It’s Academic

by Gerald Carpenter

BACK TO THE BOOKS: It looks as if, for the next
month or so, the university has become our major provider of
classical music. Certainly for the next week, just about every
musical event either happens at UCSB or under its sponsorship.

There is the conclusion of UCSB’s Primavera!
Festival, which began last Monday and ends this
Saturday. There are two significant concerts as a kind of festival
coda: the CREATE (Center for Research in Electronic Art
Technology) concert at 8 p.m. on Friday, April 21, in
Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, and then the California EAR
Unit concert at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 22, also in
Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall.

CREATE (JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, director,
Curtis Roads, associate director) will present a
concert that features new electro-acoustic and multimedia works.
The object is to bring to our attention the works of student
composers from California digital media centers at Stanford, UC San
Diego, Mills College, California Institute for the Arts, and UCSB.
The sounds will be projected on the Creatophone, a multi-channel,
pluri-phonic sound projection system. Admission to this concert is
free.

Now, to tell the truth — and I hope I can call myself a friend
to new music — I am completely unfamiliar with the California EAR
Unit, so I will just pass along the information that I have
received:

“The six-member California EAR Unit is a chamber ensemble
dedicated to the creation, performance, and promotion of new music.
For 18 seasons, EAR Unit was the Ensemble-in-Residence in the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, and is currently in residence at
CalArts.”

This concert, a program of new works featuring electronic and
acoustic instruments, with video and text by composers
Morton Subotnik, Eve Belgarian,
Shaun Naidoo, Anne LeBaron, and
EAR Unit’s Amy Knoles, will conclude with the
group’s acclaimed version of James Sellars’s Go, “a
densely textured 10-minute, non-stop vertigo trip.” There will be a
7 p.m. pre-performance demonstration of EAR Unit’s electronic
techniques with Knoles, and a meet-the-artist discussion after the
show.

Tickets to this concert can be purchased from UCSB Arts
& Lectures, 893-3535.

Now, in between the CREATE concert and the EAR Unit
concert — that is to say, at 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 22 — oboist
Cammy Yuen will play a UCSB bachelor of music
junior recital in Karl Geiringer Hall. Ms. Yuen’s assisting artists
will be John Ballerino, piano, Cecilia
Shim, cello, Jeff Lum, baritone,
Ramon Fermin, guitar, and Kristin
Park, flute; they will perform works by Antonio
Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach,
George Frederick Handel, and Mario
Castelnuovo-Tedesco. This event is not connected to the
Primavera! Festival. Admission is free.

Now, for a lusciously romantic change of pace, with the new
music folks having finished up the night before, the UCSB faculty’s
great violist Helen Callus will team up with
pianist Robert Koenig, with the assured and
exquisite assistance of flautist Jill Felber to
perform a program they call Chiaroscuro — Music of The
Heart at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 23, at the Lobero Theatre.
For once, the modest viola steps forward to make its own mellow
case for stardom in a charming, seductive program of works,
including Robert Schumann’s Adagio and
Allegro, Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and
Juliet Suite, Maurice Duruflé’s
Recitative and Variations, Henri
Vieuxtemps’s Elegy, Rebecca
Clarke’s Lullaby, Frank Bridge’s
Miniatures: Romanze and Appassionata, Ralph
Vaughan Williams’s Romanze, and the “Scherzo”
from the FAE Sonata of Johannes
Brahms.

I shall be particularly glad to hear the Frank Bridge pieces,
for everything I have heard of his has been delightful — so much
nicer than the droning of his student Benjamin Britten.

Tickets to this concert are $15 general and $10 students; call
the Lobero at 963-0761.