On Sunday, Oct. 20, senior Lauren Coon performed a student recital at 5 p.m. in Harper Hall. Unlike other student recitals, guests were greeted with a table of rocks before entering the auditorium. Next to this museum-like display were slips of paper entitled “Rock Music” by Leo Rodda. Pictures of rocks, rock names and descriptions of rocks illustrated the flier, while blank, numbered boxes at the bottom of the sheet indicated that there was some sort of puzzle or engagement activity to be expected.
Working on her Bachelor of Music in performance and her Bachelor of Arts in geosciences, Coon was able to combine her interests. Sophomore and fellow horn studio player Leo Rodda composed “Rock Music” [12’], where each movement is a type of rock that is encapsulated through sound. The movements were comprised of Basalt, Bismuth, Dolomite, Garnet, Granite, Olivine, Quartz and Slate, and an example of how Rodda combines music and material is as follows (to describe Olivine): “Olivine is forged under intense heat and pressure in the Earth’s mantle, yet displays an elegant green hue. Olivine illustrates this contradiction by alternating the piano’s thunderous rumble with the horn’s relaxed melody.” With this in mind, audience members were to read these blurbs and guess which movement coincided with each rock. Unsurprisingly, it was fun but difficult.
Coon began her recital on the alphorn. If you cannot picture an alphorn, that is okay, because I sure did not know what they looked like either. The best way I can describe it is to think of a tobacco smoking pipe — like that shape, with the curved bowl at the end and a long, skinny stem towards where you breathe through. With that image in mind, blow up the size — think regular dragonfly but enlarged to Jurassic dragonfly — so that it’s a pipe that you’d have to rest on the ground to use. Alphorns were used by mountain dwellers in the Swiss Alps for intercommunication, ceremonies and festivals. According to “Switzerland Tourism,” the alphorn “combines the richness of a brass wind instrument with the softness of a woodwind instrument.” Coon wowed the audience with traditional alphorn calls transcribed by Alfred Leonz Gassmann.
Afterwards, Coon played Vitaly Bujanovsky’s “Four Improvisations from Traveling Impressions” [5’], III. Espana on her French horn, before Radda joined to play piano for “Rock Music” [12’]. The order of the movements — the aforementioned guessing game! — ended up being Granite, Garnet, Dolomite, Bismuth, Quartz, Amethyst, Slate, Olivine and Basalt, corresponding to erratic, passionate, piano trills, four-note patterns, ostinatos, thunderous rumbles, relaxed melodies, low register and bold pedal tones. Most of the movements felt dark and foreboding, dramatic, and like something you’d hear at an important plot point of an old movie (“101 Dalmatians” comes to mind, haha). My favorite out of the eight was Amethyst, I think; it was the calm and melodic one that felt different from the others. I liked it because it was a change of pace from the other works.
After a brief intermission filled with rock puns (“You rock!”), Coon played Alfred Bachelet’s “Lamento” [5’] on horn, with Nick Towns on piano. Coon joked that this piece might not exist outside of Associate Professor of Music Ann Ellsworth’s office, as she found no videos of it online. To conclude, Coon (and Towns) played Richard Strauss’ “Horn Concerto No. 2” [22’], movements “Allegro,” “Adante con moto,” and “Rondo: Allegro molto.” The concerto follows a fast-slow-fast structure, which is typical of classical concerti.
As always, Coon blew my mind and knocked my socks off with her concert. It was so fun to watch her play her horn and think about rocks and time passing too quickly.
The next concert featuring Coon is the Lawrence University Symphony Orchestra (LSO) Concert at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 16.