Program: Sound In Sculpture 2024

Sound in Sculpture

Landmarks, Texas Performing Arts, and The Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music present

Sound in Sculpture

Wed, Apr 17, 2024

Seay Building (SEA)

108 E Dean Keeton St

6 p.m.

Sound in Sculpture returns for a ninth year to showcase original music composed and performed by UT students, inspired by works in the Landmarks public art collection. This year, Eamon Ore-Giron’s Tras los ojos (Behind the Eyes), a metaphor for the flow of information between the external world and the mind, serves as the source of inspiration for the composers.

Cover

photo by Paul Bardagjy

Eamon Ore-Giron American, born 1973

TRAS LOS OJOS (BEHIND THE EYES) , 2023

Digital print on canvas

Commission, Landmarks, The University of Texas at Austin, 2023.

Photo by Paul Bardagjy

Los Angeles-based artist Eamon Ore-Giron is interested in exploring the intersections of different cultures and identities. His work reflects his deep connections to the Latinx community and is a challenge to the erasure of its stories from art history and the North American public sphere. By drawing upon a broad range of artistic movements and traditions, he produces a fresh visual language that creates new meanings as well as unexpected connections between European, pre-

Columbian, contemporary indigenous, and popular Latin American influences.

Ore-Giron created Tras los ojos (Behind the Eyes) for the university’s Department of Psychology. The artwork began as a small painting that was later reproduced as a large digital print on canvas. Its design was inspired in part by ophthalmological diagrams that illustrate how we receive visual information. Ore-Giron’s biography also influenced his decision to focus on

the eye. When Ore-Giron was twenty-eight years old, he discovered a small black spot in his vision. At first, he thought it was temporary, but medical tests revealed that he had the same genetic condition that affected his father and ultimately led his family to emigrate to the United States instead of settling in Peru. This experience encouraged Ore-Giron to reflect on the role of anatomy in our perception of reality.

While Tras los ojos (Behind the Eyes) primarily employs the vocabulary of hard-edged

geometric abstraction, it also references the natural world. The work’s palette of rich, solid colors evoke the moments before sunset, with a series of conical shapes and gradient rays in shades of purple, sky blue, and pale pink. Ore-Giron describes the gently curving lines at the top of the work as “the stratosphere of the painting,” and “the edge of the atmosphere where things start to bend.” The result is a striking metaphor for the flow of information between the external world and the mind.

AL LADO DEL MENTE

by Ashton Cartwright

Ruben Acuña Gonzalez, Percussion

About the Composer

Ashton Cartwright is a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Denton, Texas. He began composing music in middle school and has arranged and performed pieces for his high school jazz combo and high school string orchestra. He has been recognized at the state level for compositions through the John H. Guyer PTSA and at the national level as a recipient of the John Philip Sousa Award. Ashton has performed at the Western International Band Clinic in Seattle, Washington, and the Music for All Festival in Indianapolis, Indiana. He currently studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

About the Program

Al lado del Mente is a solo work for multi-percussion setup with a particular focus on timbre and polyrhythmic interplay. Our brains are in a constant state of processing sounds, visuals, and various sensations, all trying to make sense of where we exist in time and space. This piece takes inspiration from Tras los ojos by constructing layers of rhythm and sounds reminiscent of the layers of visual information Tras los ojos imparts.

BEHIND THOSE EYES

by Deniz Aslan

Billy Pickus, Trombone

About the Composer

Deniz Aslan is a composer and a bassoonist specializing in new music. He was born in 1997 in Ankara, Turkey. Classically trained in bassoon for ten years, he received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in composition from Bilkent University under the supervision of Tolga Yayalar. As of 2024, he is a DMA student and an Assistant Instructor at the University of Texas at Austin and continues his studies under the supervision of Januibe Tejera.

About the Program

Behind Those Eyes is a product of a close collaboration between the composer and the performer. It is a site-specific composition written to be performed specifically in front of Tras los ojos (Behind the Eyes). The composition, structurally and conceptually based on Tras los ojos, makes use of not only the work itself, but also the physical space in which it is located: its relationship with light, its size, and different vantage points in the space from where the artwork can be seen. By processing the trombone sound in real time, as its sound is manipulated and distributed in the space through multiple loudspeakers positioned in a

3D setup, it is aimed to (re) construct a hyper-real spatial perception of the entire space for the audience.

THROUGH A GLASS, DIFFERENTLY

by Cecily Shield

Flute, Michelle Chang

Oboe, Caroline Ferguson

Clarinet, Sebastian Trevino Bassoon, Jo Hammerstein

About the Composer

Cecily Shield is a composer and mezzo-soprano who seeks to provide a reflective space in her music for people to encounter the world and themselves in new ways. Much of her work centers on the intersections between music and history, nature, and text. She currently attends the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies with Dr. Donald Grantham.

Composer Remarks

Eamon Ore-Giron’s Tras los ojos considers how we perceive visual information. Its reflections, circles, and lines suggest the physical processes by which our eyes organize and interpret light from the world around us, but as an abstract work of art it is also open to interpretation – especially since it hangs in a psychology building, a space dedicated to untangling the different states and possibilities of the human mind.

To write this piece, I spoke to people passing through the space and asked what they saw in the painting. The responses from students, professors, and parents included the following: a bird’s head, geometric reflections in a math textbook, an arcade, a waterfall, breath, neurons. Those images served as my inspiration for the variations in the piece, so that the work celebrates the multifaceted possibilities of interpretation. Whether your first impression of the work is reflected in this music or not, I hope you enjoy considering it through a different lens.

PERCEPTION

by Josíah Garza

Ariana Chan, Oboe

Jonathan Churchett, Bassoon

Maggie Chvatal, Flute

Grant Koot, Horn

Gabriel Vaca, Clarinet

Josíah Garza, Narrator

About the Composer

Josíah Garza is a composer hailing from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas whose work focuses on communicating social issues. He began his journey as a child in the visual and performing arts before beginning study in both Music Composition and Biology at the University of Texas at Austin where he is both a Minnie Stevens Piper and

Butler Academic Excellence Scholar. Garza’s multidisciplinary practice aims to bridge the world of Mexican American art with contemporary aesthetics by incorporating narration, electronics, and movement in concert settings. He is the student of Dr. Yevgeniy Sharlat and has previously studied with Drs. Michael Mikulka, Russell Podgorsek, Melissa Dunphy, and Alyssa Weinberg.

Composer Remarks

This work is what I’d call a living art installation.

Audience members will have roles to play in bringing this experience to life as performers themselves. Guided by a narrator and five instrumentalists, patrons will take part in a work that grapples with the nature of understanding one another and questions how we perceive the world around us. The music to be heard will be in response to what is seen. We choose how blank spaces are filled just as we bring sound into silence. Life is art, and the silence is hazy.

landmarksut.org

texasperformingarts.org