An event at Bernheim Forest on Friday will highlight the connection between music and nature.
Composer Allen Anderson will be the featured guest at this month’s edition of SonicBernheim, a lecture and performance series that coordinates with lunar events. Friday is the “blue moon,” or the second full moon in a calendar month.
Anderson, a professor of music composition at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, will deliver a lecture, entitled "Edge of the Stage, Edge of the Wild," about how classical music composers have used elements from nature in their work. He will then lead a performance of his piece “Over the Mountain,” which includes a group of child percussionists who will improvise much of their parts.
“Their charge is to make the sounds of insects, and sound of air, sound of heat, which won’t be any difficulty on Friday night,” Anderson told Daniel Gilliam of Classical 90.5 WUOL, WFPL's sister station.
In addition to the percussion ensemble, the piece is scored for violin (Anderson prefers to use the word "fiddle), double bass, and a narrator.
“The narrator is a child as well. It’s essentially a child’s story that is told with the briefest amount of spoken word but a great deal of musical input," Anderson said.
SonicBernheim starts at 7 p.m. on Friday at the Education Center.
