By Jason Hagey and Alisha Hagey
Last Thursday evening, March 7th, Brigham Young University Museum of Art provided an eclectic audience with a transcendent and avant-garde experience through “Nature Transformed: Musical Experience at the MOA.” To the common observer, with little training in music, this performance would hardly be considered “musical,” but the three performances defied expectations and produced something truly unique, extemporaneous, and enchanting.
Setting up in the main foyer outside two current BYU Museum of Art (MOA) exhibitions, “Nature Transformed” explored the themes of “Windswept” by Patrick Dougherty and “Where the River Widens” by Danae Mattes. To better understand the performance, you should understand the art installations. Dougherty’s “Windswept” is composed of real willow saplings bent to create a monumental scale environmental sculpture meant to be “reminiscent of a walk through the paths of a sweeping mountainscape.” Mattes’ “Where the River Widens” is a series of works using an evaporation pool, clay, and water to explore our physical and emotional relationship to natural phenomenon. Her work is filled with dynamic surface textures with cracks and rivulets. Both pieces are composed of nature but are aesthetic transformations.
Each of the musical experience pieces keep with this idea of natural metamorphosis. Scott Nelson’s “Fire Festival” is an improvisation on guitar with projected video. Nelson’s guitar is not unlike the early synthesizers of the 1960’s where they looked like pianos, but the sounds emanating from them were anything but the sounds of a piano. As Nelson plays his guitar there is the sound of water dripping, winds whistling, and fire crackling. He creates a soundscape both mesmerizing and beautiful. His accompanying video moves and morphs through his improvisation, having an untextured resonance of nature without being natural; the hues of colors being more neon than real, with half-recognizable half-unknown organic shapes. His projections are like seeing outlines through night vision, abstractions like flame and seismic readings. He plays a lot with dissonance to evoke a form of nostalgia, which feels like birth and death together as a whole.
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Steve Ricks and Christian Asplund (known collectively as Ricksplund) create a piece they call “Woven.” “I’m taking natural sounds and changing them into something else, something unexpected,” said Ricks. “Mattes and Dougherty also took something natural and put it into an artificial space. This inspires people to think about nature and creativity in a new way.” Asplund plays on viola but experiments with various materials as substitutions to the traditional bow and Ricks is on MIDI. “It’s like an orchestra in a box, where the orchestra can play any sound you could imagine.” They weave sound layers of music to create denser textures, a nod to both the art around us and to the process of creating electronic music. The vibrations and the purposeful minimalism create a palpable atmosphere. It is a joy to listen to them create together.
Modern music (like modern art) is a breakdown and a step away from traditional convention. It allows for a freedom (aesthetically speaking) from melody and rhythm. There is a redefining of music in general. Nature Transformed, taking its cues from an already dynamic and abstract collection of art, becomes more: interactive, sincere, and beautiful. These experimental, radical, and unorthodox performances are necessary to our cultures to take us to new music, art, and experience. When Igor Stravinsky first presented his Rite of Spring in 1913 Paris, he caused a riot. His work was completely avant garde at the time and the far reaching impact of his masterpiece forever changed music composition and performance. Nature Transformed continues this legacy, asking audiences to experience the next evolution in music.
Brigham Young University Museum of Art presents Nature Transformed: Musical Experience at the MOA
Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Campus Dr, Provo, Utah 84602
March 7, 2019 7:00 PM
Tickets: Free
Contact: 801-422-8287
Museum of Art Facebook Event Page
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