Composers Concert

Please join the Cal Poly Humboldt Department of Music and music composition professor Brian Post as they present the Composers Concert, an evening of new works written by an inventive and capable cohort of Humboldt music students, on Friday, November 8th at 8:00 p.m. in Fulkerson Recital Hall.  Included on the program are works for solo trumpet, clarinet, five string violin, guitar ensemble, jazz combo, synthesizer, and solo piano, the latter featuring the nimble and dynamic playing of pianist John Chernoff. $10 General, $5 Child, FREE for Humboldt Students with ID.

The repertoire for the evening will be varied, compelling, and entertaining.  Jeffrey Ruiz contributes two compositions, the first an unaccompanied work for solo trumpet that he will perform himself, and the second a polyrhythmic work for the piano which holds a two-against-three feel passed from one hand to the other while exploring harmonic territory that starts with a simple collection of pitches and intervals and expands outward from there.  Composer and pianist Erich Lenk joins guitarist Nick De Anda, bassist Emilie Silk, and drummer Travis Strong on his funky, ethereal jazz chart "The Highway," where he utilizes the film scoring technique of parallel stepwise motion on the keyboard to create a strong emotional response.  Adam Erickson revisits "Vibe" on synthesizer, which was originally written in Ableton Live and arranged for the graduating senior class of the Humboldt Music Department of Spring 2019. Erickson also offers a work for solo piano inspired by romantic era piano music and sprung from a musical motive he initially composed for an Humboldt theory assignment.  And finally, Erickson arranges a simple melody for a music box, written by video game composer Nobuo Uematsu for Final Fantasy 5, to be played and explored on four classical guitars by Erickson, Grant Hempy, Nick De Anda, and Jeffeth Lopez. Victor Vasquez plays his original composition for the five string violin entitled "Aurichalcum."  The term for a semi-mythical alloy, "Aurichalcum" uses the modern technology of a loop pedal along side old techniques inherent to the instrument, creating the alchemy of a more complex whole.  Theo Singer offers up two very different works, the first being Furshocked, an electronically realized piece that Singer describes as a "full furby symphony," comprised of carefully arranged samples of the various sounds that those furry little electronic toys make when they run out of batteries.  His second work is composed for solo clarinet and is the realization of a melody that Singer had bumping around in his head all summer, inspired by the work of Holst, Dvorak, and Shakira.