On Feb. 15, Mason Gross Music Department professors Rebecca Cypess and Steven Kemper, both of Highland Park, will host a symposium and concert titled "Expressive Engines: Musical Technologies from Automata to Robots."
This 19th century 4-Tune Keywind Cylinder Musical Box, invented by David LeCoultre, Le Brassus, Switzerland, is part of the Murtogh D. Guinness collection of mechanical musical instruments and automata at the Morris Museum. It will be performing excerpts from Rossini's Guillaume Tell. NEW BRUNSWICK -- On Feb. 15, Mason Gross Music Department professors Rebecca Cypess and Steven Kemper, both of Highland Park, will host a symposium and concert titled "Expressive Engines: Musical Technologies from Automata to Robots."
The symposium will explore automatic music from the early-modern era to the present, as well as the attitudes toward the role of technology in music making.
Kemper, a music technology professor and composer of music employing robots, believes that technology-mediated performances can be musically expressive.
Cypess, a musicologist and performer, agrees and adds that, "If music in general sparks us to creativity -- as I think it should do -- what does it mean when the music is created by a machine? Can machines be creative?"
Monochord-Aerophone Robotic Instrument Ensemble (MARIE), is a robotic instrument designed and built by Expressive Machines Musical Instruments (EMMI) in 2011. On Feb. 15 at Rutgers, MARIE will perform pieces by Troy Rogers, Scott Barton and Steven Kemper. Additional scholars participating in the symposium are: Scott Barton from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Emily Dolan from Harvard University; Bonnie Gordon from the University of Virginia; Thomas Patteson from the Curtis Institute of Music; and Troy Rogers from Expressive Machines Musical Instruments.
The symposium is free and will run from 8:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at Richard H. Shindell Choral Hall in Mortensen Hall located at 85 George St.
The concert will be held at the Nicholas Music Center at 7:30 p.m. Acoustic instruments, automata and musical robots will be used to highlight music from the early-modern and contemporary eras.
On Feb. 20, the Mason Gross School of Arts will celebrate its 40th anniversary year with a performance of "The Soldier's Tale" at 7:30 p.m. at the Nicholas Music Center.
The production will be a school-wide collaboration of the dance, digital filmmaking, music, theater and visual arts programs.
An ensemble of seven musicians, led by Rutgers Symphony Orchestra conductor Kynan Johns of North Brunswick, will perform Igor Stravinsky's score.
Christopher Cartmill, theater faculty member and the voice of the narrator in the play, described the show as a "remash of a few Russian folktales that are put into one story of a soldier who sells the devil his violin, which in a sense represents his soul."
Tickets for the show are $15 for the general public, $10 for Rutgers alumni, employees and seniors and $5 for students.
Nicholas Music Center is located at 85 George Street on the Douglass Campus of Rutgers. For more information, visit masongross.rutgers.edu or call 848-932-7511.
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