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Five Colleges to celebrate new music with three-day festival The region's first new music festival in 30 years will be a three-day, free admission celebration of Five College composers and musicians. The Five College New Music Festival takes place September 11-13, 2009 at UMass Amherst's Bezanson Recital Hall in the Fine Arts Center. Admission is free. For many people, the first step in considering attending a new music festival is to understand what kind of music it is. The term "new music" was first used to define the more adventurous evolutions of music since 1945. As Reginald Brindle Smith writes in his book The New Music: "in the wake of World War II, musicians and composers had a desire for 'artistic renewal, revision of aesthetic ideals and technical resources. . . ." Festival co-organizer Salvatore Macchia, UMass music professor, explains that new music began with "a realization that there was a broad expanse of artistic potential available to composers and performers that could quite literally embrace the whole world". New music often finds its way into movie soundtracks, perhaps most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey. In one iconic scene, a group of apes discovers a black monolith. As they gather around it, the soundtrack offers up an intense, dramatic chorus -- Requiem, by Gyorgy Ligeti. Though the work of Ligeti and fellow Hungarians Gyorgy Kurtag and Bela Bartok will cap the Five College New Music Festival on Sunday afternoon (preceded by a lecture on their music by Amherst College professor David Schneider) the festival's main thrust is in showcasing work by current and former Five College composers, including retired Amherst College professor Lewis Spratlan, whose opera Life is a Dream won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2000. "One of the things that we really want to show is that there is such an amazing amount of diverse compositional activity right here," says Macchia. "The pieces are so completely different, from works that involve elements of free improvisation to works that reference folk music." Macchia and fellow organizers Elizabeth Chang of UMass and Eric Sawyer of Amherst College have put together a series of performances that include a composer's concert, an afternoon of premieres and a heritage concert, in addition to the Hungarian program. A panel discussion on the "History of Composition in the Valley" will precede the Heritage concerts. For a schedule of performances, visit the Five College New Music Festival Web site. The Five College New Music Festival is supported by the Amherst Cultural Council, a local agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council; Five Colleges, Inc.; the music departments of the Five Colleges and the UMass Amherst Arts Council. Based in Amherst, Massachusetts, Five Colleges, Inc., is a nonprofit educational consortium created in 1965 to advance the extensive educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions -- Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Contact: Marilyn Kushick, (413) 545-0018 Originally posted 8/28/09 Home
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