Sound & Light Produced by Musiqa

Musiqa presents Sound and Light, a marriage of live contemporary chamber music performance and visual art unlike anything else on Houston stages. (Photo: Melissa Taylor)

Musiqa presents Sound and Light, a marriage of live contemporary chamber music performance and visual art unlike anything else on Houston stages.

The first half of the program features Anthony Brandt’s stunning Diabelli 200, a hybrid art-science performance that uses neuroscience to take viewers inside the brains of the performers. The second half of the program features Karim Al-Zand’s Cinderella and Pierre Jalbert’s Visual Abstract, both of which take their inspiration from silent films.

Inspired by the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Brandt uses Beethoven’s approach to variation form as the inspiration for his own set of variations, scored for flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin, and cello.

During the performance, the conductor and pianist will be wearing mobile brain-body imaging caps, monitored through a brain-computer interface (BCI), by a team of neuro-engineers from the University of Houston’s BRAIN Center led by Cullen Distinguished Professor Jose L Contreras-Vidal. Audience members will watch this experiment take place in real-time. Visualizations of the live EEG data, conceptualized by multimedia artist Badie Khaleghian, will be displayed on screen. This pioneering research study–developed in Houston—has implications for brain-machine interfaces, the understanding of how brains synchronize, and music’s potential as a medical intervention.
Al-Zand’s Cinderella was written as musical accompaniment to the 1922 silent film, Aschenputtel [Cinderella] by the renowned German silhouette artist Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981). Reiniger pioneered a distinctive “silhouette” technique–an animation method using backlighting, stop-motion filming, and elaborate hand-cut paper figures. Aschenputtel [Cinderella], Reiniger’s second film, was screened in Weimar in 1922 and later reprised in London in a version with English titles. Reiniger’s charming silhouettes wonderfully capture the elegance, whimsy and occasional dark humor of this classic story.

Jalbert’s Visual Abstract was created in collaboration with Montreal filmmaker Jean Detheux. Reversing the usual process, Detheux created the imagery to Jalbert’s music. All of the images are abstract and colorful–like an abstract painting that moves through time. Detheux was inspired by some graffiti he saw in Montreal, painted on an uneven surface, which gave it a grain-like characteristic. Visual Abstract rounds out a program of homegrown sonic/visual collaborations as unique and diverse as Houston itself.

The composers featured on this program are all founding members of Musiqa’s Artist Board. The University of Houston’s BRAIN Center’s neuro-engineering team in composed of Dr. Elena Grassi, engineering graduate student Annel Pacheco Ramirez and biomedical undergraduate students Rebeca De Stefano Ramos and Diego Garza who will be controlling the brain-computer interface led by Prof. Contreras-Vidal.

Led by four composers, Musiqa’s mission is to enrich and inspire our community through programs that integrate new music with other modern art-forms. With its innovative collaborations and educational programming, Musiqa strives to make modern repertoire accessible and vital to audiences of all ages and musical background.