VMC ENSEMBLE DESCRIPTIONS
BALKAN ENSEMBLE (contact roger.landes@ttu.edu)
The TTU Balkan Ensemble is open to players of any instrument as well as singers and dancers, and it provides a unique set of skills opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, most of whom come from the orchestral, band, and choir worlds. First, most Balkan musics are dance oriented, and they tend to prioritize melody over harmonic structure. Second, those melodic structures are built on the non-Western system of modes called makam (which developed in the East in stark contrast to western European modes and scales, which were modified during the centuries that Europe prioritized harmony). Third, the dance rhythms tend to be in asymmetrical meters. And finally, all Balkan musics prioritize improvisation, which is one of the stated pedagogical goals of the National Association of Schools of Music. Over the 11 years since its founding, Balkan ensemble has made major contributions to the musical growth of dozens of students.
CELTIC ENSEMBLE (contact christopher.smith@ttu.edu)
The Celtic ensemble, which began as a small group playing traditional instruments of the Celtic world (flute, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, tin whistle, and so forth), has expanded over the years due to increased interest from a wider diversity of instrumentalists and singers. Because many of those interested to participate are winds or brass specialists who do not have the hours or years available to learn a traditional instrument, Celtic’s repertoire and orchestrational choices have expanded to accommodate this wider diversity. Currently, the ensemble includes winds, brass, strings, percussion, SATB vocals, and dance; the repertoire is founded in the most traditional folkloric sources, but is arranged for the one-to-a-part chamber orchestration and sight-reading capacities of the expanded ensemble. Celtic is a particularly good situation for players, at a range of skill levels, who will benefit from experience at: playing by ear, playing from memory, playing dance music rhythms with authentic and effective feel, exploring related instruments or performance modes (e.g., singing or dancing), playing with a full rhythm section, “head” arrangements, and related “bandstand” skills.
COLLEGIUM (contact angelamariani.smith@ttu.edu)
The Texas Tech Collegium Musicum, founded by director Angela Mariani in 2001, offers students the hands-on experience of working with historical period instruments and investigating the technical practices, performance processes, notations, texts, and contexts of pre- and early-modern music. In doing so, it provides a model for the integration of scholarship and performance, and the reification of the concepts of style and musical development that they study in their musicology classes. In addition to their yearly concert performances, special projects have included: collaborations with TTU Main Stage Theater (historical music for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night); a full staging of Ordo Virtutum by 12th-century abbess and composer Hildegard von Bingen; and a sub-group that focuses on the techniques, repertoire, performance practice and historical pedagogy of Renaissance Wind Band instruments, with guest instructor Bob Wiemken of the period wind instrument ensemble Piffaro.