Students of the Audio and Visual Performance Project course came together on Wednesday evening at Beall Concert Hall to perform a visual fusion of art and music.
The David Foster Experimental Course Fund has provided the money to facilitate the Audio and Visual Performance Project every year. The course emphasizes creativity and innovation within a curriculum, and experimentalism between the University’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts and the School of Music. This course aims to carry on the spirit of Foster, an art department professor emeritus who passed away in December 2002.
“It is a competitive award where we had to propose a specific curriculum that was centered on creating a horizontal learning environment where the ideas and initiatives were largely shaped by the students,” said Jack Ryan, a School of Architecture and Allied Arts professor.
Molly Barth, a flute professor who worked in tandem with Ryan, said that upon meeting Ryan two years ago, they began discussing synesthesia, which is when the brain chemically joins color and music. After the initial discussions, plans commenced for the course and the performances that would follow.
This year’s performance was divided into five different acts, all violently interrupted by sounds of orchestral horror, beauty and students moaning into pillows.
The first act began in darkness with nothing more than a trumpeter, a flutist, a shamisen player and maniacal sounds seeping out of a few speakers. After the initial darkness, projections of color behind a transparent screen appeared behind the musicians, and multiple art students created shadows with black construction paper.
The projections continued well into the second act as a different flutist and trumpeter, clad in hats and clothed in black, emerged. They performed in a call-andresponse manner while maintaining their respective roles on each instrument.
As four students acted in and around a massive, fold-out cardboard cutout that featured scenes such as a post office, a bedroom and a bathroom, a voice came over the loud speaker in the third act echoing, “It is really exciting. It’s not just a dream. It is real.”
The orchestra from above was strongly emphasized in the following act, as the sound of a chain going from one bucket to another transitioned into a flutist, an electric violinist, a drummer and an electric guitarist. All the while, stars and women illuminated by headlights were projected onto cacti cutouts.
The final act went out with a bang. A xylophone player, two flutists, a pianist and two art students all collaborated together. A seven-minute ballad carried on as the two art students colored furiously over what was seemingly a miniature funhouse, fully equipped with shutters that opened and closed sporadically.
“It reminded me of Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Requiem for a Dream,’” University sophomore Jordan Chestnut said.
University sophomore Lauren Eberle enjoyed the performance.
“The percussion from the shutters had a post-modern effect,” she said.
The audience sat through the entirety of the program in complete silence.
“It was great, really great,” Simon Hutchinson, one of the program’s shamisen players, said. “It was really nice to work collaboratively with artists in other disciplines as we all worked in different ways.”
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