Space, the musical frontier.
The orbits of Clark College’s music and aerospace programs will intersect Saturday in a concert featuring sounds inspired by stars, planets, black holes and other wonders of the universe. Some of the student musicians are also student engineers who work on computer-aided drone and spacecraft design, and those will be on display with other projects during the event.
“Engineering students have that brain function that translates to music very well,” said Richard Inouye, director of the Clark College Concert Band. “This is a great collaboration.”
Collaboration with other departments is always important to Clark’s music scene; for example, Inouye said, French and Spanish students help out with intermission concessions — and draw attention to their programs — when the concert program is relevant. In this case, Inouye said, there was an almost cosmic coming-together of musicians and scientists.
“I was kicking around a space theme or flight theme or stars theme for a concert,” Inouye said, about when aerospace program director Keith Stansbury approached him about a collaboration. “It was a fantastic twist of fate. It all fell into place.”
Get ready for stargazing sounds from across the centuries. Clark’s Concert Choir will perform pieces as old as the 15th century and as new as “SINGularity,” by contemporary composer Timothy Michael Powell, inspired by the discovery of a supergiant black hole that generates the deepest tone in the universe: a B-flat that’s 57 octaves below middle C. (The lowest note the human ear can hear is a wave whose oscillation takes about one-twentieth of a second; this black hole generates waves lasting about 10 million years.)
And the Concert Band will tour the cosmos in Julie Giroux’s “Space Symphony”; revisit Roman mythology in “Mars, Bringer of War” from Gustav Holst’s classic suite “The Planets”; and even march along with “The Eagle Squadron” by Kenneth Alford — a tip of the hat to the daring American pilots who volunteered for Britain’s Royal Air Force before the United States entered World War II.
Reprise
Meanwhile, Clark College’s former choral director is back on the scene. Even though she retired last June, April Duvic never really left.
“From literally the minute I retired,” Duvic said, “I was hearing, ‘Wait a minute, we’re not going to be able to sing with you again? What can we do about that?'”
What Duvic did was reconnect with her former co-director at Clark, Janet Reiter, and start cooking up an ambitious new choir. This one would start out small and aim for a really high level of professionalism and challenge. The initial membership of 33 was hand-picked from the ranks of Duvic and Reiter’s former voice students and fellow music educators in the community; they mean to expand the group after word spreads, but not by a whole lot. This area already has several large, excellent community choirs, Duvic said, and she doesn’t want to step on their toes.
One superb concert each year is the goal of the new choir, called Reprise. Since so many of the members are music teachers tasked with their own seasonal concerts, Duvic and Reiter decided to convene the group after Christmas, but before spring and graduation, for three months of intensive rehearsals.
“There’s no way we can ask them to commit to rehearsal and performing when they’re busy trying to get their own holiday concerts done,” she said.
But, she added, when sheet music was purchased in November, all the singers showed up on a Saturday to pick up their copies and start practicing at home.
And different sections of Reprise have gathered to perfect their parts, she said.
“These are people who take ownership,” Duvic said. “They come to rehearsal prepared, so we don’t have to work on what-are-the-notes. We can really focus on making the music come to life.”
The theme of Reprise’s debut concerts, set for March 25 in Hazel Dell and March 26 in Camas, is “Unforgettable.” It sweeps through history like Clark’s space concert, including everything from a 16th century Norwegian piece and a Swedish folk song to love songs by Brahms and familiar tunes by Leonard Cohen and Carly Simon. There will be new classical works by Ola Gjeilo and Daniel Elder; “Pure Imagination,” from the movie “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” in honor of late actor Gene Wilder; and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” which was sung by Mahalia Jackson at the funeral of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Duvic said these pieces represent a balance between the musically challenging and the “simply beautiful.”
