Melodies and Minds mix at matchbox

By Farrah Madanay     3/29/12 7:00pm

Few could walk past the ground level of Sewall Hall without diverting their path to peer down into the Sculpture Courtyard. Percussion beats and wind harmonies beckoned liberated students recently released for midterm recess.

The Matchbox Gallery broke new ground Wednesday, March 21, when Brown College senior Joelle Zigman and Duncan College freshman Lydia Smith collaborated in an exhibition of sights and sounds.

Zigman, a music and English double major, used the courtyard for her senior recital, while Smith, a visual and dramatic arts major, featured work from a semester-long project.

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A contemporary classical composer studying under Kurt Stallman, Zigman is the first Shepherd School musician to have given a recital at a Rice University venue outside of Alice Pratt Brown Hall, she said.

"I wanted to bring some contemporary composition outside of the traditional concert hall in a performance that would be very accessible and casual and break down some expectations that people have about classical concerts being stuffy and intimidating," Zigman said.

Breaking from concert conventions, Zigman created an atmosphere of dynamism by activating audience members and musicians alike through the presentation of the seven total pieces, each in different areas of the courtyard.

The evening began with Zigman's premiere of a brass quintet fanfare descending the stairs and processing into the gallery space. Following this performance was a piece in which Zigman appropriated poems of Sappho into music for piano and soprano. Other works included a cello solo and a string quartet, each located beneath different hanging sculptures. The program ended with a flute and electronic tape composition featured near the sculpture studio and the premiere of a wind quintet piece performed by WindSync in the middle of the courtyard.

The flute-and-tape piece was the only work that incorporated a pre-recorded, electronic element in the recital.

"I knew I wanted to work with this audio clip from a Tori Amos interview with this great metaphor about dying 'like the sunset,'" Zigman said.

Zigman said each composition took her about two months to tinker with and complete. Zigman handpicked her performers from among her friends at the Shepherd School as well as from the University of Houston's Moores School of Music.

Fragments of Smith's artwork demarcated a map of Zigman's predetermined performance spaces for the traveling music ensembles.

"Because my pieces were going to be all over the courtyard, Lydia set up these extra pieces that also spread out into the courtyard, framing each of the ensembles, and it ended up being this really cool effect," Zigman said.

When Zigman expressed her desire to foster intermedia collaboration with a traditional artistic showcase at the Matchbox Gallery, Smith jumped on the opportunity. Smith's work, entitled I Am Here, was a play on horror vacui, the compulsion to fill white space with detail. Smith, however, was able to balance the compulsion with blocks of white both within the intricate patterns of her drawings and within the Matchbox Gallery room itself. The drawings, eight panels in total, were duplicated and expanded to sprawl across the walls in an installation that represented the personal geography of Smith's mind. The installation, which began as drawings consolidated onto notebook paper, is a self-portrait of her internal cognition, Smith said.

"Whether in class, listening to the radio, having a conversation on the phone or waiting in line, I find my hand tracing my thoughts with a pen," Smith said. "The resulting drawing lacks any direct, recognizable imagery of the outside world, but rather reflects my mind's activity through nonfigurative pattern, influenced by the auditory, visual and sensory input I encounter."

Inspired by the automatic drawings of surrealists and the works of outsider artists such as James Castle and Adolf Wolfli, Smith organically transformed her "class notes" into an installation. I Am Here conveys a dialogue between spaces, with the courtyard representing the outside world and the gallery a manifestation of Smith's mind.

"The doorway of the gallery was like a semipermeable membrane," Smith said. "A higher concentration of my material was within Matchbox, and Joelle's music remained outside along with pieces of my mind."

The complementary compositions of Zigman and Smith culminated in an audiovisual event unprecedented in Matchbox history.

"I want to inspire my fellow composers and performers to see how awesome an event can be when you bring your music to a non-traditional space, and how fostering collaboration with other mediums of art can be really rewarding," Zigman said.

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