“One, two, three, four,” drumsticks clashed, setting the tempo for the ensemble of brass that would follow. The NE jazz band, dressed in formal, black clothes, began playing an energetic and infectious melody.
This was just one era of music performed at the Music Through the Centuries event March 24. Instrumentalists for the evening were instructors in the department. The audience was sectioned into four groups that would travel from room to room to listen to music from the classical, Romantic, modern and jazz eras.
“Some students have never heard live music,” an instructional associate Patricia Schimpf said. “It’s fun to watch the students faces light up.”
In another building, a solemn deference hushed the audience as the voices of a student chorus filled the room with an operatic song of the classical era. A cellist followed, face alight as he drew a medley of Bach’s work. Then, a string duet, viola and violin asking questions and getting answers in an unspoken conversation Mozart composed.
“I shed a tear at some point,” NE English major William Senn said. “It was great. I can see why people enjoy attending orchestra concerts … It really puts a new appreciation on how it’s supposed to sound. There’s a lot more intention when it comes to professional musicians.”
Danny Rennie, a biology major, attended the event as a requirement for his class, but left with a new appreciation for live performance.
“It’s kind of cool to see that people around me just have that talent, and they’re actually expressing that skill that they’ve built,” he said.
A group rotated to the modernism period. Professor Jerry Ringe performed an abstract jazz clarinet solo Igor Stravinsky composed. The notes were fleeting, flying and sharp, resonating throughout room. This era featured innovative and unconventional sounds and techniques. In an improvised section of her piece, cellist and music instructor Kourtney Newton, drew her bow across the strings of her cello in a circle, rather than horizontal, creating a unique texture to her notes.
Schimpf recalled Newton’s previous performances for the event where she also experimented with technique and sound.
“She played a piece for cello and kick drum,” Schimpf said. “And last semester, she was playing the cello, and all of a sudden, she started singing. I was like, ‘All right, she’s singing!’ It was really cool.”
The audience was led to another room. There was a quiet anticipation broken by a flurry of chords as instructor Taeyu Kwon flew her fingers across the keys of the piano. Blue, bedazzled heels pumped the pedals, face buried in concentration as she played through the entirety of the romantic era pieces.
Kwon accompanied a string bass, euphonium and a vocalist. Each performance expressed the dramatic harmonies that characterize the era.
This was Rennie’s favorite room. He was taken aback by the beauty of the first piece, “Widmung,” and liked how the era began to embrace imperfections and ignore the rules set by the classical era.
“It was something about the tension building and then just breaking, like it kept fighting. The piano kept fighting the tension,” he said.
Senn hadn’t seen an orchestra since middle school. He was surprised by what difference seeing professionals perform live can make. He credited Kwon and the cellist in the classical era, Tsun Kwok, to putting their whole heart into their performances. The instructor’s dedication and vigor is what left the biggest impact on him.
“It’s not really the sheet that makes the music, it’s the person,” Senn said. “These musicians, you could tell they were passionate about what they were making and that reaches me.”
