Andrew Riley has been selected to participate in the 2013 Aspen Summer Music Festival.  Andrew is a junior at the Jacobs School of Music, majoring in Percussion Performance. Riley grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, where he received a background in jazz, classical and marching percussion. Before moving to Bloomington, Andrew was a member of groups such as the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra and the Kentucky All-State Symphony Orchestra. He has studied with John Tafoya, Kevin Bobo, and Michael Spiro, and has since been a member of various IU ensembles including the Bands and Orchestras and the Percussion, Steel Pan, Brazilian and Afro Cuban Ensembles. In 2012, Andrew performed as a member of The Phantom Regiment Drum Corps.

Bobby Conselatore has been selected to participate in the 2013 Aspen Summer Music Festival.  Bobby is a native of Washington, D.C. and is currently a junior at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. At IU, Bobby performs with the Philharmonic Orchestra and has studied with John Tafoya, Michael Spiro, Kevin Bobo and Steve Houghton. Outside of school he is a member of the Square Peg Round Hole percussion quartet. He is an alumnus of the National Music Festival, Chosen Vale Percussion Seminar and American Youth Philharmonic. Past teachers include marimba soloist Rebecca Kite and James Swartz of the US Navy Band. Bobby can be heard with Square Peg Round Hole on WFIU on February 19th at 10:00 PM.

Second-year MM precussion student Bridget Leahy has been named director of bands at Defiance College (DC) in Defiance, Ohio. Her duties will include the creation of a new marching band (The Marching Yellow Jackets), directing the pep band, the DC Community Band, supporting the DC Strings and Big Band, and providing percussion lessons and other music courses.

Student percussionist Erin Jeter has recently been appointed as the spring 2013 intern for the Percussive Art Society (PAS), beginning in January.

During the six-month internship, Jeter will be part of the team that is planning the 2013 international convention (PASIC), work with the PAS Museum Curator to help manage the museum collection, and be the principal tour guide for the Rhythm! Discovery Center.

The PAS headquarters are located in Indianapolis.

She is graduating from the Jacobs School of Music in December 2012.

HeraldTimesOnline.com

PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE CONCERT

MUSIC REVIEW: Program included fun piece mimicking radio sounds

Kevin Bobo was the gentleman in charge on Monday evening as the Indiana University Percussion Ensemble gathered for an often scintillating program in Auer Hall. Not only did he conduct most of the pieces, but he wrote one.

The one he wrote, ironically, he did not conduct. Written for four players, it was performed, as music written for string quartets and such usually is, conductor-less. But the four musicians involved — Michael Ahearn, Cy Miessler, Julia Ross and Marco Schirripa — certainly knew what they were about, most likely having been coached by composer Bobo.

The work, called “Radio,” written just this year, brought forth chuckles from the audience. It was meant, says Bobo, to recall childhood memories of “listening to the radio on long car rides where stations would come in clearly at times, only to be lost or mixed up with others as the trip would progress.” Sure enough, the four musicians, using a battery of percussion instruments, approximated such an experience. One heard jumbles of music shifting in styles and rhythms, fading in and out. There was occasional static. There was talk made mumbling and close to indistinguishable by one of the musicians speaking into a plastic cup.

The musical journey was clever, fun to listen to, and a well-met challenge for the performing quartet.

Monday’s concert held three other compositions. Most interesting and unusual was “Six Invocations to the Svara Mandala,” composed in 1973 by Walter Mays, a celebration of a deified harp used in the classical music of India, a harp comprised of a resonator box across which metal strings are stretched. Using 13 players, Mays created soundscapes that reflected instrumental derivatives, labeling his invocations “Brass and Steel,” “Bowed Bronze,” “Bowed Glass,” “Bowed Aluminum,” “Wood and Membranes” and “Apotheosis.” In each, the titled materials were employed to make arcane sounds, as if in ceremonial fashion.

A wonderfully nimble marimba player, Josh Bowman, was soloist in “Uneven Souls,” a 1992 composition by Nebojsa Zivkovic, meant to suggest the Slavic populations in the Balkans, “souls” that, according to the composer, “are free from any ‘strict rules,’ any ‘ultimatums,’ or any ‘square, even’ way of behaving.” Bowman, three terrific fellow instrumentalists, and four colleagues chanting “Ahs” delivered a smashing performance, overflowing in virtuosity.

The program began with Adam Silverman’s “Gasoline Rainbow,” a tonal painting for eight instrumental “painters.” Composed in 2010, the score piled drums upon mallet instruments and mallet instruments upon those of bowed metal, a prescription for sonic overload. Not surprisingly, however, since this was the IU Percussion Ensemble and director Bobo was in charge, the sounds were as orderly as they were noisy.

Copyright: HeraldTimesOnline.com 2012

Student Matthew Levine (M.M., percussion) was recently awarded the position of percussionist for the U.S. Air Force Academy Band in Colorado Springs, Colo.

IU students Marco Schirripa and Sean Gill have been selected to perform in the Final Round of the 2012 PASIC International Marimba Competition which will take place in Austin, Texas in November 2012.