learn more about UMS and pick up a free UMS cup and t-shirt!

It's been an eventful month!

2007-09-27T15:00:00.000-04:00

September always proves to be a busy month for UMS and the UMS Student Committee -- with student welcoming events, the student half-price ticket sale, our first committee meeting, and the start of a new performance season, it’s not hard to understand why!

Members of the student committee were present at many of the student events during Welcome Week, including Artscapade and the Graduate Student Orientation Resource Fair. UMS also had a booth at Festifall and Northfest, where many interested students received information about our student ticket programs and upcoming performances (and picked up a UMS cup and t-shirt as well!). We also let students know about one of the best ways to purchase cheap tickets to UMS performances – the UMS Half-Price Student Ticket Sale.

The Half-Price Sale, which ran from September 12 to September 16, was a HUGE success. Not only did over 1300 students place orders, but over 800 tickets were ordered within the first two hours!

In other news, the UMS Student Committee had our first meeting on September 18 in the conference room at the UMS offices. Ken Fischer, president of UMS, stopped by to introduce himself and meet those in attendance. (To see photos Ken took at the meeting, click here.) While enjoying ice cream sundaes, we discussed goals for the year and upcoming committee events. Members of the committee will be volunteering this weekend at the Shen Wei Arts & Eats event and will help set up for a China Reception following the performance.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the student committee or would like to come to a meeting, please e-mail umsstudents-board@umich.edu to receive more information. Serving on the committee provides a great way to get a “behind-the scenes” look at UMS. It’s never too late to get involved!

Welcome back!

2007-08-14T12:54:00.000-04:00

Although classes have yet to start and students have only begun trickling back onto campus, UMS staff and the Student Committee are already busy preparing for an exciting season. Speaking of the UMS Student Committee, our first meeting is September 18 at 7:30 pm in the Carver conference room on Liberty Street. We have an exciting agenda for this year, complete with educational, networking, leadership, and other opportunities to interact with UMS staff members and other professionals in the industry. Everyone is welcome to attend this meeting and we hope to see you there! If you have any questions about this first meeting or the Student Committee in general, please feel free to e-mail us at umsstudents-board@umich.edu.

Are you ready for the Student Half-Price Ticket Sale? You can go online to purchase tickets starting Wednesday, September 12 at 8 pm through Sunday, September 16 at noon. Another great student ticket program we recommend is the UMS Student Card. The UMS Student Card is a pre-paid punch card for Rush Tickets, and is available for $50 for 5 performances or $100 for 10 performances. The best part is that you can request your tickets online and just pick them up at the performance! For more information on the UMS Student Card and other student ticket programs, please visit www.ums.org/students.

Good luck beginning the school year! Be sure to look for UMS at Festifall, Northfest, and other student welcoming events!

Pablo Ziegler Quintet for New Tango concert & post-concert Tango Dance Party!

2007-03-28T16:15:00.000-04:00

Looking for something new and different to do this Friday? Come listen to the Pablo Ziegler Quintet for New Tango (with Chilean singer Claudia Acuña) at Rackham Auditorium, and then tango the rest of the night away at the Alumni Center. Or come just to watch -- the evening will include a tango dance demonstration by two amazing local tango instructors. More info below!

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Pablo Ziegler Quintet for New Tango & Post-performance TANGO DANCE PARTY

What: Pablo Ziegler Quintet for New Tango with Claudia Acuña, vocalist
When: Friday, March 30, 8 pm
Where: Rackham Auditorium

Tickets $20 - $40
www.ums.org or 734-764-2538

(Student Rush Tickets available for $10 at the Michigan League Ticket Office until 5 pm Friday, or for 50%-off at the door the night of the performance. Student ID required. Limit 2 tickets per student.)

*****

What: Post-Performance Milonga / Tango Dance Party
When: Friday, March 30, 9:30 pm - 1 am
Where: U-M Alumni Center, 200 Fletcher St., across the street from Rackham Auditorium
DJ: Avik Basu

Free for concert ticket holders. $5 for everyone else.
Light snacks provided. Cash bar.

A collaboration with the U-M Alumni Center, the Michigan Argentine Tango Club, and a2tango.

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YouTube video clip of the Pablo Ziegler Quintet performing Asfalto:

YouTube video clip of Pablo Ziegler & Emanuel Ax performing Libertango:

Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra - Annual Ann Arbor Concert

2007-03-06T12:41:00.000-05:00

The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra returns to Ann Arbor for its 11th UMS performance, next week on Thursday March 15th at 8PM in Hill Auditorium. A student favorite on the UMS series, the LCJO made Ann Arbor a permanent stop on its annual tours of the United States and abroad. Playing to a sold out Hill Auditorium isn't a difficult task for the LCJO. Band Leader and Trumpet master, Wynton Marsalis always delights, offering a fabulous show filled with original compostions and classic standards of the big band songbook. Next week's program featurs highlights of some of our favorite songs!

If there is anything more amazing than the sound of this group, it is the fact that many of its members are just in there mid-twenties (both Dan Nimmer and Chris Crenshaw were born in 1982!) Youth aside, the LCJO will surely delight you and your friends with their smooth and rich jazz sound! To get an idea of just how fabulous this group is check them out on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRKBHt4ZeAw

Tickets for Thursday's show can be ordered by going to www.ums.org or calling the UMS Ticket Office at 734.764.2538

Dave Holland Octet and Big Band @ The Michigan Theater

2007-02-08T11:33:00.000-05:00

It’s been four years since the sold out UMS debut of Bassist, Dave Holland. With such an overwhelming response to his first UMS engagement, fans will no doubt return for another amazing night of Jazz featuring the Dave Holland Octet and Big Band Thursday, February 22, at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theater. Dave Holland’s career has taken him through the world’s best jazz halls, mastering repertoire that spans the entire spectrum of the jazz sound. That said, Dave Holland and Co. will no doubt impress, offering up a diverse program that will include selections from Overtime (2006 Grammy Award, Best Jazz Ensemble), as well as Critical Mass the newest recording of the Dave Holland Octet. If you’ve got ears for Jazz, this concert is a must see event! Featuring two awesome ensembles comprised of leading NYC Jazz musicians, Thursday’s 8:00PM concert at the Michigan Theater will surely be the place to warm up from the cold.

Dave Holland has had a spectacular career. To start, one of his first major successes as a bassist came when he met Miles Davis in the late sixties. The partnership lasted many years and found Dave as Bassist on legendary recordings such as Bitches Brew and Live at the Fillmore East among thirteen other album collaborations. Furthermore, Mr. Holland has worked throughout his career with a long list of esteemed collaborators including Chick Corea, Anthony Braxton, Kenny Wheeler and Joe Braxton. If that weren’t enough, Dave Holland is a member of his own quintet, octet and Big Band and has acted as band leader and co-band leader on more than thirty recordings. But what I find most impressive about the work of this legendary bassist is the music itself. One of the great things you can expect to hear is something you’ve probably never heard before. That is because all compositions that will be performed on Thursday’s show are original tunes of Dave Holland himself, or other musician/composers in the ensemble. If you’re still not convinced, listen to the Dave Holland i-tunes sample play list at href="http://www.ums.org/s_current_season/artist.asp?pageid=360 ">

STUDENTS: Student Rush Tickets to this performance are available in a limited quantity, so don’t hesitate – get your’s today! $10 Dollar Student Rush tickets sold the day of the performance at the Michigan League Ticket Office. Half-price tickets available 90 minutes before the event at the performance venue ticket office. * Must have valid college ID. Limit two tickets per student ID.*

UMS Interns attend APAP conference in NYC

2007-01-29T18:22:00.000-05:00

UMS Interns Rob Vuichard, Liz Georgoff, Leonard Navarro, Liz Stover, Amy Fingerle, and Erica Ruff volunteered at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters annual conference in New York City this past month. APAP conference volunteers work about 4 hours a day over the course of 3-4 days in exchange for free admission to the conference. If you're a student and interested in attending the APAP conference in future years, please visit their website at: http://www.artspresenters.org/

Read about the UMS interns experiences at the January 2007 conference below!

By Rob Vuichard, UMS Marketing Intern

As I took my seat for takeoff from LaGuardia International to Detroit, the experience of my four long days in New York City began to sink in. Although I was exhausted and days behind in school work, it didn’t seem to matter, I had experienced four intense and creative days at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters Conference (APAP). Initially, I had signed up as a student volunteer at the conference, so that I may take part in the extensive events, performances and talks that were being held throughout New York. What I expected out of the experience of APAP ended up being nothing close to what I actually got out of being a part of in those four days!

As a conference volunteer, I was able to meet many students who had flown in for the event from all over the country. I found most students had volunteered as part of their university or college degree program(s) in arts management. At this realization, I was made aware that I, as well as the six University Musical Society interns who had come to the conference, had really done so on our own initiative; committed to interfacing with the unique world of arts presenting, we did so professionally and independently of our affiliation at the University of Michigan. Since none of us are currently in a degree program pertaining to arts management or administration, we only had our knowledge and experience of working at UMS. In short, we had come to APAP to get our very curious feet wet, but as we were all soon to find out, we ended up getting soaked!

If having backstage access and a chat with one of the stars of Broadway’s smash-hit production “The Color Purple” wasn’t enough, having the opportunity to speak one-on-one with Dana Gioia, the Director of the National Endowment of the Arts, certainly was. If nothing else, the best part of the trip to New York was being introduced to the many influential people working as directors of top college arts centers from Arizona State, Penn State, University of Illinois and the University of Maryland, just to name a few. Being introduced as a member of the UMS team certainly made me realize how proud UMS president, Ken Fischer was to have a committed group of young and interested UMS interns asking questions and making intelligent conversation with conference members long after volunteer hours were over.

What topped the weekend off was getting the opportunity to see three new dance works by New York choreographers in the West Village, with UMS Director of Programming, Michael Kondziolka. Blown away by the work of Carol Armitage and her dancers, Michael and I left the Baryshnikov dance center on 37^thstreet proud to have caught the short thirty minute showcase, reminding each other how much we’d love to see the group come to Ann Arbor. And in that moment, I realized that the University Musical Society is an amazing organization. Committed to finding the best of what the arts community has to offer, the people who I work with each week are truly committed to putting up a unique and diverse series of dance, theater and music for the Ann Arbor community, an experience and dedication that you won’t find just anywhere. If I was to say I learned anything over my weekend in New York City, it was in realizing what a unique and rare opportunity I have had as an intern for UMS these past two years. The weekend trip, as well as the long hours spent in the UMS Liberty St. office, is really something that I will always remember. I can only say thank you to the people who have helped to make the opportunities such as the APAP conference a reality.

By Amy Fingerle, UMS Marketing Intern

As our group of five UMS interns and one from the Ann Arbor Symphony boarded an evening flight to LaGuardia airport, I had no idea by how much the APAP conference would defy my expectations. I had a couple of showcases picked out that I wanted to see, but other than that, I was starting the conference with a completely blank slate. Of course, we were all going to volunteer at the conference, but most importantly we were there to represent UMS. My time as a volunteer at was fun, but my time as an intern was better. Ken Fischer, UMS president, took such great care of all of the interns. He introduced us to literally EVERYONE and really helped us to feel at home at the conference. From seeing Dan Zanes in the second floor lobby on the first day, to meeting Zarin Mehta (President & CEO of the New York Philharmonic) on the last, it was a weekend full of fun surprises.

I had always heard that UMS was up there with the major arts presenters in the country, but never did I realize the instant respect others in the field gave to those associated with this organization. The APAP conference allowed me to see the bigger picture and understand how the work I am doing for UMS contributes to its success, even if it is something as simple as hanging a poster in a store window. Volunteering at the conference was more than just a chance to get away for a weekend; it was one of the many opportunities UMS has given me to explore what lies ahead in the field of arts presenting.

By Leonard Navarro, UMS Education Intern

Many of us that work for organizations like the University Musical Society take extreme pride in what we do. Our time is devoted to workshops, projects and performances each demanding our interest, focus and daresay a bit of our hearts. When my family asks what I do, I usually say something like, "Oh, I work for an Arts Presenters organization that focus on Cultural enrichment within the community and promoting artists for the betterment of music, dance, theatre, visual and other performing arts." …It is at this point that the blank stares and quizzical reactions take effect. Indeed, being new to
UMS, and freshly from a Performing Arts High School and the International School of the Americas in the heart of South Texas, UMS seemed something of a mystery to me. The organization was filled with deadlines, posters around every corner, meetings going on in every space and card board boxes that no one really knew the contents of. It was a blessing to find that other students were working in the office, each as diligently as the other. Thus began the creation of a group known as i-team. I-team WAS a think-tank of knowledge and problem solving skills that lacked a solidifying bond of some kind. It is
my belief that that bond was created in the electrifying atmosphere that is APAP.

As a team, an i-team if you will, we met one cold afternoon in a coffee shop to schedule our flights, combine schedules and book accommodations for the Conference. We really did not know exactly what we were getting ourselves into. Would we really be the right representatives? Was it worth our time? Were we really into this complex Arts Presenting world? A resounding yes flooded through our minds as we landed at La Guardia airport in New York City.

Once at the conference, our immediate response can be described best as mildly terrifying. We were given so many opportunities that we really created a juncture in our understanding of what UMS is. Noticeably, the relationships created by UMS and most definitely our earnest staff led by Ken Fischer, (known eloquently as "The Fish") were incredible. I had the pleasure to attend the Arab Leadership seminar and discussion and in no way could the team of interns or anyone else have gained that wisdom and knowledge without the focus and energy of UMS. The moments like this caused the team to take a
breath and really grasp what fortunate tools were in our grasp. Raw knowledge, artistic connections, and self enrichment were in our hands no matter where we went.

At the University of Michigan I study Musical Theatre at the prestigious Music School. Since childhood I have been wooed by the performing arts and actor singers. While at APAP I stumbled upon a showcase that was a unified performance of everything I hope to become. The showcase was for the management company “On Spot Management,” which represents such artists as Stephen Schwartz, (writer of the mega-musical WICKED), and singers like Lauren Kennedy, Christine Ebersole, Adam Pascal, Alice Ripley and Ken Page, ALL of whom can be found on the i-pod of any Musical Theatre Major in the United States. Seeing their performances in the intimate setting of a conference room in the lobby of the Hilton was mind blowing. What were garnered there were artistic tools that I could carry with me for my own uses as a performer, and moreover from whom better than the Broadway stars of my time.

The i-team very quickly created bonds as we sat in the famed Broadway theatre and watched the Tony Winning performance of THE COLOR PURPLE. Though I admittedly cried more than any other person in the orchestra section we were all greatly moved. In the late evenings we usually had the opportunity to visit the Major University Presenters Suite (Codenamed M.U.P.S.) at the Hilton. There, many great people had the ability to sit and converse about the brilliant experiences we had gone through during that day. Colleen Jennings-Roggensack spoke with the interns about her passion for Artistic Creation and how that was the basis for her work. This was a point that rings in the ears of any performer. She later that week went on to win the Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award, the most prestigious award given at the conference. We can pride ourselves on knowing her before she became famous!

As our trip was coming to an end, the reflections back on the entire excursion were filled with really an honor of knowing what we had been a part of. I-team has a relationship that will continue to benefit UMS and all that we effect and just as great we each have a stronger understanding of the business AND passion that goes hand in hand with Arts Presenting. Thank you to the rest of the team and especially to those that are our mentors at UMS. It was a great pleasure and we hope and intend to see you again next year!

By Liz Georgoff, UMS Marketing Intern Looking back at the APAP conference, I find it surprisingly appropriate that the word “new” is in the name of the city that where the conference was held: New York. This is because I had the most new experiences condensed into a four day period than probably ever before in my life. These new experiences were broad and diverse and what I learned from them has made my work and relationships at UMS more meaningful.

Being at the conference, (which was held in practically every available space at the Hilton in Manhattan) I was amazed by the massive scale of professionals in the arts presenting field gathered there. When Ken [Fischer, President of UMS] guided us through the resource room, which was essentially three banquet halls filled with hundreds of booths displaying every kind of artist and their work, usually divided by dance/theater company or talent agent, I got to see the “other” part of what goes on in the field. I recognized many of the agencies of artists that we’ve hosted at UMS. Seeing all of this put into perspective the wide range of artists UMS’s Programming Director Michael Kondziolka sifts through in order to determine who ends up performing at Hill Auditorium and how artists and arts presenters even come together. I realized that Ken Fischer knows everyone in the business, and everyone knows him. I remember walking past a booth and hearing a man say to another, “There’s Ken Fischer, the president of UMS and some interns. He always seems to bring interns but this time he has quite an entourage.” I couldn’t help but laugh and feel proud of UMS and the fact that I was there. It became apparent that UMS is a pretty big deal. I came to understand this, for example, from the positive responses I got from both presenters and exhibitors (artists/agents) when I identified myself as an intern at UMS.

I realized that a lot of what goes on in this field is dependent on relationships and who knows who. I got to meet a lot of incredible and important people, through my affiliation with UMS and Ken in the Major University Presenter’s Suite (aka the MUP’s suite), the most notable to me being Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, Arizona State University’s version of Ken who told me that the only key to success is to follow your passion. Following a passion such as the arts can seem to be taking a shaky path for one’s future in comparison to the UM engineers or pre-law majors; her comment and this conference showed me how many opportunities there are for someone as in love with art and culture as myself and that UMS has already opened doors for me. My fellow members of I-Team (which stands for Intern Team), shared my excitement over the discovery of possible career paths. We also shared the experience of seeing the Color Purple and an excursion backstage to meet one of the actresses. In addition, we shared in experiences such as being ripped off on a late night meal and drink in Times Square, seeing Sarah Jessica Parker in the Hilton lobby at 1:30 am, pretending to have money in Prada on 5^th Avenue, feeling swanky in the 45^th floor penthouse, seeing showcases for free of the Second City and an Australian a capella group and having a photo shoots in newly purchased hats and windy elevators. The list could go on, but I know that I-Team truly became a cohesive team from this trip.

It was new for me to not wear jeans for four days in a row, to be treated like an adult, to spend almost forty dollars on dinner and to hand out business cards. But it was all incredible and gave me a preview of the kind of career and adult life that I could one day have. Attending this conference was like finding those last pieces to a puzzle; it had helped me to step back and look at UMS and see how it fits into the larger field of arts presenting and essentially the role that presenting art has in a society’s culture. For example, through Ken’s panel discussion on “Presenting Iraq” I learned that presenting the art of different cultures can in fact do significant work in facilitating cultural tolerance which can ultimately ease political and cultural tensions. Before the trip I remember listening to Frank Sinatra’s song, “New York, New York” in which at one point of it he croons out, “I want to be apart of it all.” Coming home, I realized I did get to be a part of it all in that I got to really participate in a process of spreading culture and art from New York to the rest of the world. Having never been to New York before, this was exactly how I wanted to experience it for the first time and I will never forget all I learned from my new experiences in New York.

By Liz Stover, UMS Programming Intern

Before I even left for the APAP conference, I was overwhelmed! I didn’t really know what to expect. My boss, Mark Jacobson (UMS Programming Manager) sent me emails daily about performances he had heard about and thought I should attend. I spent a couple hours looking through the lists of hundreds of free performance showcases, trying to plan out which ones I wanted to see. But when I arrived bright and early at 8am on Friday to fulfill some of my volunteer hours, I knew that I wouldn’t follow a schedule at all. I spent the first morning checking in conference attendees and helping them register. It was so cool to meet so many different people in the field from all over the world in those first few hours. I can’t tell you how many people noticed UMS on my name tag and expressed to me how great it was that I worked with the organization.

One of the biggest highlights of the conference was Ira Glass’ (from NPR’s This American Life) keynote speech on Saturday afternoon. I wish I had a recording or a transcript of the talk so that I could quote it (it is copyrighted), but it was centered on the question “What are the arts good for?” Even though his domain is radio, it was very inspiring to hear, especially for a young person interested in the arts like myself. He stressed how important it is for you to include personal humor in your work no matter who your audience is, so that your work will always bring you personal joy.

One of my goals for the conference was to network, and with the help of Ken and some of the UMS staff, I was introduced to so many fabulous people. Most inspiring was Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, the Executive Director of Arizona State University’s Public Events. She spent so much time speaking with our group of interns and giving us advice on how to succeed in the world of arts presenting. She is also extremely dedicated to being a mentor for women in arts presenting, and I plan to keep in contact with her as I move along in my career. She was also the recipient of this year’s Fan Taylor Distinguished Service Award in the field of presenting, and in her acceptance speech at the final Awards Luncheon she mentioned how impressed she was to have met us U-M students and how confident she was that the future of arts presenting was in good hands! I couldn’t have felt more valued and excited at that moment to be surrounded by hundreds of people in the arts presenting field. I also got to meet Zarin Mehta, President and CEO of the New York Philharmonic, and several people from the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, all places that I would love to work at someday! I also met two former UMS interns, Carla Dirlikov, a professional singer, and Erika Floreska, the Director of Education for Jazz at Lincoln Center, who both told me that working for UMS has had a very positive impact on their careers.

The weekend was an overwhelming rush, but everything came together by the time I got back on the plane to return to Ann Arbor. Working in the programming department, I’ve learned a lot about how our seasons are planned and prepared for, but I’ve only seen it from the side of the presenter. Being at the conference completed the puzzle that is arts presenting; I saw presenters, agents, and artists interacting together all in one place. I got to know other members of the UMS staff, and got even closer with the other UMS interns. I had always known that UMS was highly regarded, but the conference made me realize how lucky I am to be a part of it. UMS presents the best of the best artists out there. For anyone who reads this, you are extremely fortunate to be involved with the University Musical Society, whether you work for them, or attend an occasional concert. Thank you so much to the UMS staff members who were there and to everyone I had the chance to meet—you made my experience at APAP so worthwhile!

For information on 07/08 UMS internship positions or for information on the UMS Student Committee, please visit www.ums.org/students

Handel's Messiah Arts and Eats Event

2006-12-05T15:13:00.001-05:00

The Arts & Eats event that preceeded Saturday's production of Handel's Messiah was an awesome success! 451 students purchased Arts & Eats tickets to this event, which is quickly becoming one of the more unique community building experiences available to student ticket buyers -- not to mention an event that makes the UMS experience so much more than just going to the concert alone. Saturday's Arts & Eats talk was given by University of Michigan School of Music Associate Professor of Conducting, Paul Rardin. Check out these photos from Saturday night's event!

Couldn't make Handel's Messiah? Don't miss the next Arts & Eats event!
Bright Sheng's Silver River
Friday, January 12, 8 pm
More info.

Arts & Eats tickets are only $12 and include great seats, a free pizza dinner before the performance, and a brief talk by a seasoned expert on the evening's performance. Tickets available at the Michigan League Ticket Office, or online 2 weeks prior to the event at www.arts.umich.edu/ums

Click here to view more photos of the Messiah Arts & Eats event on Facebook.

Handel's Messiah: The creation of UMS, 128 years ago!

2006-11-21T13:08:00.000-05:00

If you hadn’t realized, Ann Arbor, Michigan is an extremely independent and industrious place to live. Central to the community of Ann Arbor is the University Musical Society. Affiliated with, but not part of U of M, UMS remains a fundemental source for creative an artistic experiences, presenting over 80 performances annually. The University Musical Society (UMS) was formed by a group of local university and townspeople who gathered together for the study of Handel's Messiah. For more information on the beginnings of UMS click here.

Since that first season in 1880, UMS has expanded greatly and now presents the very best from the full spectrum of the performing arts' internationally renowned recitalists and orchestras, dance and chamber ensembles, jazz and world music performers, and opera and theatre. Through educational endeavors, commissioning of new works, youth programs, artist residencies and other collaborative projects, UMS has maintained its reputation for quality, artistic distinction and innovation. UMS now hosts approximately 75 performances and more than 100 educational events each season.

This December 2nd, consider attending The University Musical Society’s presentation of Handel’s Messiah. Be a part of the tradition that got UMS started all those years ago! If you’re a University student, consider purchasing an Arts and Eats ticket, attend the free pizza dinner before the show and hear a talk given by U-M Assistnant Prof. of Conducting, Paul Rardin. To order your ticket to Handel’s Messiah, call 734-764-2538 or click here

Anticipating The Trio Mediaeval

2006-11-08T09:59:00.000-05:00

By Colin Miller

I can't really explain my interest in what is usually called "early music". It's just one of those things, you know? Initially it sounds like an odd preference to have, and I wouldn't consider myself to be an aficionado, but you don't question what you like. If it feels right to you, you go with it. The particular sound, so rich with history and a sort of passionate grace just grabs me when I hear it. When it's done particularly well it's something to behold. Once you hear the voices of the three ladies in Trio Mediaeval, I think you too will understand. The group consists of three (no, really?) young Norwegian sopranos, who perform polyphonic English and French medieval music, Norwegian medieval ballads and songs, and also contemporary work. To hear them is to be astounded by the capability for beauty in the human voice. The catch is that I haven't had the chance to hear them live yet, but that will soon be corrected as I plan to attend the concert they are giving, organized by the University Musical Society on Thursday, November 16th at the St. Francis of Assisi Church. I imagine there's a difference between hearing a CD and experiencing the sound in that particular setting. I have high expectations, and getting
off of a rough and busy period of work and school there's nothing I'm looking forward to more than taking the night off to have those expectations blown away.

Most blurbs on the group simply quote the litany of superlatives and endorsements that others have heaped on them. It's easy enough to find that sort of promotion-by-quoting. A simple Google search will get you pages of reviewers, some scrambling to find all the right words, some any word at all, left speechless by the beauty of these voices. That was more than enough to convince me to check out a live recording, which lead to more investigation and more listening, and now they're coming to Ann Arbor. Rush tickets are available for only $10, an amazing deal. UMS brings in groups from all over the world and lets students partake for less than it would cost to buy the CD. Twice the experience, at about half the price. And if you're not convinced you'll like it, you still get to preview it for less than the cost of a movie ticket and a bag of popcorn. Expand your horizons, you can't lose.

Watching The Tempest

2006-11-07T16:42:00.000-05:00

Blog entry by Liz Georgoff

Last Wednesday was probably the coolest Wednesday I have ever had. I woke up, went to class, ate some lunch and then did a little reading…You know all that normal daily grind stuff. BUT THEN, I put all that and aside and headed over to the Power Center to help usher at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s dress rehearsal of The Tempest. After showing various high school groups to their seats I found myself a seat and within minutes, I was completely blown away.

The Tempest opens up with a violent shipwreck scene. Before the show began it was beyond me as to how they were possibly going to show it such a scene on stage. I guess I was forgetting who I was going to see, because the Royal Shakespeare Company is no average theatrical group. They went above and beyond, with spectacular lights, sounds effects and settings. Basically the gist of the setup included a large screen that took up the entirety of the stage with an image of a transistor radio on it. The round speaker of the radio doubly functioned as a pothole-esque window in which the actors stood, or should I say, swayed around on a set that looked like the deck of a ship. All the while, there was dramatic music and frantic lighting. On top of all that, there was even a translucent kind of video imagery being projected over the entirety of the stage on the screen of crashing, violent waves.

This layer upon layer of visual stimuli created quite a spectacle! I can’t imagine a way that a theater company could capture so dramatically and effectually the mood and events of an actual shipwreck on small stage in the Power Center. The rest of the show was up to par with the grand beginning, what with Patrick Stewart strutting around on stage with his shirt off, excellent acting, creative costumes and a unique set placing the story in the artic. The character of Miranda got on my nerves a little, as she came off as very childish and not at all ready to get married as she does at the end of the play, but perhaps I don’t understand her character as well as the actress.

During intermission I realized I was sitting next to the Assistant Director Steve Marmion. We started talking and I was able to help him out by giving him my impressions of the show. He was incredibly friendly and when he told me he had directed The Tempest five other times, I was surprised because he seemed so young. Getting to speak to one of the creative masterminds of the show made my experience even more exciting.

Overall, this was by far the best live Shakespeare I had ever seen. I understand now why people stood in line for hours in the cold rain to get tickets earlier this year to see the RSC. I have no doubt that Shakespeare would be proud.

More Photos -- RSC's Patrick Stewart conducts the U-M Marching Band

2006-11-07T16:36:00.000-05:00

RSC's Patrick Stewart took a turn conducting the U-M Marching Band during half-time at the U-M/Ball State football game last weekend. See some photos on the UMS Facebook Album.

Stewart Takes Command of the University of Michigan Field Band

2006-11-03T15:51:00.000-05:00

By Amy Fingerle, Michigan Band Member and UMS Intern

Patrick Stewart (in town starring in Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra) made a guest appearance at the Michigan Marching Band’s snowy afternoon rehearsal on Thursday, November 1. This weekend at the U-M/Ball State football game, Patrick Stewart will once again take the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard as he conducts the band during halftime for “The Victors” and the Star Trek theme song. He will make his conducting debut, for which he specifically took conducting classes, at the Big House in front of over 100,000 people. Stay tuned for an update on Saturday’s performance!

Discover, Eat, Chat, Mingle: UMS' Arts & Eats

2006-10-26T13:07:00.000-04:00

By Rob Vuichard

If you happened to be at Saturday's Kirov Orchestra Arts and Eats Event, you may have noticed that a lot of people showed up - just like you! Close to 350 tickets were sold to Saturday's event, and an astounding 95 pizzas were ordered! If you aren't familiar with UMS's Arts and Eats, you should consider coming to one of the fun, monthly events. If your idea of a weekend outing includes friends, food, learning and good music, dance or theater, Arts and Eats is a really great deal if you're on a student budget!

For $12 dollars, (up to a 60% savings) any student can purchase a ticket to any of the A&E events. That ticket will grant you access to a private pizza gathering that begins an hour to an hour and a half before the night's big event. Students mingle, catch up or chat about the performance they've come to see. Central to the Arts & Eats event, is a guest speaker who gives attendees a scholarly, but informative talk on the music, composer or the group performing. The 10-15 minute presentation given by School of Music Doctoral student Nathan Platte was really helpful considering the Kirov Orchestra’s serious program of Russian symphonic music.

If you're a new student, friendless for an evening, or unsure of what would be a good event to see, consider attending Arts and Eats, and take a chance on a composer, group or performance you might not be familiar with! For only $12 dollars you get a great seat and free pizza – how could you go wrong? The next UMS Arts & Eats event is Jonathan Biss, piano - Sat. November 18, 8 pm in Hill Auditorium. Tickets for Jonanthan Biss' Arts & Eats Event go to: www.arts.umich.edu/ums/

For more information on Arts & Eats and UMS’s student ticket programs, go to:
http://www.ums.org/students

Tickets go on sale approximately two weeks before the concert. For more information, call 734-764-2538.

In Anticipation: Shostakovich, Valery Gergiev, and the Kirov

2006-10-16T12:16:00.000-04:00

by NATHAN PLATTE
Graduate Student Instructor Dept. of Musicology, U of Michigan School of Music

I first saw the Kirov Orchestra perform at Hill Auditorium in 1998. A Tchaikovsky enthusiast, I was attracted by the program (the complete ballet score of The Nutcracker); I did not recognize the orchestra. Considering that The Nutcracker is piped annually from TVs and motorized Santa Clauses from October through December, it is a sad fact that the music is frequently performed and heard indifferently. This particular evening, however, was well outside the norm. Orchestral textures sparkled freshly, the famous melodies spun with intoxicating swiftness, and the pas de deux became the most breathtakingly beautiful five minutes of music ever. Above all, Valery Gergiev’s conducting and the orchestra’s rich sound was unlike anything I had seen or heard before.

Since then, I have gone to every Kirov performance in the Ann Arbor area (not to mention a road trip to D.C.) and have enjoyed more than several nights of incredible music, consistently performed to the hilt. Time and time again, it is the orchestra’s unique sound that impresses me. Writers often describe world-class orchestras’ sonorities as “transparent,” “lucid,” and “meticulously balanced,” like a “well-oiled machine.” None of these words effectively capture the Kirov’s appeal; I prefer to liken their sound to an irresistible and visceral natural phenomenon. Niagara Falls and thunder storms come first to mind as I recall the orchestra’s sound gushing and gusting forth, billowing out into the hall…

Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra return to Ann Arbor this weekend for the second half of their Shostakovich Centennial Festival. This particular visit includes six Shostakovich symphonies performed across three concerts. Each night features two symphonies that together reflect the musical breadth and depth of the composer. Performed on Friday and Saturday respectively, Symphonies 11 and 12 are commemorative works—written in memoriam of the birth pangs of communism in Russia. Symphony 11 depicts the 1905 Bloody Sunday Massacre in which Imperial guards in St. Petersburg opened fire upon a peaceful workers’ protest. Symphony 12 is a musical monument to the 1917 October Revolution. As their subject matter suggests, these works are intensely programmatic (one might even liken them to film scores). Symphonies 6 (Friday) and 8 (Sunday) are not dedicated to specific events, but reflect the social and cultural context out of which they were born during World War II. Symphony 8 is especially vivid and disturbing, at one point reenacting a military invasion through orchestral artillery explosions and screams. In Symphonies 13 and 14, Shostakovich turns to poetry of a potent and tragic nature. Symphony 13, which includes the text of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar,” memorializes the German massacre of Jews in Kiev while simultaneously criticizing the anti-Semitism rife in Soviet society. Symphony 14, perhaps the oddest Shostakovich symphony of all, sets a series of “death” poems by various authors to music that is alternately morose, blackly ironic, and strange. Taken together, the three concerts present a rich panorama of Shostakovich’s works, offering fascinating music played by St. Petersburg’s premiere conductor and orchestra: Valery Gergiev and the Kirov.

UMS Releases Limited Number of RSC Tickets to General Public

2006-10-06T15:49:00.000-04:00

Did you hear about the RSC Student Ticket Sale last Saturday, September 30? Were you one of the brave souls that came out in the rain? Did you wait in line for hours and even then not get a ticket?? (Read below!) We estimate that there were over 700 people in line -- the first person arrived at 4:45 pm Friday (16+ hours before the sale!). It was wonderful to see so much interest in the RSC from the student community.

While there are no more student tickets available, UMS is pleased to announce that a limited number of full-price tickets for selected performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company will go on sale to the general public on Tuesday, October 10 at 9 am.

Tickets may be purchased in person at the Michigan League Ticket Office or by phone (734-764-2538 or 800-221-1229). Tickets will not be available over the internet. Tickets will be available for all three titles and range in price from $40 to $150. UMS can accept cash, check, or any major credit card for purchase.

If you were unable to purchase a student ticket through the RSC Student Ticket Sale but are still interested in seeing the RSC, here's your chance! UMS will also start a waitlist at the Power Center Box Office 90 minutes before each RSC performance (full-priced tickets only).

All students are invited to take advantage of the many free educational events surrounding the RSC residency:

Royal Shakespeare Company Educational Event Listing [PDF]

RSC Student Ticket Sale: In The Pouring Rain!!!

2006-10-03T14:40:00.000-04:00

If you happened to pass by the corners of Fletcher and Huron by car this past Saturday morning, you might have wondered why so many people were lined up in the cold, damp rain. The event, which brought nearly 800 students to the Power Center was none other than the Royal Shakespeare Company Student Ticket Sale!

Umbrellas, scarves, socks, winter coats, hats and mittens and even tents adorned Fletcher Street this past Saturday morning as students assembled to purchase what remained of the coveted RSC/UMS residency tickets. At the front of the line were many brave students who showed up to purchase tickets Friday evening -- the first person in line got there 16.5 hours before the sale even started! Taking on the night, roughly 100 students camped outdoors in a huddled mass of tents and blankets to be some of the first students from the University to receive tickets to one, two or all of the Shakespeare productions.

The Royal Shakespeare Company will visit the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for a three week residency in October - November 2006 with Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, and The Tempest. The plays are part of the RSC's year-long Complete Works Festival, which runs in Stratford-upon-Avon from April 2006 - 2007. Ann Arbor is the only city in the United States to host these plays.

Of the more than two thousand tickets set aside for students during the residency, many of the tickets were used in conjunction with Univesity classes designed around the residency with the RSC. When doors opened, students were allowed to purchase up to three tickets per student ID; one ticket per RSC title. Unfortunately not everyone in line was able to purchase a ticket, but it was truly amazing to see the overwhelming support from students who showed up! If you did not receive tickets during the student ticket sale, but are very serious about seeing a show, contact the UMS Ticket Office at 734-764-2538 and make sure they have your information on file. While there are no more student tickets available, if full-price tickets become available, the UMS Ticket Office will send out an email with information on how and when to purchase those tickets.

The RSC Residency runs in Ann Arbor at The Power Center Auditorium from Oct. 24th - Nov. 12th. For more information visit www.ums.org

All students are welcome to participate in the many free educational events as part of the RSC Residency. More info: www.ums.org/education

More pictures from the RSC Student Ticket Sale: http://umichigan.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2118977&id=2261151

By Rob Vuichard

Emerson String Quartet: Return of an Ann Arbor Tradition

2006-10-03T12:56:00.000-04:00

By Rob Vuichard
By the time the final thundering chord of Brahm's first Piano Quartet disappeared into the air of Rackham Auditorium, the audience was already on its feet. The standing ovation for the Emerson String Quartet was of course, no accident. The sprawling audience enveloped the proscenium stage from every angle, loudly proclaiming the excellence of the performance. The humble bows of the four onstage musicians were elegant and unapologetic, because no matter where they go, their artistry is felt and adored by their many fans.

The Emerson String Quartet is one of the world's foremost chamber ensembles and has amassed an impressive list of achievements: a brilliant series of recordings exclusively documented by Deutsche Grammophon since 1987, seven Grammy Awards including two unprecedented "Best Classical" Album, three Gramophone awards, and performances in major concert venues throughout the world. Aside from all their successes, Emerson is certainly at home with Ann Arbor, Saturday's performance marking their 13th UMS appearance since 1989.

What was so special about Friday night’s performance was that the quartet became a trio; Eugene Drucker (violinist), sitting in on viola for an absent Larry Dutton who was on leave for medical reasons. In addition pianist Wu Han, co - director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center joined the trio for the second half of the program on the Brahm’s Piano Quartet, Op. 25, making her UMS debut. I had the unique and exciting experience of turning pages for Wu Han. In our 6:00 PM rehearsal, we spoke about our summers. I had the privilege of being at the Aspen Music Festival and saw Wu Han and Emerson there earlier in the season, making our meeting a fun experience to reconnect and talk about our summer in the mountains. Like old friends we chatted in between rehearsal breaks, while we worked together to connect her laptop to the wireless internet connection in the Rackham Building.

After the show, Emerson greeted a list of guests in the green room, including many old friends most of whom were UM School of Music, Theater and Dance faculty. The event ended with a signing, sponsored by Borders Books. Later that evening, David Finckel and Wu Han were spotted outside the Power Center, chatting and laughing in the middle of a tent city of students that had assembled for the following morning’s Royal Shakespeare Company Student Ticket Sale! It was no surprise that UM music students spotted the duo immediately, and posed for pictures taken in the early morning hours, by none other than UMS President, Ken Fischer.

Translinear Light: Alice Coltrane Quartet, A Celebration of John Coltrane's 80th Birthday

2006-09-26T14:52:00.000-04:00

By Rob Vuichard
Saturday’s performance of the Alice Coltrane Quartet was a once in a lifetime event. The concert was carried out as commemoration and tribute to John Coltrane on what would have been his 80th birthday. This one-night-only event showcased the talents of Pianist Alice Coltrane, wife of the late John Coltrane; their son Ravi Coltrane on Tenor Sax, as well as living legends Roy Haynes on Drum Set and Charlie Haden on String Bass.

Playing to a sold-out-house, The quartet played in a style marked and inspired the oud, the drone instrument so prevalent in the music of Indian Sitar master Ravi Shankar, a long term friend of the late Coltrane. The lyric fluidity of Alice Coltrane’s playing mixed with the mellow beauty of her son’s sax was a stirring homage to the partner and father that was taken from them tragically in 1967. Accompanying the performance was a tribute film to John Coltrane offering insight to the innovations that Coltrane made musically and socially, as his art was at the apex of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s.
Backstage, I was able to interface with the quartet. Alice and Ravi were extremely nice and humble people. Ravi and I had a great conversation about improvisatory music, as senior Noah Reitman talked shop with fellow bassist, Charlie Haden. Following the show Alice and Ravi were greeted by close to 30 family members from the Detroit area, Alice’s childhood home. “This is great!” remarked Emily Avers, a UMS Production Staff member as she stood back to see the large group regaling old family memories, while Producer Mark Jacobson snapped photos of the unforgettable homecoming. School of Music junior Melissa Gardiner, who was the recipient of the John Coltrane Scholarship, was given the opportunity to play her trombone in concert with the group during their Hill debut. When I asked her what the experience was like she said: “It was the most amazing thing, my heart is still pounding.” Check out more Jazz offerings this UMS Season at www.ums.org

BALLET FOLKLORICO DE MEXICO de Amalia Hernandez

2006-09-26T13:54:00.000-04:00

I’ve enjoyed most of the Ballet I’ve been exposed to (most of it by U.S. companies), so when I took my seat at Thursday night’s performance of Amalia Hernandez’ Ballet Folkorico de Mexico, I really had no clue what to expect. It is no secret that a large amount of concert, theater and dance presentations offered to audiences in the United States, are European in derivation. In response to this, UMS’ season spotlights the cultural offerings of Mexico and the Americas with a varied roster of internationally recognized acts from the South American Continent, allowing audiences the opportunity to connect with unique and rare artistic presentations.

Naturally, not having been exposed to Mexican Ballet, I was curious and excited to see what the group was going to be like. In the dark of Hill Auditorium, a voice cried out over the rumble of percussive drums, and before me were 30 stunning male dancers, elegantly dressed in bright and expressive costume of the Mexican dance tradition. As they danced, the form of the ballet was held together with the expressive, earthy arabesque of the male form. Low to the ground, the men danced the traditional Mexican, Matachines. The Matachines is a dance performed in the Northern part of Mexico City. This dance is inspired by the customs of Pre-Hispanic people who danced exclusively to worship their gods. This dance has survived through the centuries of Spanish Conquest and occupation of Mexico and has been preserved to this day. What made this experience most amazing was the live musicians who accompanied many of the ballets presented with traditional Mexican folk music of centuries past. The company also presented to a sold out Hill Auditorium the following evening.

In 1952, Dancer and Choreographer Amalia Hernandez founded the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico, having embarked at a very early age on a never-ending quest to rescue the dancing traditions of Mexico. This vital search came from a basic need to express (not only in Mexico, but in the rest of the world) the beauty of the universe in motion through dances from the Pre-Colombian era, to the Hispanic vice Royal period to the popular movement of the Revolutionary years. Since 1959, the company has presented over 5,000 performances, and both Amalia Hernandez as well as the Ballet Folklorico, have been distinguished with more than 200 awards. If you missed the wonderful offerings of Ballet Folklorico, here is a list of other UMS season offerings presenting the cultural diversity of Latin America!

Manuel Barrueco and Cuarteto Latinoamericano
Sun, Nov 19th, 4 pmRackham Auditorium

Tamango’s Urban Tap:Bay Mo Dilo (Give Me Water)
Wed, Mar 14, 8 PM Michigan Theater

Gilberto Gil
Friday, March 16, 8 PM Hill Auditorium

Pablo Ziegler Quintet for New Tango
Claudia Acuña, vocalist
Friday, March 30, 8 PMRackham Auditorium

Los Folkloristas
Sunday, April 22, 4 PMRackham Auditorium

UMS Student Blog !!!

2006-09-19T15:21:00.000-04:00

The University Musical Society (a.k.a. UMS) brings performers from all over the globe for you to enjoy right here in Ann Arbor. As a student, you can experience the world's best in classical music, jazz, world music & dance, modern dance, and theatre right here on campus! Check back often for student thoughts and reflections on this season's concert and event schedule. Feel free to leave your thoughts and to start a discussion on what you liked or didn't like!

Enjoy -

Rob Vuichard
UMS Student Blog Moderator