Aired 10/17/18

Welcome to this week’s Musical Moment. In our last episode, we defined Chamber Music. Today, we’ll hear about upcoming concerts that expand that definition, as well as the connection between music and movement. 

Shawn Puller, Executive Director of the Garth Newel Music Center, Bath County Virginia: Upcoming at Garth Newel, we have Leyla McCulla, and she fits in with our definition of chamber music. Leyla is this extraordinary artist: she’s a cellist, originally born in Haiti, she sings in Creole, she sings in French, she sings in English, she sings in Spanish! [She] plays a variety of instruments. It’s hard to nail her down into a single genre. She’s doing a performance on Friday night and we are very excited to have her come here. Leyla is part of the American Made Series. It’s a series that we have that runs all year-round (somewhere around four or five concerts a year) where we get to explore and expand the definition of chamber music.

Also this weekend, we have Joseph Wiggan, who’s this extraordinary tap dancer coming in! On Saturday, he’s doing an active concert with our own piano quartet: our piano quartet is playing pieces, Joseph will be doing tap-dancing interpretations of the pieces, so there will be some back and forth with that. And that’s really stretching our own boundaries, breaking out of our own box for performance and for music.

Dance and music have always been intertwined. There are two things that we are sort of wired for and they’re interconnected: one is movement and the other one is music. They are intrinsically woven into the human makeup because we ourselves have an internal rhythm – our hearts beat to an internal rhythm, we respond to the rhythms of the planet which we inhabit. We are intrinsically wired for rhythm.

What we know of as Western Music really comes out of dance forms. If we go back to the Baroque era, we hear a composer like Bach (almost everyone’s heard of Bach) and Back wrote hundreds and hundreds of pieces, and almost all of those pieces is based on a dance form. So we have (in Bach’s era) dances called the Minuet, the Sarabande, the Gavotte. These were all country dances or aristocratic dances. Bach took those forms and began writing in a way that they were made for listening rather than dancing to. But it all came up out of the dance form.

For this week’s Sunday Social Concert, Joseph Wiggan will teach an open-to-the-public workshop at 2pm. 

SP: When we were speaking with him, he said, ‘Oh! All ages, all ranges, all levels!’ If you’ve had some tap in your life that’s fine, but if not, it’s going to be fun anyway! We would love to have the place just packed with people in the community who just want to explore what tapping is and she what an extraordinary artist he is!

For more information, www.garthnewel.org