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[singing in Spanish]
[flute solo]
♫
♫ Worth all the effort ♫
♫ Cover me ♫
[flute & marimba play]
♫
(woman) This program is funded by
the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund
with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota
on November 4th, 2008,
and by the members of Prairie Public.
[playing in bright rhythm]
♫ We're sitting at the opera house the opera house the opera house ♫
♫ We're waiting for the curtain to arise with wonders for our eyes ♫
♫ We're feeling pretty gay well we may... ♫ "Oh Jimmy look!"
♫ I say "The band is tuning up and soon will start to play." ♫
♫ We whistle and we hum beat time with the drum ♫
♫
♫ We whistle and we hum beat time with the drum ♫
[flute solo]
♫ We're sitting at the opera house the opera house the opera house ♫
♫ We're waiting for the curtain to arise with wonders for our eyes ♫
♫ A feeling of expectancy a certain kind of ecstasy ♫
♫ Expectancy ecstasy expectancy ecstasy ♫
Shhhhh!
Curtain!
[marimba solo]
♫
♫ From the street ♫
♫ A strain on my ear doth fall ♫
♫ A tune as threadbare ♫
♫ As that old red shawl ♫
♫ It is tattered it is torn ♫
♫ It shows signs of being worn ♫
♫ It's the tune my uncle hummed ♫
♫ From early morn ♫
♫ T'was a common little thing ♫
♫ And kind of sweet ♫
♫ But t'was sad ♫
♫ And seemed to slow up both his feet ♫
♫ I can hear him shuffling down ♫
♫ To the bar or to the town ♫
♫ A humming ♫
♫ A ♫
♫ Humming ♫
♫
Hello, I'm Dr. Terry Vermillion,
I'm one-third of Trio Lorca.
We're really glad to have you with us this evening.
It's really an honor to get a chance to perform for you.
Trio Lorca is a faculty ensemble at St. Cloud State University,
where I serve as the professor of percussion studies
and also serving as department chairman.
It's really, really important for faculty
to maintain a performance opportunity
and to continue to grow as artists.
Trio Lorca gives us this opportunity
to explore a wide variety of music.
Much of the music is composed for the trio,
specifically for flute, soprano, and percussion.
But much of the music also is arranged by us,
music that we really enjoy, that we'd really like to perform,
we adapt for the three of us.
My role as percussionist in playing the marimba
is to adapt many of the piano parts,
guitar parts, harpsichord parts,
any of that tonal keyboard part of the music,
and apply that on the marimba.
I also get a chance to play timpani, glockenspiel,
crotales and a wide variety of other instruments
from the percussion family.
And so my opportunity for exploration
is quite endless with this trio,
and it's been a very rich and rewarding experience.
The trio's been together for on about 12 years now
and we've had many, many performances, and most recently,
back in March at Carnegie Hall,
which was quite a great experience.
Also as a percussionist,
I tend to be a little bit of a gear junkie.
I like equipment; I end up
enjoying working with electronics as well.
We have a very strong new media and composition
digital arts program at St. Cloud State University.
And I get a lot of opportunity to collaborate
with my colleagues who are composing music
and creating music in the digital realm.
So Trio Lorca also gets an opportunity
to take advantage of adding many digital sounds.
And so I have a pad in which I trigger some samples.
We have some reverb and digital effects
that we add to the voice and the flute as well.
And this next composition on the program, "Cover Me,"
by the artist known as Bjork, is a great example of that.
And I get a chance to stretch my wings, I guess,
and make sounds that just wouldn't quite be possible
on traditional percussion instruments.
[flute solo]
♫
♫
♫
♫ While I crawl ♫
♫ Into the unknown ♫
[crash of thunder; splashing of rain] ♫ Cover me ♫
[Terry creates woodblock percussion]
♫ I'm going hunting ♫
♫ For mysteries ♫
♫ Cover me ♫
♫ I'm going to prove ♫
♫ The impossible really exists ♫
♫
[flute and marimba play in counterpoint]
♫
♫ This is really dangerous ♫
♫ Cover me ♫
♫ But worth all the effort ♫
♫ Cover me ♫
♫
♫ I'm going to prove ♫
♫ The impossible really exists ♫
♫
[crash of thunder and loud splashing of rain]
Hi, I'm Dr. Catherine Verrilli,
I'm the soprano of Trio Lorca and also on
St. Cloud State University Music Department faculty.
I teach voice as well as music
and world cultures and music history.
I think one of the most wonderful things
about being in a group like this,
where we get to explore different kinds of repertoire
and different kinds of styles,
is actually the process of discovery
that brings us to the place of performing,
discovering what's in the music, how we interact,
what we need to tweak is actually
almost as fun as performing.
So the rehearsal process is really a magical time for us
that we set aside every week.
Everything else is to the side,
we're not teaching classes during that time,
it's kind of a sacred time that we get together and practice.
So that's pretty great.
The other thing is, I love, I love my colleagues,
and so it's a joy to perform with them.
What I hope the audience takes away from a performance
of Trio Lorca is the sense of joy and commitment
that we bring to the expressive process,
whether it's through traditional repertoire,
as in stuff that was composed for us,
for this instrumentation,
or things that we arrange or have even have written for us,
we are first and foremost
focused on being expressive players.
And while the styles are very different,
I think that's kind of a universal concept
and so if audiences can come away
with having been told stories
and have been able to see and hear the kinds of interaction
and the sounds that we make, that would be a pretty great,
a pretty great thing for me.
There are few pieces that I'd like to talk about
before you hear the next couple.
The first is in actually three movements
by American composer George Crumb.
And the three mini movements are based on fragments of poetry
by our honored namesake Federico Garcia Lorca.
It's his poetry that Crumb chose to set to music
in not only this composition, but also in many others.
And essentially, each of these mini movements
captures musically a fragment of Lorca's poetry,
which, if you're familiar with,
you'll know how esoteric and yet stunningly beautiful it is.
And Crumb does, I think, a magnificent job
of capturing the essence of these texts.
They are in Spanish.
The first movement is called, in English,
"Drink the Water of the Antique Song,"
which is such a wonderful, enigmatic title
and you get to imagine what it tastes like, and hopefully,
what it might sound like with our performance.
[flute and crotales play softly]
[vocalizing on the vowel "a"]
♫
♫
♫
[singing in Spanish]
♫
[flute and glockenspiel play call and response]
[Catherine and the flute; call and response]
♫
[singing in Spanish]
♫
♫
♫
♫
[glockenspiel outro]
The second movement in English is
"Death Strides in and out of the Tavern,"
pretty self-explanatory.
And you'll hear how Crumb decided to illustrate musically
the sound of death, the sound of time stopping.
It's really spectacular, the way that he uses the flute,
the instrumentation and the percussion that he uses
and the things he asks of a soprano voice
is really, really wonderful.
[intro solo on timpani]
[flute and glockenspiel play in harmony]
♫
♫
[singing in Spanish]
♫
[speaking Spanish]
[timpani plays]
[singing in Spanish]
♫
[flute and glockenspiel play in harmony]
♫
♫
[timpani plays]
[singing in Spanish]
♫
[flute and glockenspiel play]
♫
♫
♫
[descending tone fading into silence]
[singing in Spanish]
♫
♫
♫
The third movement of the George Crumb piece, in English,
is called "Little Horse, Where Are You Taking Your Dead Rider?"
So again, a little dark, but again, really evocative.
And it talks about what a powerful scent
the scent of blood is,
the "knife blossom" is what he calls it.
And you'll hear also the horse and the rider
riding off into the distance and the question keeps being asked,
where is this horse going with its dead rider?
[flute and glockenspiel play in frenetic rhythm]
[singing in Spanish]
♫
♫
♫
♫
[singing in Spanish]
♫
♫
♫
♫
♫
[whispering in Spanish]
Hi, my name is Melissa Krause.
I teach flute and music theory
at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.
I am the flutist of Trio Lorca.
We're named in honor of Federico Garcia Lorca,
a Spanish poet and playwright whose text was set
in the first piece that we ever played together as a trio.
I play piccolo in one of the pieces,
I play alto flute in a couple of the pieces,
and then the regular C flute that you see in most orchestras.
I'm most used to playing the C flute;
that's probably my favorite one to play,
but I really enjoy the opportunity to be in Trio Lorca,
because I can play all the different flutes.
I've also played some bass flute with Trio Lorca as well.
The next piece that you'll hear
the Trio perform is "Canción Tonta."
It's one of the songs of "Canciónes para niños"
by Spanish composer Xavier Montsalvatge.
[playing softly]
♫
♫
[singing in Spanish]
♫
♫
♫
♫
♫
♫
[singing in Spanish]
♫
♫
♫
♫
[singing in Spanish]
♫
♫
♫
♫
The last song on the program is in English, and it's
by American singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright,
the son of famed folk singer Loudon Wainwright.
This particular song is awfully great
because there's a sense of irony in the text,
and there's also a sense of cultural immediacy.
I don't want to give it away, so I'm not going to,
but there's something that we, most of us in this technical age
can relate to, and he very, very smartly
weaves it into a pretty funny story.
And that was one that we arranged,
so Terry arranged some of the parts
from the original recording on marimba;
Melissa has also done some obbligato work on the flute,
and then I just do the singing.
So I hope you enjoy this performance by Trio Lorca,
it's really a joy for us to be together,
but also to welcome you into our experience
and thanks very much for watching.
[playing softly in bright rhythm]
♫ My phone's on vibrate ♫
♫ For you ♫
♫ Electroclash is karaoke too ♫
♫ I tried to dance ♫
♫ Britney Spears ♫
♫ I guess I'm getting on in years ♫
♫
♫ My phone's on vibrate for you ♫
♫ God knows what all these new drugs do ♫
♫ I guess to have no more fears ♫
♫ But still I always end up in tears ♫
♫
♫ My phone's on vibrate for you ♫
♫ But still I never ever ♫
♫ Feel from you ♫
♫ Pinocchio's now a boy ♫
♫ Who wants to turn back into a toy ♫
♫
♫ So call me ♫
♫ Call me in the morning call me in the night ♫
♫ So call me ♫
♫ Call me anytime ♫
♫ You like ♫
♫
♫ My phone's on vi...brate ♫
♫
♫ For you ♫
♫ For you ♫
[marimba plays "Ives Memories A and B"]
♫ We're sitting at the opera house the opera house the opera house ♫
♫ We're waiting for the curtain to arise with wonders ♫
♫ For our eyes ♫
♫ We're feeling pretty gay well we may... ♫ "Oh Jimmy look!"
♫ I say "The band is tuning up and soon will start to play." ♫
♫ We whistle and we hum beat time with the drum ♫
[flute and marimba play]
♫ We whistle and we hum beat time with the drum ♫
[flute and marimba play]
(woman) This program is funded by
the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund,
with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota
on Nov. 4th, 2008,
and by the members of Prairie Public.