Hugh Sung’s Magical Mystery Tour
Our favorite techno-geek pianist Hugh Sung has come up with a really neat new way to integrate live music with dynamic imagery, animations, and synchronized video clips, all of which can be controlled by the performing musician directly a simple foot-switch. Think Arditti Quartet meets the Joshua Light Show. (Perhaps too old a reference for most of you.) Hugh calls his system the Visual Recital which seems as good a name as any.
You can catch Hugh’s next Visual Recital live on Saturday night at the Darlington Arts Center, 977 Shavertown Road, Boothwyn, PA
(610-358-3632) or if you can’t make it you can watch this sample clip from “Vernacular Dance No. 1” by S21 blogger Charles B. Griffin:
[youtube]vW4ud9k9-x8[/youtube]
Wow! Vicious group! I’ll order extra kevlar body armor for my next show! LOL
Maybe it’s comments like these that keep art music buried in the myopic vaults of academia…certainly don’t want to try anything to 1) develop a presentation technique that’s both affordable and easy to operate for the typical art musician, or 2) engage the visual-centric prime demographics of new audiences, now, do we?
LOL
Until i can afford a hot shot team of CGI programmers from ILM, i’ll have make do with the tools that i can work with from a one-man operation’s point of view (time and limited expertise-wise). Thank goodness i’m having lots of fun putting these shows together and presenting them directly to folks who would otherwise have no exposure – much less inclination – to modern art music!
If it flops, it flops – so be it. I’m having too much fun outside the box!
I admit I might be missing something here, but is this PowerPoint meets chamber recital? It’s not even a particularly good (i.e. informative) or imaginative PowerPoint presentation (maybe a course with Edward Tufte might be an idea). Or is this a less ostentatious, low-budget, significantly less theatrical version of what Jean Michel Jarre does? I concede Sung’s not lip-synching, but that’s not much compensation for the lack of flamboyant backdrop (the Eiffel Tower or the Great Pyramids).
I’ll go with drug-addled.
Either you never actually saw what Joshua Light Show did or your possibly drug-addled condition at the time has affected your memory. What’s on the screen during this performance bares no resemblance to any of the 60s light shows I saw, which were usually as equally interesting as the music they accompanied and were also equally as interesting as the abstract animation of experimental filmmakers of the day.
While I’m interested enough to hear more music by Griffin, with or without visual accompaniment, I have no interest in seeing more visual work by whoever designed what looks like a power point slide show without, I’m glad to note, any bullet pointed text.
Go Hugh, go!