One of the most interesting projects of this season is going to be on stage at Millersville University Friday night. The American Repertory Ballet will perform “Worlds End. And Worlds Begin,” a world premier dance choreographed by ARB director Graham Lustig, with music by MU professor and composer Rusty Banks and video images by Scott Conard, performed by the 100-voice Millersville University Choral Union and the Continental Trombone Quartet. The work was inspired by a book, “Writing at the End of the World,” by Richard E. Miller, Rutgers University English Department chairman. In the book, he considers the place of the humanities in the face of catastrophic events and senseless violence. “Why bother with reading and writing when the world is so obviously going to hell?” he asks. (The quote is drawn from this review by Sandie Friedman, not from my own reading.)
Banks had been working with the Continental Trombone Quartet on a piece for a performance in Beijing, when quartet member Mark Sheridan-Rabideau drew his attention to Miller’s book. Banks found it “thought-provoking,” but not an obvious candidate for a musical setting. However, the poems scattered throughout the book gave him material to work with, as well as a chapter simply cataloguing the human debris left after the Sept. 11 attacks. The resulting work is in five movements, scored for chorus, trombone quartet, and ambient sound effects on boomboxes, incorporating traditional and non-traditional choral writing, including a “spiky, angular” and untypical setting of the “Agnus Dei” text. Another movement explores ideas of intelligence and “smartness,” using what Banks describes as typical European art music devices that “seem more clever than they are.”
The performance and accompanying discussions are part of a larger effort by a group of universities, “Curiousity. Creativity. Collaboration.” to make changes in the study of humanities. Despite the real problems that face us, problems we can’t wish away, we have to resist the temptation to make everything practical, Banks says. “Creativity is our most important tool in everything right now,” he comments.
The performance will be at 7:30 p.m. in Lyte Auditorium (ticket information here). Miller will speak at 10 a.m. and the piece’s principal collaborators will hold a panel discussion at 1 p.m.; details here.
