As Anthony Cornicello reported on Saturday, William Paterson University of New Jersey is letting Peter Jarvis go from their faculty. Sequenza 21 last reported about Jarvis just weeks ago, announcing a concert on which he was premiering pieces by several faculty composers at TCNJ, another small institution in the New Jersey state college system. This type of activity, supporting the work of area composers through dedicated, well-prepared performances, is just one of the many ways Pete has contributed to the musical vitality of a number of institutions of higher education in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. He’s also commissioned a number of pieces for solo percussion and worked to get them published.
As Director of the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble at WPUNJ (check out their ’09 schedule here), Jarvis has not only been a mainstay on the local scene, but has been a powerful advocate for new music as a performer, conductor, and concert organizer.
Times are tough all over, but retrenching Jarvis’s position is a mistake on WPUNJ’s part. That’s why I’d urge Sequenza 21 readers to write letters in support of retaining Jarvis on the faculty at WPUNJ. Let’s aim for supportive letters on Peter’s behalf, not angry messages to the school.
The address:
Arnold Speert, President
William Paterson University of New Jersey
300 Pompton Road,
Wayne, New Jersey 07470
Berman (at left) is a terrific pianist, and this was overall a very solid program. There were several works by Mark Wingate, all of which were good–they sometimes got a bit generic, but much of the time were fresh and interesting. Wingate’s tape piece Welcome to Medicare is brilliant. He took recordings of Medicare’s already fairly byzantine automated telephone system, then re-cut and processed it to make a sort of bureaucratic limbo where the recorded voices aren’t helpful at all and seem to mock and toy with you in song. Some nice pieces by Eric Moe, including an odd experiment where the piano part plays along with a very generic and cheesy drum machine. Moe was apparently challenging himself to see if he could make it work, and he succeeded, although honestly the piece probably would have been better without the drum machine, with a less cheesy drum machine, or with a live drummer. Eric Chaselow‘s Due (Cinta)mani was a very tightly constructed piece for piano and tape which reminded me of a modernized Davidovsky Synchronism. David Rakowski‘s two offerings were gorgeous, especially Chase for piano and celeste, which featured delicate lines following each other around on the two keyboards.
This was an interesting experiment on the relationship between the audience and the performers and the nature of the performance space. As part of New York’s Armory Show, the AC Institute presented a set of 30-minute concerts inside a limosine. On March 8, there were six excursions featuring a piece by Joseph Di Ponio, performed by Laura Barger (toy piano) and Benjamin Robison (violin). The piece consisted of a stack of cards with instructions and musical materials, and the audience was to pass the cards forward to the musicians in what ever order they wanted. It was a cute idea, and the music was quite nice (although as with any piece like this it was hard to tell how much of that was the composer and how much was the improvisational ability of the performers.
Most S21 regulars know about these already, but for all our newer visitors I thought I’d mention how most of us keep on top of what’s what, day-to-day, in the classical and “non-pop” world. The secret is to visit a few of the aggregation sites intrepid volunteers have set up, that comb the news sites and blogs for current tidbits of interest. It’s really pretty easy on your part, requiring just three quick clicks (besides our humble and happy abode, of course!) once a day (or twice or thrice, even better):
On this very page back in 2007, one of my ‘click picks’ told you about a 
One of our English connections (and good S21 pal), Edward Lawes sent along a note reminding us that György Ligeti is BBC3’s