As the first bass clarinet note struck with a slow trill of resonating sound, the excitement dwelling within the wooden structures of the Mondavi Theatre began to pulsate with animalistic strokes of color. There’s passion, excitement and vibrant energy transpiring from an action-filled sequence that seems to be taking place.

The UC Davis Symphony Orchestra ended the Mondavi Center’s Madness and Music Festival with a concert Sunday night. Its diverse and beautiful program represented the festival’s exploration of the connections between music composition and the intricacies of the human mind.

Sensemayá: a Chant for Killing a Snake (1938), composed by Silvestre Revueltas, was the first piece among Sunday night’s repertoire.

Cello syncopated with staccato piano playing alongside percussion created an uneasy feeling, at once alluring and haunting. The air was enveloped with quickened heartbeats that became synonymous with the music playing on stage. As the orchestral work was originally adapted from Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poem, there is a climatic moment when the snake is sacrificed and killed. Low strings, bassoons and drums pounding violently illustrate the scene excitingly and vividly.

Coincidentally, it is Halloween, a night that is to be filled with madness, dark motifs and phantomesque mischief. However, this is not the purpose behind Sunday night’s performance. As a part of the Mondavi Madness and Music Festival, the repertoire only represented an underlying theme of madness stemming from the composers themselves.

“The original idea is to look at composers and the way they think about things,” said Phillip Daley, events and publicity manager for the Mondavi Center. “A lot of older composers went mad, such as [Robert] Schumann. There’s lots of ways in which composers can get engrained in what they’re doing and go mad. So we wanted to go with that and look at living composers and how they think about writing music.”

In complete contrast to the wildly thematic Revueltas piece, “Lu-lu, lu-lu,” composed by Jean Ahn, was a narrative depiction of the seemingly warm and gentle process of putting a baby to sleep. Flutes and drums break the tranquil sound waves as the baby is woken up. The juxtaposition of instruments created a strange feeling as the beautiful strings moved, slowing against the offbeat sound of percussion and drums. However, all goes back to tranquil bliss as the baby falls back asleep; strings and soft flute moving monotonously represent this closure.

As the final piece of narrative section and rather unconventional aspects of Sunday night’s performance, Four Hardy Songs, composed by UC Davis music professor Pablo Ortiz capture the beauty of poetry and music in unity.

“I like Thomas Hardy and his poetry,” Ortiz said. “I wrote many pieces using his text. It’s contemporary music made today and it reflects the time in some extent. These are somewhat crazy pieces. There is some sense of it not being quite there, there are some sounds which are particularly different like cello sounds or particular strings which is a little disturbing.”

Sara Gartland, soprano from the San Francisco Opera’s Adler Program, provided the beautiful vocals for Ortiz’s piece. “Did he dream of following me” was among one of the haunting and resonating lines which sent chills down the spines of the audience members. But amidst chilling vibrato, the string section created a beautiful backdrop of sound that paired wonderfully with Hardy’s textual poetry. Dark words, slow strings and long pauses all added to this hauntingly beautiful piece.

As the final piece of night and definitely grand moment, Cello Concerto in A Minor (1850), composed by Robert Schumann and performed by Susan Lamb Cook, sculpted graceful music. In a sparkling sequence top over a glowing gown, Cook played with grace and her fingers caress the neck of the cello with crisp and decisive movements. Moments of silence gave the audience time to absorb sounds as the orchestral strings echoed Cook’s cello.

Schumann went mad from symptoms of syphilis in the 1830s and this piece was one of his final publications before committing suicide in 1854.

As the conductor for the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, Christian Baldini takes music personally and has great passion. It’s not just interpreting music, he said. It’s about conveying emotions through translations.

“Conducting is communicating. Whether I am sitting in my office or at home, I’m learning music and to see how does this sound? It’s not the paper,” Baldini said. “The paper just brings a message to you. I think the absolute perfection is hard to achieve but that’s the beauty of it. It’s like when you see a guy or a girl with a [dimple], it looks so beautiful. This is exactly the same. And that’s the beauty of live music.”

UYEN CAO can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

“Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths.” Such is the tenet (termed “consilience”) behind the Consilience of Art and Science exhibition, to be held at the Pence Gallery from Jan. 14 to February 2011. The gallery encourages students of both art and science to submit work that combines elements of these two fields.

The deadline for submissions is Dec. 15. A reception and award ceremony will be held on Jan. 14 from 6 to 9 p.m., and cash prizes may be given out at the discretion of the jury.

Juried by UC Davis faculty members Diane Ullman and James Housefield, it is open to all artists and scientists.

“It can’t just be a painting of a flower – it has to be about the merging of the two fields. For this reason, we ask for an artist’s statement,” said Natalie Nelson, Pence Gallery director and curator of the exhibit.

The idea for the exhibition stemmed from the success of the first Consilience of Art and Science, organized in 2008 and 2009 by the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion program. This juried exhibit drew excellent speakers, culminating in an exhibit at the Pence Gallery.  Due to the popularity of the first exhibit, the Consilience was invited to do another exhibition at the Pence in January 2011.

“I am very excited to do the exhibit on a larger scale than in 2009 when we had our first exhibit on the theme, as it’s in our bigger gallery space, and the work is always fascinating and somewhat nontraditional,” Nelson said.

UC Davis entomology professor and juror of the exhibition Diane Ullman spoke about the notion of consilience, explaining that it entails the blending of substances from different disciplines to create a broader theory. Fifty years ago, Sir Charles Percy Snow attributed many of the world’s problems to miscommunication between art culture and the field of science.

The two disciplines had been declared disparate fields, when in fact the abstract and the logical are inextricably linked. Still, the solidified boundaries have been set in place by institutions for countless years. Such boundaries are, in the words of E. O. Wilson, “not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.” 

William Whewell introduced the term “consilience” in 1840, and it was brought in to the modern lexicon by E. O. Wilson in his highly acclaimed book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

Art studio professor Matthias Geiger highlighted the importance of intersectionality between the two mediums.

“It is at the university, a place where rationality, the mind and the sciences are celebrated, where we are in need of a good dose of enchantment, play, free creativity and self-exploration,” Matthias said. “I see art as a vehicle to transport academic research into these territories.”

Pence’s best attended event of the year, the first Consilience of Art and Science was held in March 2009 and received radiant feedback from the print media in the greater Sacramento region.

“We anticipate the 2011 exhibition to be just as exciting and innovative,” Ullman said.

Artists can submit up to three digital images of art. The art can take 2D or 3D form and must not exceed 50 pounds. It must also be pre-wired. For more information on the exhibition and how to submit work, go to pencegallery.org.

ELENI STEPHANIDES can be reached at arts@theaggie.org

His fans include Kurt Cobain, and indie bands such as Bright Eyes and Wilco have performed covers of his songs. He calls himself “a representative of Cornwood industries” and is a mystery to the music industry, artists and fans alike. He is Jandek.

KDVS will present Jandek in concert Nov. 12, at the Davis Veterans Memorial Theatre at 8 p.m.

According to Roy Werner, a DJ at KDVS, it is a show that people of all musical tastes should come out to see.

“This show will most likely be incredible by anyone’s standards,” he said.

Jandek is huge in the underground music scene. He began releasing LPs of music in the late 1970s, and started playing live shows in 2004. Who Jandek really is though, is an enigma to everyone. The albums are credited to be by Jandek, but the actual singer is known only as “a representative of Cornwood industries,” the label through which Jandek’s albums are released.

Jandek’s style of music has evolved throughout the years, ranging through the use of loud electric instruments to, more recently, quieter acoustic instruments to accompany Jandek’s voice. According to Nadav Carmel, a former KDVS DJ and a main organizer of the concert, the show will be more traditional.

“The ‘representative of Cornwood industries’ will be playing keyboard and singing. It will be similar to Jandek’s recent Toronto show, which featured some longer, atmospheric pieces with the representative singing or intoning over it,” he said.

Carmel says that what’s most exciting about the upcoming concert is that each Jandek show is quite unique.

“He seems to treat every concert as both a fully conceptualized recording session and a random encounter. He rarely plays with the same musicians twice, with the band almost always being assembled from local musicians by the local promoter.”

This was the case for the Davis concert as well, with locals Christian Kiefer on guitar, Alex Jenkins on drums and Greg Brucker on double bass.

Kiefer, a huge Jandek fan, was shocked when Jandek selected him to perform in his concert.

“It’s an incredible honor to be chosen to play this show.  I don’t even know how it happened exactly. How lucky am I?” he said.

Kiefer is especially excited for the unique experience of playing with Jandek.

“It’s essentially improvisation, and that kind of show really keeps you in the music in the best possible way: listening, responding, leading, following.  When it works, it’s like a dance,” he said.

Kiefer describes Jandek’s sound to be more than just music. “Perhaps it would be best to think of him as a spoken word performer or poet who happens to work extensively in music as well. It’s best described as sound art,” he said.

Whoever Jandek is, his influence is undeniable. “The guy is a singular and near mythical figure in underground music, and one of the most uncompromisingly independent,” Carmel said.

The concert is an experience that does not come around often.

“I would see Jandek based solely on how prolific he is and how uncommon his performances and appearances are,” Werner said.

According to Kiefer, even those who have never listened to Jandek should go.

“Jandek’s work comes from some other world. I find it to be very spooky and beautiful,” he said.

According to Carmel, Jandek will not only be giving Davis a concert, but will be performing a unique set for KDVS. Jandek will be performing solo set for KDVS’ ‘Live in Studio A’ program after the concert. Details are still being worked out.

The set will be only the second ever Jandek radio broadcast, who has, so far, only appeared on WNYU when NYU hosted him a few years ago. According to Carmel, Jandek’s set will be just as unpredictable and unique as his concert.

“I have no idea what’s in store for that,” he said.

Tickets can be pre-ordered online for $15 at brownpapertickets.com, or can be bought for $18 at the door.

ANNETA KONSTANTINIDES can be reached at arts@theaggie.org

The John Lyly Elizabethan classic, Gallathea, is getting revamped here at UC Davis. Opening Nov. 11, the show explores themes of gender roles, father-daughter relationships and fortune-seeking – inspired by source material hundreds of years old but presented here with a few modern twists.

“[Lyly] was doing post-modern work in the time of Shakespeare,” said Gia Battista, senior English major. Battista plays the lead role in Gallathea.

The play is set in a small village in Lincolnshire, England, where every five years the water-god Neptune requires the surrender of the most beautiful and chaste virgin. Two fathers, fearing that their daughters will be sacrificed, dress them up as boys and send them into the woods, where they meet and fall in love.

“[Gallathea] is a really serious role,” Battista said. “She’s going through this heavy thing, questioning her father, questioning her identity but at the same time she’s finding herself while she’s dressed as someone else. But the play is a comedy and you have to bring lightness and fun to her.”

Inspiration came to director and UC Davis theater professor Peter Lichtenfels three years ago, when he first read the play.

“I remember thinking to myself, why has this play never been done?” Lichtenfels said. “When I read it I could really feel it resonating with me and realized that this might be the only chance for most people to see it.”

The highly collaborative rehearsal process started after casting ended earlier this September. The actors and director each played major roles in the construction of the play. For close to three weeks the actors engaged in an improv workshop that allowed the cast to voice ideas of perspectives to blend in a fashion that would be beneficial for the overall outcome of the play.

One of the main issues that Lichtenfels tried to balance is how one tells a story onstage in the modern world.

“I had this epiphany when I saw my son who had a cell phone in one hand, an iPod in his ears while on Facebook, watching TV all at the same time.” Lichtenfels said. “In some sense there were four stories going on at the same time, and one story just isn’t good enough anymore.”

To create the effect of four stories at once, Lichtenfels engages the audience with not only the story on stage but also with video, sound and costumes, each telling separate but connected stories.

For the video component Litchenfels and multi-media artist John Zibell decided to give the actors three cameras and let them shoot from the side of the stage of the ongoing performance which is projected onto two screens on the stage

“Peter had this central idea of not hiding anything.” Zibell said. “For the play we see everything exactly as it is, but from different angles and different perspectives. Sometimes the actors shoot the stage, sometimes they film themselves backstage, and sometimes just the floor.”

The wings of the theater are also visible to the audience.

“This provided a challenge for the actors,” Battista said. “It really made us question how we engage the audience but at the same time not take away from what is going on the stage. Are we in character at that point? Or are we just observers?”

The costume design also brought a new aspect of social roles to the play. Inspired by the London milliner Phillip Treacy and his muse Isabella Blow, costume designer Liz Galindo made 28 hats for the characters.

“We tried to find hats that would match the characters and their personalities,” Galindo said.

Galindo said that her favorite hats were the ones that the three brothers, who are out trying to find fortune, wear. The hats are adorned with two replicas of the ships Nina and Pinta, while the Santa Maria is a boat made from a children’s craft set.

In addition to embracing new media on the stage, Gallathea has ventured onto the web. Lichtenfels had the entire cast and crew form a Facebook group as well as individual Facebook pages for each of the characters. The audience is also encouraged to text, tweet and videotape the play when they come to see it.

“When I did a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in China in 2008, we asked the audience to turn off their cell phones,” Lichtenfels said. “But when the lights went out the audience was illuminated by their own mobile devices. And so for this play, we decided to take that limitation off. If [the audience] wants to talk about the play who are we to stop them?”

The play premieres in the Main Theater in Wright Hall on Thursday, Nov. 11 and runs until Nov. 20. Tickets for students are $12 to 14. To purchase tickets go to mondaviarts.org or call (866) 754-2787.

ANASTASIA ZHURAVLEVA can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.