Within the modern architecture and sandstone of the Mondavi Performing Arts Center this past Wednesday night, the historically and internationally acclaimed Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg awed listeners with renowned symphonic repertoire by Wolfgang Mozart, Joseph Haydn and Franz Schubert.

The Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg redefines classical music as a genre. And historically, the Mozarteum has become a significant icon for future generations.

Founded in the same birthplace of arguably the most influential composer of the classical era – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – the Mozarteum has preserved the Salzburgian tradition and art form of classical music for the past 168 years. However, the Mozarteum is not weighed down by old traditions – the orchestra prides itself on its motto of being “the cutting edge of classical music.”

Since 2004 when he began conducting for the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, conductor Ivor Bolton has toured with the orchestra throughout major venues worldwide, offering a two-concert series of its own throughout the year. The first one of the series explores the classical era to the present day and the second one takes on thematic interpretations of well-known orchestra music of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, John Adams and Luciano Berio. Though Mozart’s work was absent from the night’s performance, the orchestra stilled carried on the classical tradition with Joseph Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major. The spotlight later shifted from Bolton to virtuoso cellist Johannes Moser on center stage.

This performance comes to explain why the Mozarteums’ motto is “cutting edge.” When most performers keep their eyes fixated on conductor Bolton or their sheet music, Moser was not afraid to lock eyes with the audience – often passionately flinging and swaying his bow to express his enthusiasm for the moment.

The violin and cello make for a majestic duo in a dance where Moser led the rest of the orchestra. When all other instruments were quiet, the clean sound of Moser’s cello vibrantly shone with one slow progressing note. Subtle moments like these, where a single instrument radiated above the entire orchestra, provoked emotions of rawness and simplicity.

As the finale of the night – Symphony No. 9 in C Major by Viennese composer Franz Schubert – finally featured the full ensemble of the 91-musician orchestra. With a quicker tempo than the two preceding numbers, the addition of oboes and bassoons gave this piece a different texture and tonality – creating the gypsy-like feeling Franz Schubert intended when he composed the piece centuries ago. The fading and intensifying arrangement of instruments led up to an overwhelming yet satisfying end. This was the perfect finale.

Despite the cultural prejudices and stereotypes that say classical music is strictly for the sophisticated and matured, the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg is an example of how classical music can reach across all geographic and age boundaries. The Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg has and will continue for centuries more carry on the tradition of classical music.

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

The Manhattan School of Music band in residence, better known as the Meridian Arts Ensemble, will perform this Saturday, Nov. 7 at the Vanderhoef Studio at the Mondavi Center.

Tickets are available now at the Mondavi box office and mondaviarts.org. Discount tickets are $9 with student ID; General admission is $18.

“The Meridian Arts Ensemble is a unique combination of instruments,” said Philip Daley, events and publicity manager of the UC Davis Arts Administration Group. “They’re actually a traditional brass quintet: trombone, tuba, French horn and two trumpets. But they also have percussion; and the addition of percussion allows for a whole different range of pieces that they can play.”

Formed in 1987 in New York City, the Meridian Arts Ensemble had its initial roots in traditional brass chamber quintets. Soon though, the band began expanding its sound pallet beyond academic music, touching on American vernacular and particularly Frank Zappa.

“When we began getting interested in playing the music of Frank Zappa and other rock and jazz composers, we realized that we needed to add percussion to the ensemble,” said Daniel Grabois, horn player for the band.

Grabois said the ensemble played twice for Zappa at his house in Los Angeles.

“He loved how we play his pieces, and especially liked that we put it in the context of other classical music.”

MAE’s unapologetic genre mixing has also been the cause of much notoriety.

“There seems to be a tendency in America to want to categorize things,” Grabois said. “You have your jazz, your rock, your contemporary music. When we started recording CD’s with huge ranges of musical styles on them, we encountered the question: What is this? And there’s not one answer. It’s lots of different stuff! Audiences that come with an open mind will find lots to like.”

“They do such a variety of things,” Daley said. “They’re known to describe the music as ‘anything from Bach to Zappa.’ On Saturday, they’ll be doing mostly 20th century compositions, some as recent as 2009.”

In addition to Saturday’s Mondavi performance, Meridian will also be playing Sunday night at the Annual Causeway Band Festival in Jackson Hall, performing Zappa arrangements with local junior and senior high school honor bands. On Tuesday, they will hold a free noon concert in room 115 of the Music Building, where the band will perform pieces written by students of the UC Davis music department.

“It’s an exciting change of pace to have to have such an eccentric and unusual chamber band play the Mondavi,” said Jessica Kelly, senior writer for the Mondavi Center.

Since having formed in Julliard 22 years ago, MAE has released nine albums, toured on four continents, received innumerable commissions from Milton Babbitt and Elliot Sharp and still find ways to push the boundaries chamber music and redefine classical conventions.

“We are currently preparing to perform an opera we commissioned from composer Su Lian Tan,” Grabois said. “She is an ethnic Chinese woman who grew up in Singapore and is now a university professor in Vermont. That kind of sums it up!”

BORIS FREYMAN can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

I’m starting to think Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is one of the most devastating and widespread diseases today, simply judging from the number of people who tell me they have it. Everyone and their kids, family and friends apparently have ADHD – even their pets suffer, too.

However, these excuse-loving hypochondriacs do have a point when it comes to their music tastes, and as a musical elitist myself I fully enjoy criticizing them for it. People truly have problems listening to music for any extended length of time, especially when it comes to listening to longer songs and full-length albums from start to finish.

I don’t want to make some snobbish oversimplification, favoring long songs over short songs. It’s the content, stupid! Rather, I’m arguing for the album as an album, not the compilation of crappy singles radio, Limewire, singles, shuffle mode and everything else created (better yet, butchered).

It doesn’t help that the top selling albums tend to suck. What’s so bewildering is the nature of these albums – simple compilations of one or two radio hits plus eight or nine tracks of filler. Really – why buy the whole album for a few singles? Albums aren’t mix tapes. If I wanted a bunch of randomly assorted singles, I’d buy a “NOW” CD.

People’s attention spans on average dropped tremendously after the ’70s. The musical holocaust that was the ’80s made this shift somewhat understandable, but there’s really no reason why musical attentiveness continues to shrink up with every new dumbed-down and chopped-up radio hit. Give anyone an album with five or six minute tracks and people will either faint or fall asleep with boredom. Because listening to one twelve-minute track is entirely different than listening to four three-minute tracks simultaneously.

Shuffle modes, Limewire and the radio are largely to blame for this musical ADHD. They render the album completely obsolete for the average listener, and reduce the average attention span to three or four minutes. It’s no surprise that every shared iTunes library you see on a shared network has hundreds of artists with only one or two songs each, or that iPod shuffles outnumber traditional iPods at the ARC. Even with these boiled down and edited singles, people still flip through stations or change tracks halfway through the song.

Call me old fashioned, but there’s no better way to listen to an album start to finish than in the car. Besides the lack of having to constantly flip through songs every few minutes, listening to an entire album is simply more of an experience. Maybe people don’t have the time to listen to an entire CD during their day-to-day routine, but there’s a pause button for a reason.

Artists that put effort into creating a cohesive, full-length album probably intended for start-to-finish playback, so it only makes sense to listen to the CD in full. But now, it seems like every time an artist wants to make a cohesive album-long idea, it’s immediately labeled as a “concept album.” What, like a concept car? Albums don’t have to have an obvious theme to be worthy of an entire sit down listen, and themed albums don’t need an obvious theme anyways.

Play the whole album, download the whole album and listen to that album that you heard on the radio. Don’t just fill your library with singles.

JUSTIN T. HO loves the radio, depending on what it is of course. Mainly, Jason Bentley’s old show on KCRW “Metropolis.” E-mail nostalgic memories of Bentley’s eclectic electronic sets and mixes to arts@theaggie.org.

1989. Most UC Davis undergraduate students will remember this year as the year they took their first steps, spoke their first words or had their first brush with that bully on the kindergarten playground. To Joshua Clover, Associate Professor of English at UCD, the year signifies something greater. To him, 1989 evoked images and sounds of a year that had the cultural revolution of the century.

In his new book, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About, Clover explores the many faceted aspects of that years pop culture and historical events, as well as how these events gave the world more meaning.

Clover will be giving a talk about his book on November 10 in the Memorial Union second floor Art Lounge. The event will start at 6 p.m. and run for two hours. It will involve what Clover jokingly calls a multi-media presentation. Not only will there be a book reading and a Q&A section but he will also show music videos from the year’s most relevant pop hits.

“This type of setting, where a faculty member speaks about the book that they have written, creates an intimacy,” said Paul Takushi, a trade book purchase agent at the MU Bookstore. “The questions that the author is asked turn out to be more thought-out and specific.”

An experienced music journalist, poet and self-proclaimed “pop-expert,” Clover takes his experience from the observations of pop music he made while he wrote for Spin, Village Voice and GQ magazines.

“Journalism seemed unsatisfying for me,” Clover said. “I felt like I was selling my readers a product. When you are writing for a mass audience as a journalist, you are never asked to have a complete and elaborate theory. You are asked to have a nifty idea, an insight here or there and a funny attitude.”

In the book, Clover tries to merge away from this idea and takes a more behind-the-scenes approach. He dissects pop music and social history as if looking at it through a microscope, a complex feat for a book that was written in the short span of 98 days.

Published by the University Press, 1989 was a way for Clover to repay his unpaid debt to his journalistic past. Clover says the chapter was never fully closed off, because he had too many incomplete arguments about the years of 1989 to 1991 that he needed to work out.

“Ideally I wrote the book for someone who had been following my career as a journalist and said to themselves, ‘This is interesting but it does not take on problems directly,'” he said. “Because the same thing bothered me during my career, the book allowed me an opportunity to go after serious problems.”

There are about a dozen of these author events during the year – all of them featuring publications written by UC Davis faculty. Previous book talks have seen all types of turnouts, from two people showing up to an overflow out of the Art Lounge. Everyone from admiring students, friends, colleagues and the occasional half dozen people not affiliated with the author have been known to show up.

Clover’s popularity among his students will most likely guarantee a great turn out for his Nov. 10 appearance at the Art Lounge.

Junior music major Joey Rodriguez said he is looking forward to the presentation.

“After having taken one of [Joshua Clover’s] classes and reading his book The Matrix, I know that anything Joshua Clover does is guaranteed to be as shockingly thought-provoking as the frames of his glasses.”

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

Film today has been reduced to white noise in our generation’s culture. To be said quite relatively, film is a medium that directors use in order to convey a specific message, be it educational or simply for pure artistic expression.

UC Davis comparative literature professor Sheldon Lu along with Chris Tong, a Ph.D. student in comparative literature, will join other graduate students are organizing a three-day long Asian film festival from Nov. 4 to 6.

The theme this year, “Spaces of Asian Cinema,” challenges students to look beyond current frameworks and to be conscious of space – such as film locations, architecture, built and natural environments – through cinema representation.

The film festival’s website explains that “while various modes of film analysis tend to focus on composition, narrative and production in terms of temporality and historicity, space has re-emerged as an important counterpart to and an interlinked phenomenon with time.”

The Asian film festival is split up into the film screening portion and the symposium portion. The films that will be screening are One Shining Day, 3-Iron, If You Are The One and Departures – a mix of independent, romantic comedy, horror and drama. On Thursday and Friday, the public symposium will feature professors from different universities and keynote speakers to educate attendees on selected topics centered on the theme.

“All the talks and films are related to space … when you look beyond the actors and plot, you’ll notice the settings are full of meaning,” Tong said. “These settings can be the apartment buildings in Pulse and 3-Iron or they can be the countryside in Departures and If You are the One.”

So – why this focus on Asian films, you ask?

“We wanted to attract a variety of audience members [like] people who are interested in theory within the academic community, since not everyone does Asian cinema,” Tong said. “We’re asking a lot of questions about the relationship between the screen and space. Asian cinema is just a way to find specific content for these questions.”

The festival will provide an educational as well as entertaining experience for all students.

“It’s interesting to see a foreign perspective about romantic comedy,” said Jacklyn Farrens, a sophomore English major.

“We hope to increase the multi-cultural awareness of Asia on the part of UC Davis students as well as the Davis community more broadly,” Lu said.

The film screenings, free to everyone who will attend, will be held in Olson 6. The films will be subtitled in English for accessibility.

As an aside, films rented through Blockbuster or Netflix and watched on 13″ Macbook screens don’t serve any justice to the intended aesthetic and visual consumption for which these films were originally envisioned. So take your pick and open the aperture of your knowledge on foreign films.

For more information about “Spaces of Asian Cinema,” visit langlit.ucdavis.edu/home/shlu.

KAREN SONG can be reached at arts@theaggie.org.

Kings of Convenience

Declaration of Dependence

Virgin/EMI

Rating: 4

The new Kings of Convenience album, brilliantly titled Declaration of Dependence, will go a long way for you if you’re into bands like Feist, Belle and Sebastian and Simon and Garfunkel. The album consists of quiet folk-pop music formed by light layers of bass, cello, viola, acoustic guitars, piano plinks and vocal harmonies between the winsome, whispery vocals of Norwegian duo Erlend Oye and Eirik Glambek Boe.

The melodies are warm and the album radiates with intimate lyrics about a love affair with an ice-princess, the ups and downs of reuniting and occasional references to politics – depending on your own interpretation.

Think of it as a sonic narrative about what we all went through last season, because that’s exactly what it is: a collection of songs with reverberating effects that wraps you up reminiscence and fleece while you’re unwinding from a quiet and somber autumn day.

Give these tracks a listen: “Mrs. Cold” and “Rule My World”

For fans of: Feist, Belle and Sebastian

– Vanna Le