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February 04, 2005
Zap!
A few days ago, when I was looking into my chorus auditions, I happened to notice a somewhat obscure posting on an MIT music bulletin board. It was advertising a concert, to be held on Feb. 4th, and the title of the concert was Zap! Music for Robots and Van de Graaf generator, among many other instruments. I thought, "sounds like fun!"
It was held in the Theater of Electricity at the Museum of Science. And yes, they did use the giant Van de Graaf generator during the music. It was pretty neat. The place was packed! I was surprised at the number of people there. I had no idea whether it was publicized at all, and apparently it was, because there were people watching all the way up to the second balcony.
The music was pretty good. There was nothing particularly compelling about it, but you could tell that it had been composed with care and that it wasn't all about the sparks. Unfortunately sparks have a pretty limited expressive range, but for the material I was impressed. They had big sparks, smaller sparks, tiny buzzy sparks and the Tesla coil in certain spots which makes big loud buzzy sparks. They also used the Jacob's Ladder during some of the quiet parts (a small, quiet spark which slowly rises due to air convection).
All in all, a fun night. It was a little weird to be going out by myself... It was fun and all, but I kept feeling like there ought to be someone else there. There were a bunch of friends who sat near me and I thought about bringing my friends to something like this. Of course, though, they wouldn't really appreciate it and would probably get really bored really quick. It was hard enough to keep myself from getting bored, and this is the fun stuff for me...
Now, to go home and get some dinner. I haven't eaten since noon and I'm starving. What should I have?
Sent from: Karl Gutwin
Posted by kgutwin at February 4, 2005 08:10 PM
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