The School of Music's Wind Orchestra teamed up with the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design’s art students for “Framed: Art & Music,” a concert experience melding music and fine art, on Nov. 16 at the Florence Kopleff Recital Hall.
The program featured conductors Chester B. Phillips and graduate student Jonathan Kochik with a painting exhibition by third-year Master of Fine Arts graduate students Amelia Carley and Aaron Putt, as well as an animated video montage produced by students in professor Joseph Peragine’s Digital Possibilities class.
The work of Carley and Putt, projected on a screen, interpreted the music of Karel Husa’s "Al Fresco" (1975) according to their individual aesthetic impressions. The performance yielded bold abstractions and a lyrical landscape.
“The collaboration between art and music seemed too obvious not to make it happen,” Phillips said. “Why not let the audience have both?"
According to the program notes, the video assignment was to create an animation to accompany the performance of Claude Debussy’s Engulfed Cathedral. Like Debussy, the class looked to Claude Monet (1840-1926), the seminal Impressionist painter, for inspiration. Each student chose a Monet painting as the initial frame of animation, and then morphed their image into the next student’s work. The project resembled a relay race with an end-result of cohesion while highlighting each student’s point of view in relation to Debussy’s score.
Professor Peragine stated, “As the College matures, I believe this sort of collaboration will become the norm. It was intimidating and exciting to work towards a finished video, and then to have it shown on the big screen shortly after its completion. For two years in a row, the students have stepped up to the challenge. Overall, I was very impressed especially with the orchestra...just perfect!"