Free concerts, seminars planned for second NEON event
By F. ANDREW TAYLOR
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UNLV music professor Virko Baley said that the free concerts that will be held on campus this weekend as part of the second Nevada Encounters of New Music (NEON) composers' symposium and festival will be unlike anything festival-goers have ever heard before.
"There will be things you love, things you hate and things you won't know what to think about," Baley said. The event, first held last year, will feature experimental pieces and works with a wide range of inspirations.
"In a way, it's an adventure in music," Baley said. "The audience is not going to hear anything they've heard before; each concert is going to be a musical journey."
The symposium will be attended by eight gifted students and four working composers of new music.
"We placed ads in magazines and listings for applicant students to submit their work," UNLV music professor and event co-director Jorge Grossman said. "It was very competitive."
The students attending the symposium will enjoy a number of seminars and one-on-one time with each of the guest composers, of whom Grossman said there will be a great variety.
"They come from across the country, and include a Pulitzer (Prize) winner and an award-winning film and television composer," he said.
In addition to the nightly free concerts, there will be two daily composers' seminars, also free and open to the public. Thursday through Saturday, there will be seminars from 1:45 to 3 p.m., and a second from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Sunday seminars are 1 to 2:30 p.m., and 2:45 to 4:15 p.m. The events will be held in the Dr. Arturo Rando-Grillot Recital Hall in the Beam Music Center.
Last year's concerts did not gather much of an audience, Baley said. "Our advertising was mostly in house. We wanted to know how things would go before we went public in a big way; it was kind of an experiment," he said.
Baley said, in spite of that, the inaugural event went smoothly. He said that the hope is the symposium and festival will become an annual event, although grant funding necessary to make that a reality is still pending.
"After this one, we'll start looking for outside financial help, we'll write some grants," Baley said. "They usually need to see that you can make it work before they'll put money towards it."
Music will be performed by NEXTET, UNLV's new music ensemble; and Talea Ensemble, a New York-based group. The two will perform compositions by UNLV faculty members, as well as works by participating students.
"The audience will get to hear new sounds and new ways of hearing them," Baley said. "There will be a lot of variety. One of the pieces is inspired by rock and funk. The live music is filtered through a computer and modified before it reaches the audience."
The concerts will intentionally be shorter than many traditional concerts, with most clocking in around an hour. "We don't want to oversaturate the ears," Baley said. "It would be too much to take in. It should be an experience of exploration. If this were food, it would be the equivalent of exotic food, like going to Tibet and then to a small village in Puerto Rico, and continuing on to other places you'd never been."
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