On Wednesday, Oct. 31, guest cellist Craig Hultgren performed solo cello pieces with electronic accompaniment in the Pottle Auditorium as a part of Fanfare.
Hultgren, a cellist in the Alabama Symphony and the new music ensemble Luna Nova plays new music, the newly creative arts and the avant-garde music styles.
The program Hultgren played Wednesday is one he has been working with for some time, including new pieces by Philip Schuessler, instructor of theory and composition, and Kari Besharse, lecturer of music.
“I’ve been playing this program over the summer, and the first part of the program I already played in Atlanta and Birmingham,” said Hultgren. “Then there were the new pieces by Dr. Schuessler and Besharse, and they seemed to go well. And then I had this very early piece by Dr. Schuessler that he wrote when he was an undergraduate for me.”
Schuessler and Besharse’s songs were both for solo cello with electronic accompaniment. Although they were similar in style, their inspiration came from different places.
“I had this idea of taking two pieces, different pieces, and smushing them together and seeing if I could make a piece that has basically two pieces in one,” said Schuessler. “Kari had a different inspiration. Her main idea was wind sounds. She was really interested in sounds of wind.”
Hultgren and Schuessler were generally happy with the way the performance went.
“Couple of technical glitches, but that always happens,” said Hultgren. “It actually went very well. Sometimes you can turn on a computer and it won’t work for you, but everything technically worked very well tonight.”
“I think it was great,” said Schuessler. “When you have a performer such as Craig with as much energy as he does to play these kinds of pieces that are so demanding; it’s very rare, and so it’s very exciting to see this. And to, you know, expose a new audience to this kind of music that they’re not often used to hearing. There’s always technical things too that could go wrong and you never know, but everything went wonderful.”
The students that attended seemed to enjoy this unique performance.
“It was very out of the box,” said Lindsey Poret, a freshman music education major. “It’s not something you hear every day. I enjoyed it because of that.”