The Digital Arts Concert was held last night in Bryan Recital Hall of the Moore Musical Arts Center. It was a free multimedia concert for the opening of their 2003-04 season. The concert was sponsered by the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music at the University’s College of Musical Arts.
Performing at the concert was Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith and clarinetist Ros Dunlop. Dunlop has performed all over the world and premiered numerous compositions for the clarinet as well as a number of works that were written just for her.
Dunlop is a member of the cello/clarinet duo Charisma and the clarinet duo Touchbass. Dunlop also teaches clarinet at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and she has released three solo CDs featuring music mainly by Australian composers.
Wesley-Smith is an eclectic composer at home. The two main themes of his music are the life, work and ideas of Lewis Carroll, and the plight of the people of East Timor. One of his pieces, “For Marimba and Tape,” is the most-performed piece of Austalian art-music. He is the former director of the electronic music studio at SCM, and he is now a full-time composer and duck farmer.
They performed cutting-edge interactive electroacoustic music to a slideshow presentation dealing with the plight of the people of East Timor, the world’s newest nation. The duo performed “Tekee Tokee Tomak” to the multimedia presentation. The music and video was composed by Wesley-Smith, as well as works by Don Banks, Jane Brockman, Barney Childs, Elena Kats-Chernin and Michael Lowernstern.
