Ever heard whale song on the Slope? Body percussion in the Johnson Museum? Musical sets including those sounds, as well as the Cornell Chimes, jazz, poetry, violin and other acoustical music will take place Sept. 4-5 during the ReSounds Festival on campus.
The festival kicks off a yearlong project focused on innovation in acoustic instruments and includes installations at the Johnson Museum and concerts each day beginning at 4 p.m. that take listeners on a pilgrimage to various locations around the Arts Quad.
鈥淭his project is about trying to reimagine acoustic instruments and spaces,鈥 said , assistant professor of music in the 麻豆视频 & 麻豆视频, who received a Fowkes Family from the 麻豆视频 & 麻豆视频 for the project, along with , pianist and professor of music in A&S. 鈥淎s musicians during COVID, a huge part of what we do has been mangled and shifted. We鈥檙e thinking about how to embrace that and what music-making means in this post-COVID world.鈥
The musical sets on Sept. 4-5 take place in seven different locations, including the atrium of the Johnson Museum, the Groos Family Atrium of Klarman Hall, Libe Slope and Sage Chapel. The last set each night is a jazz hootenanny in the back garden of the A.D. White House. .
The setting of each place reflects the performers and their instruments in a way that reimagines the way we typically listen to music, Ogonek said. Performers will include individuals and groups, including , the MikeDropDuo, , Desmond Bratton, HereNowHear, Fallingwater, , Amy Saunders, Antuan Byers, Jones/Butterfield Duo, , Electrolyte and Fifth Parallel.
The kickoff events also encourage people to remember what it鈥檚 like to attend a concert in person, Bjerken said. 鈥淭here are certain things you do when you attend a live performance that you don鈥檛 do in normal life, just being attentive and fully present,鈥 Bjerken said. 鈥淗ow many livestreams have we all been on this year that we have not really watched.鈥
Ogonek and Bjerken鈥檚 yearlong project, The Design and Performance CoLab for New Acoustic Instruments, includes building and re-envisioning new instruments, as well as composing music for those instruments and finding performers interested in playing them. They鈥檒l be collaborating with professors in engineering and computer science, as well as other departments where faculty are interested in musical applications related to their disciplines. Those instruments are already in the works, but aren鈥檛 yet ready to be unveiled.
Ogonek will also be teaching a class in the spring, 鈥淔uture Sounds,鈥 with pianist and visiting lecturer in A&S , where students will be designing instruments and composing pieces for them. They plan to also host pop-up events around campus when a new instrument is created and eventually include photos and audio files of new instruments on their website.
鈥淪o much of this is harnessing the resources available here at Cornell,鈥 Ogonek said. 鈥淲e have such an amazing collection of historical instruments, so we鈥檙e thinking about how to take the past and the present and put them in dialogue, not just in performing older music but taking older instruments and modifying them to reflect a more contemporary medium.鈥
For example, what if there was a way to modify a piano with a harmonic arm so that fast passages of harmonics could be played with two hands? What if we could register a piano like an organ to quickly and easily access different piano preparations?
As composers and performers, Ogonek and Bjerken said they are often trying to push the technical and musical limits of acoustic instruments. 鈥淲ith the Cornell ReSounds project, we鈥檙e chasing the world of musical possibility that will result when certain technical constraints no longer exist,鈥 Ogonek said.
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