Videos of UTEP Musicians in 2020
Musician’s at UTEP have been able to continue making music together while maintaining social distancing through the imaginative efforts of the UTEP Music faculty. Please enjoy their efforts showcased in the videos below:
Commercial Music with Dr. Chris Reyman
Opera UTEP with Cherry Duke
“WHAT IS OPERA, PART 2” is the Spring 2020 Opera Showcase for the University of Texas at El Paso's Department of Music, starring the talented students of UTEP Music's Opera Workshop class. This show premiered on Facebook Live with narration via Zoom alongside student performances of scenes from zarzuela, operetta, Singspiel, opéra comique, opera buffa and more, filmed entirely during the pandemic lockdown!
Here are a few selections from the show
You can keep up with the Opera UTEP at their YouTube channel for Facebook page:
UTEP Trumpet Studio with Nancy Taylor
UTEP Chorale with Dr. Elisa Wilson
Trombone with Dr. Steve Wilson
Piano with Dr. Dena Kay Jones
A Piano Professor's Covid-19 Quarantine Experience (Spring 2020)
My University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Piano Chamber Class from the Spring 2020 semester proved to be the most challenging, as the question arose: how do you collaborate with other musicians when you can't physically be in the same space to play music together? Technology came to the rescue. As musicians from all over the world started to collaborate by recording themselves separately and then merging the two videos to seem as one, our own UTEP graduate student Chris Beroes-Haigis, started publishing these types of projects online. I was curious how he could play his cello with other musicians in other locales, and so I reached out to ask him about it. After realizing he was way ahead of me on the learning curve, I reached out to colleague Professor Cherry Duke, who also had been successful in publishing pre-recorded and live audio/video projects online. She too was a bit beyond my own scope and being able to teach my students. So with the little information I had, I went to work myself.
After some experimentation and patience from my own chamber music partner, Keliana, soprano, I learned how to accomplish the video merge process. The result was Antonin Dvorak's arrangement of Psalm 23 from his Biblical Songs Cycle, Op. 99, No. 4. The piece was short, concise, and just the appropriate sentiment for where both Kellie and I and the world were. Here is the professor's result:
In our online class, the students and I talked about the ins and outs of this type of musical work - video merging separate recordings to be like one recording. The original goal of the class was to perform an assigned chamber piece with your chamber partner(s) in the end-of-the-semester recital on campus. After Covid-19 put us all into isolation, the goal changed to be an online video merge publication.
It is not easy. There are many non-verbal cues we as musicians give each other when performing. This aspect is still apparent in communicating through technology, but to be acutely aware as a chamber musician in this medium, takes even more concentration and focus. You not only have to communicate deeper and stronger (forte "louds" have to be louder, pianissimo "softs" have to be softer, and tempi choices have to be razor-sharp clear, for example), but you also have to listen more intently. You also have to repeat and practice more diligently, because the person is not beside you.
It takes many more hours to have an end result this way.
Here is one of the students' results (Nolan Alexander Ancil's final project):
And here is the English translation of the project (Oh Never Sing To Me Again by Sergei Rachmaninoff and sung in Russian):
Do not sing, my beauty, to me
your sad songs of Georgia;
they remind me
of that other life and distant shore.
Alas, They remind me,
your cruel melodies,
of the steppe, the night and moonlit
features of a poor, distant maiden!
That sweet and fateful apparition
I forget when you appear;
but you sing, and before me
I picture that image anew.
Do not sing, my beauty, to me
your sad songs of Georgia;
they remind me
of that other life and distant shore.