ARTS
Mayfield musicians keep the beat at home Mayfield’s award-winning Women’s Ensemble has always embraced creative challenges, but making music remotely was a new feather in their choral caps. To build their virtual choir, students had to record solo tracks from their bedrooms, without the conducting cues they’re used to getting in the music studio. “Not having our conductor or accompanist made us focus on our counting a lot more,” said Sophia Paz ’20, and on “the musicality of each piece.” Alyssa Atienza ’22, a self-taught editor who worked behind the scenes to blend the individual recordings into a finished video, said she learned more than new software skills—the project also improved her grasp of rhythm, meter and tempo. And, watching the final version of the group’s heartfelt rendition of Randy Newman’s “When She Loved Me,” she said, felt “almost like we were in a performance.”
Our instrumentalists conquered similar challenges to create their onscreen musical mash-ups. Playing solo made it difficult to stay in tune but, after weeks of COVID quarantine, students were excited to make music together any way they could. “It’s definitely a privilege to work with my peers, even if we’re apart,” said guitarist Karissa Ho ’21. The group decided to record the high-energy Journey anthem “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” because, Karissa said, it had “the kind of optimistic and bold energy that we felt the Mayfield community could use.” And they were right—these virtual video concerts were a much-needed morale boost for Mayfield musicians and audiences alike. As singer Agueda Berlot ’20 put it, “Despite being miles and screens apart from my friends and classmates, it’s doing things like this that make me grateful for being a part of this community.”
Photography by first principles Photography teacher Paul Tzanetopoulos and his students collaborated on a unique project in honor of Strub Hall’s centennial—taking a photo of our 100-year-old building with a 100-year-old camera. (See the photo on page 36.) We asked Mr. T to walk us through the process. What was the general idea behind the project? The lesson basically was to use photo logic and figure out how we could take this picture. It made sense, but I hadn’t ever tried it. Did you have to buy 100-year-old film? We had to make film. The negative film is what doesn’t exist anymore, but you can still buy paper sheet film. So we took the negatives with a paper negative, one for the sky and one for the building, and then we reversed these digitally in Photoshop and combined them. Can you explain the process? It was a little bit of a mental exercise for the girls to figure, okay, everything in photography is about reversal. So if we take a snap, what are we going to end up with? Of course it was going to be a negative, but the negative was going to be on paper and not transparent film.
The Instrumental Conservatory’s recording of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” helped kick off the summer vacation.
Reframing art. Mayfield
dancers brought famous canvas characters to life at the Dance Conservatory’s “A Night at the Museum” concert, as they transformed into live Degas ballerinas and real-life Rosie the Riveters on stage.
How did you even find a 100-year-old camera? And how did you make it work? I have a camera collection in my studio—50, maybe 60, cameras. I use the older cameras as demonstrations, because cameras had all the same functions literally over a hundred years ago as the cameras do today. Physics are physics, optics are optics— they do not change. So it’s really nice to be able to show a turn-of-the-century camera having the same numbers and f-stops and everything that’s in our digital cameras right now. It takes you back to the actual fundamentals. How did the girls feel about this grand experiment? They were very jazzed to see the finished thing. Everybody had a hand in this. I tried not to do too much ahead of the class so I could stay honest to the process—I tested just enough stuff so it wasn’t leading them into failure. It was about a bunch of experimenting. 2020 POSTSCRIPTS
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