Fourteen musicians from the NMSU Music Department will present a free concert on Tuesday evening showcasing works for six main musical areas: strings, winds, brass, percussion, voice, and piano. Flute professor Marta Plominska, who coordinated the concert, said in this interview that faculty are invited to play pieces of their choice and many ask their colleagues to perform with them.
“We have chamber groups, we have solo performances, we welcome all sorts of different repertoire for these concerts,” she said, which take place once each semester.
Trumpet professor Jacob Dalager, who also came to the interview, will perform an original composition, “No Mud, No Lotus,” with horn players Angela Winter and Nancy Joy, and trombonist Dawid Mzyk. The piece was written for the International Horn Symposium in Poland this past summer, and the title comes from the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn.
“Lotus is a symbolic flower in Buddhist tradition, and it’s a symbol of purity and enlightenment, but of course it grows in swamps. So it comes out of the mud. Out of this icky, gross thing that we don’t like comes this beautiful flower.” Dalager said the music expresses the idea that “Through persevering through those difficult times, that’s when the true beauty of life can persist and show itself.”
The concert also features an original marimba concerto written by percussion faculty Jeff Ausdemore. Other faculty who will participate in the concert are cellist Jorge L. Espinoza, singers Eike Gunnarson and Sarah Neely, horn player Joshua Pantoja, saxophonist Rhonda Taylor, violinist Daniel Vega-Albela, and pianists Yoshiko Arahata and Seth Zamora. Listen to the interview to hear more about the range of music to be performed by composers such as Haydn, Johan Halversen, Venezuelan composer Efrain Amaya, Spanish composer Ruperto Chapi and Mexican composer Samuel Zyman.
The concert takes place on Tuesday, October 20 at 7:30 p.m. at the Atkinson Recital Hall.
Musical clips:
Adrienne Albert, Lament, performed in private recording by Marta Plominska and Dawid Mzyk.
Johan Halversen, Passacaglia, performed by Antoine Bareil and Stéphane Tétreault (Analekta cd #9888).
Samuel Zyman, Cancion de Cuna, performed by Jonathan Borja and Hector Landa (Albany/Troy cd #1937).
