“New Dimensions in Classical Guitar” premiered in March 2004
Mesut Özgen and friends in a Multimedia Performance
Visual Artists:
Gustavo Vazquez, video and stage choreography
Peter Elsea, digital images and multimedia design
David Lee Cuthbert, scenic/lighting design and stage choreography
Guest Artists: Deepak Ram (bansuri), Annette Bauer (recorder), Lauren Rasmussen (soprano)
Frequently collaborating with accomplished, innovative composers, Mesut has long been a champion of new music for guitar. His eclectic tastes, rooted predominantly in traditional and folk musics of the world, have inspired composers to combine avant-garde compositional techniques with traditional tunes and rhythms. This concert features world premiere performances of some of these works.
The program includes works by Anthony Gilbert, Anthony Newman, Benjamin Verdery, Carlo Domeniconi, Christopher Pratorius, Deepak Ram, Pablo Victor Ortiz, Robert Beaser, and Robert Strizich.
New Dimensions in Classical Guitar is the collaborative effort of a multidisciplinary artistic team. Each musical composition is accompanied by a visual composition comprising video, interactive computer images, and particularized lighting design and stage choreography.
The video images support the music in various ways, setting an emotional mood through an abstract use of landscapes, animate and inanimate objects. Vazquez has prepared the video footage, exploring the relationship of sound as vibration and image as color temperature, which appears to be an abstraction to our rationality in many ways.
Elsea creates animated digital image patterns and manipulates them during the performance. His Visualizations Project is an exploration of methods to make visual images and performed music cohesive by generating and modifying images with the sound. A computer program analyzes the sound of the performer for volume, pitch, and timbre during the performance. This information is then used to produce the projected images.
The scenery and lighting design also set the mood of each piece and support the music by transforming the stage subtly during the performance according to the changing musical content, both between and within the same piece. Cuthbert's interest in multimedia as a theatrical device for story telling for years has led him to develop new design approaches for the New Dimensions in Classical Guitar .
This interdisciplinary collaboration between several art forms (music, visual arts, digital media, and theatre arts) aims to push the traditional boundaries of these art forms to explore visually enhanced stage presentations in classical music performance.
The first three performances of New Dimensions in Classical Guitar are presented to California central coast audiences in March 2004.
Read more about the program, visuals, repertoire, and composers
Featured in articles on:
Metroactive Music: The Wizardry of Oz
Sentinel: Classical Guitar Unleashed
Currents Online: "Faculty collaborate for innovative, multimedia classical guitar concert"
GuitArt International: Glimps inside the future of concert art
Read a Concert Review on Register-Pajaronian: Colorful 20th-century musical extravaganza
Read a DVD Review on Classical Guitar Magazine: New Dimensions in Classical Guitar
Also, read a related article on Light Millennium
