You might not have noticed an attempted outdoor concert on Baker Lawn this past winter, when it was 12 degrees outside. However this term, when the weather is a bit more conducive, the 35th annual Ye Olde New Music Festival will be in May.
Although it began to snow during the previous attempted Baker lawn concert, "a few brave souls showed up," Ryan Maguire GR'13 said. Phill Hermans GR'13 and Maguire, both digital music students, decided to incorporate their concert project to the festival's programming to increase the event's attendance and visibility.
The festival, which will begin on May 6, includes a week of music-related events, including an outdoor concert, a special edition of the Green Fish concert series, a showcase featuring the work of student musicians in Spaulding Auditorium and workshops with the renowned experimental ensemble Tilt Brass.
"It's kind of an entire crazy week of music performances, in culmination with the Year of the Arts and musical exploration," said Hermans, who is organizing the festival.
The festival aims to showcase student and faculty composers and performers, while also giving student musicians an opportunity to work with famous musicians. The New York-based Tilt Brass will not only be performing while they are at the College, but interacting with students in workshop settings, Hermans said.
"We were very fortunate to get them," Hermans said. "To book a professional ensemble, you want to do it six or more months in advance. We didn't start discussing it until January or February."
The student musician showcase will be held on May 7.
Student musicians can submit their work to Hermans to be considered for the event. As of now, Hermans is still receiving and considering submissions for performance proposals, scores for Tilt Brass and scores for solo instruments.
Maguire, who plans to perform at the festival's student music showcase, described the difficulty in appealing to the audience when composing a piece for the event.
"Thinking about the audience is problematic because you can't predict the experiences that a roomful of hundreds of people will have," he said. "If the little grandmother in the third row has one set of musical experiences, hers will be different from a 15 year-old who listens to [Justin] Bieber, which will be different from a professor who likes sound art. Everyone has different ways of relating to music and sound."
Maguire will instead focus on creating a piece that he finds personally stimulating and fulfilling.
"I kind of assume the audience will be 150 clones of me," he said. "Like, if the audience was all me, I would flip out and love this. That's what I feel I can do best."
The concert showcase always has a large turnout from students and community members alike, Maguire said.
"It's kind of a unique opportunity to hear everyone on campus who is serious about writing new music," he said.
The Baker Lawn concert, which will incorporate Baker-Berry Library's famed Bell Tower, is tentatively planned for May 10, Hermans said.
"We'll ideally have a bunch of musicians out on the Baker lawn," Hermans said. "We're also talking to dancers to get them to collaborate, and we'll have the concert start around 3 or 4 p.m., right when everyone gets out of class."
Hermans hopes students will stumble upon the concert.
Hermans, along with Maguire, oversees the Bell Tower and takes song requests from the community. The Bell Tower is experiencing some technical difficulties and may not be able to be incorporated. The outdoor concert might move to the week following the festival to accommodate use of the Bell Tower. Regardless, music will be a strong presence on campus during the week of the festival.
"The idea of the festival is to have campus musicians have their music played, have community members listen and have the musical culture be shared," Hermans said.
